NEW YORK -- It’s not immediately clear that you’re in the hands of a master storyteller when the one-woman play Bexley, OH(!) begins.

Prudence Wright Holmes looks like a stagehand and enters wearing a work shirt and carrying a flimsy cardboard box, which she tosses unceremoniously on the floor of off-Broadway’s New York Theatre Workshop.

And her opening line is decidedly yawn-inducing.

“I’m going to tell you a couple of stories tonight about my hometown of Bexley, Ohio.”

Luckily, the interest level builds exponentially from there. Wright, the play’s writer and sole performer, tells two meticulously crafted tales about her youth -- one centering on her distant, volatile father, the other on her social-climbing mother.

In tone and quality they’re reminiscent of the work of Garrison Keillor (Prairie Home Companion) -- but not as self-consciously folksy.

At their heart, Holmes’ stories are character studies, but they also serve as portraits of a time and place.

You know you’re in an upper-class suburb in the mid-1960s --  the setting of both stories --  when a father and daughter clash over the merits of Bob Dylan’s singing, or when feminism and civil rights are little more than exotic new ideas.

And although it’s been explored a thousand times before, the buttoned-up, repressed atmosphere of Vietnam War-era suburbia gets a fresh examination.

There’s an especially heart­breaking scene in which an adult Holmes, after graduating from a new-age workshop, tries to get her father to articulate why he loves her. He can’t.

The set -- by Riccardo Hernandez, who also designed the one-woman show Elaine Stritch: At Liberty -- is simple and beautiful, especially for the second story Holmes is bathed in purple light, backed only by a gorgeous photograph of an African violet (her mother was an avid collector).

Holmes, who’s appeared in scores of television commercials and in small roles on Broadway, is an effective enough writer. But her understated performance is the play’s secret weapon. Although these are mostly unhappy tales --  the artsy, free-spirited Holmes was miserable growing up in conservative Bexley -- she’s never overly melodramatic or self-pitying.

Still, an unpleasant note of snobbery sometimes creeps into the proceedings.

Holmes paints her parents and most of her childhood peers as small-minded buffoons largely because they don’t read philosophy and study drama, or flee to the East Coast, as she does.

Her accomplishments -- and she is clearly a performer to watch --  would have been even more effective if they weren’t tinged with elitism.