TIME STANDS STILL — in a photograph– but what is its value, and its cost? These are the questions a photojournalist must ask herself in one of the smartest new Broadway plays now onstage in Boston at The Lyric Stage Company: TIME STANDS STILL by Donald Margulies. Under Scott Edmiston’s astute direction, this expert ensemble drives every point home when photojournalist Sarah Goodwin (Laura Latreille) and her longtime romantic partner, foreign correspondent James Dodd (Barlow Adamson), return to the states after long stints dodging bullets and recording atrocities in war zones around the globe.

Sarah’s been seriously wounded and James is caring for her back in Brooklyn; as she recovers, the two of them struggle to find their footing in domesticity. Adamson is wonderfully sympathetic as a man trying to heal his own wounds privately, while walking an emotional tightrope around his high strung lover.  This uncomfortable situation is exacerbated when Sarah’s colleague and one-time romantic interest Richard Ehrlich (an especially vibrant and charismatic Jeremiah Kissel) drops by with his new, young, chipper girlfriend–a party planner named Mandy (Erica Spyres). Sarah instinctively recoils from Mandy’s “perkiness,” dismissing her as a lightweight; we laugh at Sarah’s hilarious and caustic asides.  But Latreille also invests the no-nonsense Sarah with real integrity. So when, in the course of the play, it’s Mandy who asks the toughest questions, these questions shake Sarah to the core.

As Mandy, Erica Spyres effortlessly conveys the strength of the unabashed but grounded optimist whose very being provokes THE question at the heart of this play and our times: as media continues to shape our world, our values, our reality, our lives, Mandy wonders how Sarah can keep shooting pictures when someone is dying in front of her. And furthermore what is an average person like her supposed to DO with that information?

“Shooting” begins to assume its darker meaning here, as does the notion among some “primitive” cultures that taking a person’s picture steals that person’s soul. Eventually we and Sarah must confront the repercussions — what is a picture worth? Will it change anything? What is the value of telling these stories? Is our fascination with exoticism a form of racism? Is Sarah a mere parasite living off the suffering of others? Worse, is packaging these images in glossy books or on the evening news as a form of entertainment– numbing? Ghoulish?  Or worse– do these images and stories assuage our guilt, convincing us that by merely “looking,” we have done something and can then look away?

The play and the players convey all of this in the most believable way. There are big laughs, deeply human moments, and complicated characters who ride the emotional waves of each scene from high hilarity to angry confrontation as easily as breathing. We’re in the hands of professionals. The question remains, what are we to do with the reality they so authentically convey? See TIME STANDS STILL at THE LYRIC STAGE through March 17th.