S. Epatha Merkerson has a heavenly smile. Who knew?

Not me, despite having seen literally thousands of close-ups of her face on “Law & Order.” For the last 15 years, that face, simultaneously open and severe, has spurred more than 300 murder investigations onto their all-but-inevitable path to resolution. Light moments are few and far between for Lt. Anita Van Buren.

Resolution comes a bit tougher for Lola, the faded beauty at the center of William Inge’s “Come Back, Little Sheba.” An ill-considered shotgun wedding some 20 years earlier has left her with little beyond an alcoholic chiropractor for a husband and a mental scrapbook of tattered memories. Yet Ms. Merkerson, whose Tony-nominated turn in 1990’s “The Piano Lesson” was instrumental in winning her the “Law & Order” role, has suffused this grasping, anxious housewife with a heart-splitting dose of optimism in Michael Pressman’s gently stirring revival of Inge’s 1950 drama. And when her teetering husband, Doc (Kevin Anderson), finally allows himself to take refuge in that warmth, the result is more gratifying than any perp walk could ever hope to be.

Both for Doc and for Inge, this process takes time. It doesn’t help that Mr. Pressman lets the Freudian cross-currents among Lola, Doc, and their college-age boarder, Marie (Zoe Kazan, the granddaughter of frequent Inge collaborator Elia Kazan), unfold at a stately, almost lethargic pace early on. But as the collision course between Doc and his sweet, sad Lola draws near, precipitated by the flighty Marie and her two suitors, the director and his largely fine cast tighten the reins and do justice to Inge’s strains of Midwestern melancholia.

“Little Sheba,” followed by “Picnic” and “Bus Stop,” briefly nudged Inge into the pantheon of mid-20th-century playwrights, alongside Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. His star has dimmed considerably since then, though, and “Sheba” is frequently — and, to my mind, reductively — pigeonholed as a play about unrequited lust, in which Doc’s barely contained desire for the nubile Marie sends him off the deep end. And the production’s opening tableau, with both women visible in their respective bedrooms (James Noone designed the aptly nondescript set), prepares the audience for just such an approach. But Mr. Pressman rightly shifts the play’s focus from the proximity of young flesh to the even more galling presence of no longer young flesh — one’s own. Doc’s affection for his young boarder is apparent from their first encounter, but his attentions are as protective as they are predatory.

Lola flirts just as strenuously with Marie’s ne’er-do-well beau, Turk (a rakish Brian J. Smith), and with the strapping milkman. The difference is that Lola, who has cast a blissful haze over her own youthful indiscretions, is happy to leave the actual “tall spooning,” as she calls it, to the younger generation. Not Doc: Every time he insists on how “fresh and innocent” Marie is, he wills himself to imagine young love as something altogether different from what he and Lola experienced.

The color-blind casting of Ms. Merkerson notwithstanding (the role was made famous by Shirley Booth, who emphasized Lola’s stifled, depressive qualities), Mr. Pressman keeps the production firmly rooted in the mid-20th century. This is as it should be, perhaps even as it must be. Marie’s combination of tentative liberation and presumed innocence would be almost impossible to replicate today, for one thing. And Doc’s and Lola’s confessions of ambivalence and dependency are all the more piercing for being so infrequent, as befits their more cloistered era.

When they do finally work up the courage to voice their fears and regrets, both actors attack the moments with measured yet plausible desperation. Ms. Merkerson beautifully establishes Lola’s fidgety need for contact — watch the furtive eye contact she makes toward whomever she’s addressing anytime she fears they may lose interest — and her long-suppressed ache for an adolescent fervor that faded away practically before it began. “I thought nothing we could do together could ever be wrong,” she says of their courtship, “or make us unhappy.” Ms. Merkerson’s layered, haunting performance, dusted with the vestiges of a Southern accent, makes clear how Lola has yet to admit entirely that those days came quite some time ago.

Too many subsequent stories have delved into the play’s more melodramatic strains — addiction, recovery, sexual jealousy — for “Little Sheba” to maintain the gut-punch intensity it reportedly carried in 1950. Mr. Anderson and particularly Ms. Kazan adopt an overly contemporary tone from time to time, although Mr. Anderson’s battered masculinity feels absolutely authentic. (So does his unexamined certitude during Doc’s kitchen-table chats with Lola.) And several of Mr. Pressman’s less subtle gambits, most notably Peter Golub’s syrupy musical score, feel like unwelcome carryovers from his TV days.

But for every little thing he gets wrong, Mr. Pressman gets the play’s freighted, sputtering romance right. With a minimum of fuss, he has mounted a well-made production of a well-made play about primarily well-made men and women — a stage genre that has been AWOL nearly as long as Little Sheba, Lola’s beloved (and metaphorically overworked) little dog. But sometimes they come back after all, looking a little musty but welcome all the same. It’s enough to bring a smile to one’s face.

Until March 16 (247 W. 47th St., between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, 212-239-6200).