NEW YORK, NY.- Most actors will tell you that when they take on a role, they want to own it. If it’s a classic or a play based on a movie, they like to say that they avoid watching earlier performances so they can go in free of preconceptions.

The women taking turns playing A, the central character in Marin Ireland’s new play “Pre-Existing Condition,” went for a communal quality. “When you’re seeing a person perform, it has the DNA of all the other people because we’ve watched each other,” director and actress Maria Dizzia said.

Tavi Gevinson, who starts her stint as A on July 23, said, “I think it definitely helps eliminate this illusion that there is some ideal performance that you’re trying to unlock and do an imitation of; it’s something that you’re co-creating with the piece every night.”

The show, whose run at the Connelly Theater Upstairs was just extended through Aug. 17, is structured as a series of brief vignettes involving A, who has endured domestic violence. In addition to Dizzia and Gevinson, the past, present and upcoming actresses playing A include Tatiana Maslany, Julia Chan, Deirdre O’Connell and Edie Falco, who recently joined the cast.

In the aftermath of the breakup with the man who hit her, A is seen interacting with different people in her life: her mother, the leaders of a support group, a lawyer, prospective dates, friends — all played by Greg Keller, Sarah Steele and Dael Orlandersmith, who appear at every show.

“I watched Julia do it while I was also doing it, so it felt like I was carrying her with me onstage,” said Maslany, who also saw Dizzia’s performance. (All the interviews for this piece were conducted via video.) “It helped me understand the possibilities. There were no limits. Didi [O’Connell] was there watching rehearsals, which is just wild because she’s, like, this legend, and she’s in there taking notes and learning, and it’s just beautiful.”

Reading the play, Maslany added that she felt “it put language to something that is incredibly difficult to talk about, and that I myself have experienced, and that a lot of people have experienced.”

Indeed, Ireland drew from what happened to her in 2012, when she was slapped and knocked to the floor by actor Scott Shepherd, who was her boyfriend at the time. She has spent the past 12 years working on the play, holding readings and workshops and collaborating with such directors as Evan Cabnet and Lila Neugebauer until Dizzia eventually took the helm.

The show has a great deal of humor, deploying a frequent levity that does not obscure the subject’s seriousness as the play subtly exposes the conventions and systems survivors face. The title itself refers to insurance companies, before the Affordable Care Act of 2010, using so-called preexisting conditions to deny coverage. Some of these conditions — including having experienced domestic violence — were often linked to being a woman.

Ben Brantley, a former New York Times critic, once described Ireland as “one of New York theater’s most inspired and entertaining interpreters of people programmed to self-destruct.” You can imagine a scenario in which she could have processed the event as a one-woman show, but, she said with a laugh, “I wanted to try my best to actually take the focus off of me.” (She said she would be more likely to take on one of the supporting characters rather than A.)

The idea of having rotating actresses in the role came relatively late in the project’s long genesis, but it suited Ireland’s desire to not allow “people to judge, particularly the A character, based on whatever externals they’re given, and to strip away as much as we could from the scene so that it can be porous wherever it was being performed or whoever was performing it.”

Whoever plays A appears with script in hand. “There was the sense that you cannot ask actors who are already so underpaid to take time,” Dizzia said, “to memorize an entire script.”

“This allowed us to ask as many people as we want and not feel like we’re asking them too much,” she added. “But what it became is that the script was a blueprint for healing. A’s handed it at the top, and then she leaves it on the stage after.”

Having various performers alternate as A also illustrates the fact that anybody could experience a traumatic incident and then have to navigate the aftermath. “I think few of us walk away unscathed,” Falco said. “The details do not have to match specifically. My experience is, every single person will be able to relate to this in some way or another, insofar as a big event that they’ve managed to try to dispel from their system in some way.”

The actresses playing A cover a wide age range, from late 20s for Gevinson to early 70s for O’Connell. This means that the scenes’ dynamics change all the time without any alterations to the text or the staging.

“I’m a great deal older than the other women, and so I was like, ‘Is that going to cancel anything out for the audience? Is that going to be baffling on any level?’” O’Connell said. She was a little apprehensive, in particular, about the scenes in which A goes on dates, but they just fell into place: “I was like, ‘Greg, here you go! All your guys are into the older ladies.’ It doesn’t bother me at all doing it because it’s so fun to act with it. So I stopped thinking about that very quickly.”

The British-born Chan relished the opportunity to use her natural accent. And then there was a more profound significance. “I came off of a breast cancer treatment and started rehearsal for this a month and a half after a double mastectomy,” Chan said. “Doing this play with people I trust was an amazing healing experience on a deeply personal level.”

In some ways, A is everywoman, but she is not generic: A is us, but A is also whoever plays her. “The thing that I discovered right away when I got on that stage is that it’s almost like a Rorschach test,” O’Connell said. “You cannot be anybody but yourself doing it.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.