There are multiple sequences in “Wolf Play” that playwright Hansol Jung describes as “same space, different place.” The actors are all in the same kitchen, making breakfast — there’s only one stage at Shotgun Players, after all — but their characters are separated, poignantly so. They’re inches away from each other, but they can’t find common ground.

This zero-tech device exemplifies one of the great powers of theater, something you just can’t get in any other art form. A playwright waves her magic wand and declares she’s bending the rules of space, time, reality — in this case aided by the sure hand of director Elizabeth Carter — and even if you in the audience don’t think of yourself as a particularly creative person, your power of make-believe is immediately galvanized. You buy it and say, “Yes, and …”

In “Wolf Play,” which I saw Sunday, Sept. 10, at the Ashby Stage, “same space, different place” is achingly potent because in another, more compassionate universe, all these characters might be in the same family, under one roof. Robin (Laura Domingo) wants a child so badly she resorts to unethical means to adopt one, while her professional boxer wife, Ash (Gabby Momah; both the character and actor use gender-neutral pronouns), says they need to focus on training for a potentially career-making bout. Peter (Sam Bertken), the Korean boy’s first adoptive dad, loves his son but agrees to sell him on the internet when his family flounders. Ryan (Caleb Cabrera) is Robin’s brother and Ash’s trainer, and to him a troubled child threatens Ash’s and Robin’s happiness, not to mention his own financial prospects.

Then there’s the boy himself, embodied by a puppet. Peter calls him “Junior,” but then the lad reveals to Ash that his actual name is Jeenu. Having been abandoned by so many humans, he thinks of himself as a wolf in search of a pack. Actor Mikee Loria stands in for his lupine nature — howling at the moon, donning a fur hood, delivering repetitive, meandering monologues about how “Wolves are an extremely adaptable species.” Only Momah’s Ash can make eye contact with Loria; everyone else, when speaking to Jeenu, addresses the puppet. Ash and Jeenu are both plainspoken, heart-on-their-sleeve fighters, so only Ash can see the boy’s true nature.

Though on the surface these characters’ interests compete, with no shortage of antipathy and diametrically opposed politics, the gut punch of “Wolf Play” is that in another sense they all want the same things: stability, connection, affection. We humans, the play avers, have set up our legal system, our bureaucracy, our world so that we cannot live, hunt and play with the packs that feel right and true.

Crucial in establishing this feeling is the production’s soundscape. Whenever James Ard makes a show’s noise, the sound design doesn’t merely emit vibes or buy time during a scene change. If you feel vibrations from speakers under a theater’s risers, traveling up to your seat and body through the chair legs and your feet, that’s a telltale sign that Ard is part of the creative team.

Here his work is the first thing that happens when the lights go down: Clangs, thumps and pizzicato make way for horns, chimes, strings and winds — a whole forest of sounds layered one on top of the other. Later, thuds, bells and strings amass symphonic grandeur, making what could, in someone else’s hands, feel like a small kitchen-sink drama into a horizon-spanning story of star-crossed parents. Later still, he makes a moment of despair sound as lonely as a wind-scorched empty desert.

Loria’s monologues dawdle, at one point going so far as to enlist an audience member into a silly knock-knock joke, then making fun of that person for participating, all for no discernible reason. And it’s not always clear why Ash and Robin are partners, since they’re apathetic about or disdainful of each other’s interests.

Still, much of the acting triumphs. Domingo as Robin registers a hurtful word as a wound more deadly than any punch; her very human essence seems to reel and collapse. Bertken’s Peter, inflamed by his own unseen family, looks ready to exit his body through his own eyeballs if necessary. And Momah’s Ash enters like a hurricane and never stops storming, even when tension abates; there’s always something feral brewing within them. Perhaps wildness lies in all of us, the play suggests, and Ash and Jeenu are just more honest about it.

Reach Lily Janiak:ljaniak@sfchronicle.com