The next time you’re wading through tourists curb-deep outside “Phantom of the Opera,” wishing you could substitute serious thinking for that synthesized drum beat, head to a university. Recent shows at Columbia and Princeton, in particular “On Religion,” which was performed Friday and Saturday nights at Columbia, have blazed trails that the pokier professional theaters are slow to follow. Perhaps for college kids, there’s something thrilling about a medium in which “argument” is synonymous with “plot,” or maybe they really don’t want to finish their Econ papers. But no matter their reasons, keep an eye on the bulletin boards of your local campus. You might just find a cure for your theatrical burnout.

In 2005, Mick Gordon, best known for curating the revolutionizing Transformations season at the National Theatre, teamed up with philosopher A.C. Grayling to write “On Religion.” With a series of similar titles (“On Ego,” “On Kissing”), Mr. Gordon considers his works “theater essays,” despite their relatively conventional structures.

After consulting with a raft of experts — from superstar atheist Richard Dawkins to Archbishop Rowan Williams — Messrs Gordon and Grayling shaped an incredible array of arguments into a surprisingly cohesive two hours. It’s essentially a collage — entire arguments and even anecdotes appear from Dawkins’s “The God Delusion,” for instance. But with just a spoonful of appealing family dynamics, they help a great horse pill of information go down. (Did you know Muhammed’s ninth wife was Jewish?)

In one family, we find the full mixed-nuts arrangement of faith. Grace (Marguerite Van Cook), is a renowned, public anti-religionist (she objects to the term atheist); her husband, Tony ( Tim Hayes), is a lapsed, secular Jew; son Tom (John Beck) has entered the Catholic seminary, and his girlfriend, Ruth (Ana Cruz Kayne), is a lawyer. In relatively short-order everyone must confront his or her area of certainty, with Grace playing a guinea pig in a neurological “belief” experiment, and Tom’s religious moderation coming into brutal contact with religious extremism. Does “good” religion excuse the “bad”? Can religion be explained away sociologically or chemically? While the characters pose these questions, the play poses another: When will our professional theaters enter this debate?

To be fair, MCC plans to produce this same play, tidied up and retitled as “Grace,” in its upcoming season. And, to be honest, “On Religion” could use a rewrite. There are only so many times you can pull the “I’m practicing a lecture” trick before it gets clunky, and the heavy-handed plot is rife with sheer contrivance. But the play exists to stimulate conversation, and even at its most bare bones, it succeeds.

Here undergraduate director David Gerson, who brought the play over after seeing it at London’s Soho Theatre, demonstrates that universities can get a show on its feet, never mind the niceties. Without a board, or a subscriber base, or the ugly realities of financing, students can get the exchange started — before a slower moving pro could get his programs to the printers. Brecht’s shows went up in American schools long before Broadway; the establishment was still laughing at Gertrude Stein when her work appeared in an Oxford newspaper.

Since this was an amateur production, it would be inappropriate to point out its flaws. Suffice it to say, Mr. Gerson saddled himself with a difficult technical challenge — rookie directors really shouldn’t work in the round or in large wooden rooms with kooky acoustics. But luckily his star, Ms. Van Cook, is independently astonishing, a bone-thin embodiment of rage and righteousness, burning and clumsy with her fever to inform. Her presence onstage isn’t comfortable, but it’s all Grace. MCC should give her a call.