Most of the time, in real life, the time frame from being asked to say something, to having no idea how to respond, to coming up with something anyway only feels like an eon.

In San Francisco Playhouse’s “Yoga Play,” by contrast, director Bill English and cast hunker down and hang out in those moments of wordless panic. Here, not knowing what to say is like quicksand. It catches characters and holds them. The moment could go on forever, or the play could end right there, all the characters giving up.

Instead, actors make whole stories within that silent terror, a rising and falling action out of darting eyes, quivering lips, false starts. But the danger they create gives the show, whose Bay Area premiere opened Saturday, March 16, an uncommon comic electricity, an aliveness to the present moment that’s only possible in live theater.

Dipika Guha’s play opens with a Skype call among the bigwigs at Jojomon, an athleisure apparel company whose name’s resemblance toLululemon’sis no accident. It’s reeling from scandals. After complaints that its yoga pants were too see-through, the company’s CEO made infelicitous remarks about plus-size women. The task for new CEO Joan (Susi Damilano) is to convince founder John (Craig Marker) that the best way to right Jojomon’s reputation with its “family” (what it calls its customers) is to make clothes above a size 8 for the first time, which runs counter to John’s idea of “aspirational” branding. As righteously as Joan makes the case for women who don’t have model-thin bodies — “It is difficult to stand by the idea that these products create joy if you can’t get them on” — she has an ulterior motive: the millions of dollars in sales that a new bracket of customers would bring in.

Here, and throughout the play, Guha mines the tension between integrity and the profit motive — tension that’s particularly juicy in an industry that espouses concern for your health and spirit at the same time that its raison d’etre is to get you to buy more things. Whenever our ideals seem compatible with our bottom line, Guha implies, we ought to be suspicious — for if one has to bend to accommodate the other, dollars and cents aren’t terribly pliant.

Marker, often cast as leading men, finds new territory in which to excel as John, a loopy, rich hippie so used to being kowtowed to that he’s blind to how he comes across. He’s the kind of person who always casts his eyes to the distance but can only see a blank wall, who’s never been punished for heeding each errant impulse the instant he has it. In the first scene, his image is projected on a giant screen for a video conference, and English sublimely encapsulates the foibles of Skype calls. An accidental crotch shot goes on for so long — and gets so ridiculously emphasized by unfortunate hand gestures — that for an instant, you can’t help but fear that this is about to become a very different kind of video call.

Ryan Morales and Bobak Cyrus Bakhtiari as Joan’s second bananas, Fred and Raj, make for delectable foils to Damilano’s severe CEO. Bakhtiari’s Raj is an incorrigible sad sack, with a dopey mien always just waiting to be punctured by Morales’ spiky Fred. They could make for a spin-off into a “Silicon Valley”-style buddy comedy.

When the play requires Fred to translate English into Hindi for Raj — when neither of them speaks Hindi — the resulting gaping silence is one of the play’s finest. They each plead with the other to find a way out, then share horror at the other’s lack of ideas, then apologize to each other for the bastardization of Hindi that’s about to occur — all without words. Morales’ jaw starts as if he’s trying to make himself throw up rather than speak.

Such is the rapaciousness of capitalism, Guha suggests, even, or especially, when it’s gussied up in $200 lavender-scented yoga pants.

N“Yoga Play”:Dipika Guha(写的。由比尔在glish. Through April 20. One hour 55 minutes. $35-$125. San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post St., S.F. 415-677-9596.www.sfplayhouse.org