This weekend brings two final performances of a remarkable play that’s gotten both its earliest start and its finishing touches on the Island. The Second Girl, by former Vineyard resident Ronan Noone, takes audiences behind the swinging door that separates the Tyrone family of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night from their three servants in the kitchen.

In the play, the tragic Tyrones are occasionally heard as muffled, offstage voices, while their cook Bridget, “second girl” Cathleen and chauffeur Jack are the center of the action. Unlike O’Neill’s indolent Tyrones, whose drama is unrelieved by duty or toil, The Second Girl’s characters are almost never at rest — particularly Bridget, played by Doria Bramante, who accompanies her dialogue with vigorous action as she slices bacon, beats eggs and chops vegetables for the Tyrones’ various meals.

“I’ve tried to hone the play so that nothing takes you out of it that would make you feel this isn’t a world you could walk or live in,” Mr. Noone told the Gazette this week. That includes real bacon and eggs for Bramante to cook over an actual burner in the vintage coal-burning stove on stage, and real eating by all three actors.

“We had to do a lot of experimenting in technical rehearsal,” said playhouse artistic and executive director MJ Bruder Munafo, who directed this production of The Second Girl and has been involved with the play since Mr. Noone’s first draft. Industrial-quality hot-plate burners, installed in the stove and controlled by the stage manager in the production booth, enable Ms. Bramante to whip up scrambled eggs and bacon every night — not only for the offstage Tyrones, but also for her very real fellow actors Christopher Roberts, who as chauffeur Jack takes his meals in the kitchen, and Maggie McCaffery, who as Cathleen likes a taste of anything she fancies.

Chris Roberts eating his eggs -- live on stage. — MJ Bruder-Munafo.

“I have the easy job: I just have to eat it,” said Mr. Roberts, who also gets to bite into some burned chicken “cut” from a prop fowl. Ms. Bruder Munafo said she had hoped to use farm eggs in the play, which is set in 1912, but friends with flocks advised her that every once in awhile a live chick might emerge from a cracked egg.

“I thought, we can’t take that risk,” she recalled. But if a chicken were to cross the stage during one of this weekend’s final performances, chances are the three actors would take it in stride.

“We really trust each other,” Mr. Roberts said. “There’s always a sense of openness, of anything can happen, during the show. I have found working with Doria and Maggie to be pretty remarkable. I think we’re a pretty tight group of people and we’ve known each other for what, five weeks?

“That happens when you’re an actor,” he continued. “There’s a lot of intimacy and intimate discussion; you can become very close very quickly, and I think that shows on stage as well.”

The only member of The Second Girl’s cast to call Martha’s Vineyard home, Roberts and his family moved to Vineyard Haven nine years ago from New York city, where he had earned a master’s in acting and theatre from Columbia University. The move meant leaving regular acting jobs behind, but “MJ’s great about finding opportunities for actors on the Island to work,” he said.

“I do a lot with Shakespeare for the Masses,” Mr. Roberts aid, referring to the Playhouse’s off-season series of one-hour comedic adaptations produced by Nicole Galland and Chelsea McCarthy. “That’s always a fun blitz: We do it and it’s done and we can’t believe it just happened.

“I’m pretty sure we’re doing King John in November,” he added. “That will be fun because it will be after the election. There’s a host of fabulous actors on this Island — it’s just amazing — and it’s fun when we can get together.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Roberts and his castmates have two more nights together in the Tyrone kitchen — and Mr. Noone, the playwright, will be in the audience for the first time since making final changes to the script and action during previews.

“We’re excited he’s getting to see it,” Mr. Roberts said. “As an actor, it’s so rich — there’s so much to work with, similar to the way you’d work on something by Tennessee Williams or Chekhov.

“Every night is a little different. We go out and stay together and enjoy what we’re doing.”

The Second Girl plays Friday and Saturday at 7:30 in the restored Playhouse on Church street in Vineyard Haven. And after this, the play is “on its own now,” Mr. Noone said. “It just got published in the Eugene O’Neill Review and there’s a nice article about it in American Theatre Magazine this month.

“It’s definitely out there now and it will take on its own life depending on the actors and the productions that it gets,” continued Mr. Noone, adding that he would particularly love to see The Second Girl in repertory with Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

“It’s up to the theatres,” he said.