Fifth grade teacher Heather Clark (Hope Kean) is about to get a visit from a parent she doesn’t expect. Eleven-year-old Gidion has committed suicide after bringing home notice of his suspension from school, but his mother Corryn Fell (Ugonna Nwabueze) is determined to keep her scheduled appointment with his teacher.

Filled with feelings of anger, confusion, guilt, sadness, and frustration, Corryn arrives at Heather’s classroom. She wants to know why Gidion was suspended. She wants to understand why he killed himself. She wants an outlet for her anger and emotions. She wants a target for her revenge. The play takes place in real time as the two women square off over the next 75 minutes.

This premise in Johnna Adams’s 2012 two-person drama Gidion’s Knot, playing for one more weekend at Theatre Intime on the Princeton University campus, is complex, interesting and particularly timely for teachers and parents and anyone concerned about troubled children growing up in our violent world.

The questions arising in this confrontation between grieving, attacking mother and conscientious, conventional fifth grade teacher are important ones and the dramatic situation lends them a powerful sense of immediacy. The playwriting, however, is a bit too coy and contrived in keeping the audience and Corryn in the dark for the first 40 minutes about the cause of Gidion’s suspension (an explicitly gory account he wrote about wreaking vengeance on his teachers), and other details of Gidion’s life. Was he bullied? Was he the bully? What exactly was the nature of his relationship with the sixth grade boy who may have bullied him? Is this a bad mother? Or a weak teacher? What was the nature of his relationship with his mother, and what was it that actually drove him to go into the garage that afternoon and shoot himself?

The universal issues here resonate with increasing urgency in contemporary society: Who is responsible for children and their actions? Are parents and schools over-protective, suppressing children’s creativity and independence, or not protective enough? How can we best escape from and halt the cycle of violence that seems to have gripped our schools and our country?

The undergraduate Theatre Intime company, under the direction of Princeton University senior Victoria Gruenberg, has staged a riveting production. From start to finish Ms. Kean and Ms. Nwabueze stay firmly in character through rapid-fire exchanges, sudden reactions, and frequent shifts of emotion.

Ms. Kean’s embattled teacher is understandably nervous and defensive from the start. She stands primly in her carefully tailored blouse and skirt, controlled in her movements, often retreating when under attack. Ms. Nwabueze’s Corryn is on offense from the start, wounded and angry, unrestrained and full of nervous energy, sarcastic, probing, provoking Heather, moving about the room like a predator harassing its prey.

Though they face significant challenges with the depth and intensity of the subject matter and the requisite character stretches of 20-25 years to portray these women, these performers hold the audience’s attention. They win the audience’s sympathy and, for the most part, they establish credibility, though the text is not without its shortcomings that make the actors’ work more difficult.

Corryn’s motivations and actions, complex and irrational as they sometimes are, are nonetheless believable, as this distraught woman struggles to come to terms with her grief. The character of Heather, however, and her motivations for withholding information yet staying in the room and continuing the confrontation with Corryn are more contrived, at times less convincing.

Particularly problematic, as the play seems to lose focus and direction towards the end, is Heather’s weeping for her dying cat juxtaposed with Corryn’s mourning for her son. The tone is confusing. Not surprisingly, some of the opening night audience laughed at the incongruity of the situation, but laughter hardly seemed an appropriate response to the suffering of the two main characters in this otherwise entirely serious, realistic play.

Wesley Cornwell’s realistic, painstakingly detailed unit set is a masterpiece, deftly depicting a vibrant fifth-grade classroom. Complete with bulletin board, blackboard, instructive posters — “Parts of Speech’” “Goals for the Week,” “Order of Operations,” ”Gods, Heroes, Monsters,” — a list of Greek heroes on the board, overflowing wastebasket, industrial carpet in colorful square panels, large teacher’s desk, colorful groups of cubbies for the children and an impressive array of student-crafted mobiles hanging above (including an ominous abundance of guns and swords).

The Gordian Knot, a legend associated with Alexander the Great, is a term now used to describe a particularly difficult problem. Though the original Gordian Knot could not be untangled or untied, Alexander supposedly took out his sword and cut right through it, thus proving himself worthy to rule Phrygia.

Gidion’s knot here, however, is less simple, far more perplexing to overcome. Ms. Adams’s dark, disturbing, powerful play leaves many more questions than answers for its audience. Ms. Gruenberg, Ms. Kean, and Ms. Nwabueze make sure that those questions resonate in a manner and context that audiences will not soon forget.