It’s appropriate that Gina Gionfriddo’s new play has been compared favorably to Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles. Like that groundbreaking work, this delicious comedy interweaves personal and social issues in a way that is both entertaining and thoughtful. Receiving a beautifully acted and staged world premiere production at Playwrights Horizons, Rapture, Blister, Burn looks to have a long theatrical life.

This work offers a sort of Prince and the Pauper twist to its themes of gender politics. It concerns two former college friends reuniting after many years who have taken vastly different life paths: Catherine (Amy Brenneman) has a successful and lucrative career as a feminist author who has written popular tomes analyzing pornography and horror films, while Gwen (Kellie Overbey) is a wife and mother of two young children.

Further complicating the emotional dynamics is the fact that Gwen is married to Catherine’s college sweetheart Don (Lee Tergesen), an underachieving dean at a small New England college who mainly spends his time smoking pot and watching porn.

 Watching from the sidelines are Catherine’s elderly mother Alice (Beth Dixon), who has just suffered a heart attack, and Gwen’s 21-year-old babysitter Avery (Virginia Kull), sporting a nasty black-eye from an altercation during an ill-conceived TV reality show project with her filmmaker boyfriend.

The play is structured around a series of seminar sessions about feminist issues taught by Catherine and attended by Gwen and Avery, with Alice hovering in the background. The three generations of women comically weigh in on such issues as torture porn and the anti-feminist philosophies of Phyllis Schlafly.

 But it’s when Catherine and Don impulsively resume their romance that the play truly takes off. Both women, who have always been envious of the other’s lifestyles, agree to trade lives. Gwen, with her teenage son in tow, goes off to live in Catherine’s Manhattan apartment and pursue a graduate degree, while Catherine stays in New England to enjoy booze-fueled, all-night movie marathons with Don. 

While the play isn’t always credible in its contrived set-ups, it works beautifully nonetheless, thanks to its nuanced characterizations and sparkling dialogue that is practically Shavian in its wit.

“I am ready and willing to embrace mediocrity and ambivalence, you’re just not letting me,” cries Catherine when Don finds himself unhappy in the new arrangement.

Under the superb direction of Peter DeBois, who performed similarly expert chores for the playwright’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated Becky Shaw, the cast shines. Brenneman superbly conveys Catherine’s angst-ridden contradictions; Overbey brings complex shadings to her role as the unhappy wife; Tergesen is hugely appealing as the wastrel lover; Kull is a riot as the perky young modern woman; and Dixon is slyly funny as the elderly mother who missed out on the feminist liberation movement.

Plays that manage to mix genuine feeling and provocative ideas are all too rare. It’s all the more reason to appreciate what this talented young playwright has wrought.

Playwrights Horizons, 416 W. 42nd St. 212-279-4200. www.TicketCentral.org. Through June 24.