In Dear Edvard: Munch and His Muses, composer Steven Schoenberg and librettist Richard Michelson weave a captivating musical tale of longing, despair and redemption in a Copenhagen clinic for the mentally unwell.

The play premiered at the Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse over the weekend and runs through July 5.

The story is set in 1908, still the dawn of modern psychiatry, and painter Edvard Munch is a middle-aged mess. Consumed by anxiety and alcohol, haunted by wrecked romances and tormented by harsh reviews of his paintings and poetry, he’s finally agreed to check into Dr. Jacobsen’s establishment for treatment.

This part of the play is true to history, as is the name of his young nurse, Sigrid Asta Schacke Andersen. Munch drew her portrait during his time at Dr. Jacobsen’s.

Play continues through July 5. — MJ Bruder Munafo

We also know that Munch left the clinic in 1909 and went on to become Norway’s most celebrated artist, living to age 80 and leaving such famous paintings as The Scream.

What happened during those eight months of therapy? Dear Edvard imagines the answer, as the nurse and her patient engage in role-playing exercises that require her to represent, one by one, every woman he has loved and lost.

Carlyn Connolly, an actor and soprano who recently was nominated for a Connecticut Critics Circle Award for portraying Katherine Hepburn in a one-woman show called Tea at Five, moves with ease between one persona and the next — the fiery, demanding Tulla, Munch’s dying mother, his sister, the cousin who first seduced him, and others from his troubled past.

“Whose words are these I’m saying? Whose lives am I replaying? I’m channeling their voices, their obsessions and bad choices,” she sings, as the young nurse returns to her own character between role-playing sessions

Timothy McDevitt, a veteran concert and opera singer who also teaches at the Manhattan School of Music and Bard College, also shows his range as Munch. Entering as a shaking drunkard who can’t light his own cigarette, Munch rages at first before meekly submitting to the clinic regimen and engaging in therapy sessions with his nurse.

As they revisit earlier scenes in the artist’s turbulent life, Mr. McDevitt becomes a series of different Munchs, from the innocent boy losing his mother and sister to tuberculosis and the trembling youth discovering lust to the man still haunted by the words of his hyper-religious, mentally disturbed father.

“My mother’s looking down on me, her face in every cloud. Why can’t I make her proud?” he sings.

Both actors are equipped with remarkable voices —Ms. Connolly’s a fresh and blooming soprano and Mr. McDevitt’s a supple and expressive tenor.

The show is directed by Kevin Newbury and accompanied by music director David Sytkowski, in period attire, playing an upright piano onstage.

With a running time of 80 minutes and no intermission, Dear Edvard slips by as if shorter. First presented as a “sing-through” reading at the playhouse, it’s grown into a truly rewarding show.

Dear Edvard plays Tuesday through Saturday at 7 p.m. until July 5. Visit mvplayhouse.org.