Huge desires pulse through Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms,” even if the trees are miniaturized in Cygnet Theatre’s beautifully realized and affecting production.

There’s also no shortage of greed, hatred, revenge, love, betrayal, and, finally, redemption in this family drama. These most basic human elements, told in O’Neill’s plain language (though the accents may take a little getting used to), continue to make the play utterly watchable.

The model farmhouse with its twinkling lights and thosetitular elms is a nice touch in director Sean Murray’s elegantly simple multilevel set, backed by an expansive cloud-spotted sky streaked with Eric Lotze’s lush lighting. Keenly adorned in Jeanne Reith’s period costumes, Jim Chovick, Jessica John and Francis Gercke form the points of this Greek-tinged Freudian love triangle.

O’Neill’s 1924 play, set on a New England farm in the mid-19th century, could easily slip into melodrama. It’s got the soap opera plot points – adultery, infanticide and incest among them.

But Murray’s sure direction and a fine ensemble give the showa visual poetry and emotional force, if not quite a searing intensity.

When 76-year-old Ephraim (Chovick) brings home a new wife (John) 41 years his junior, there’s bound to be trouble. His two eldest sons (John Garcia and Craig Huisenga) from his first marriage light out to California on the gold rush bandwagon, finally escaping the miserly hardness of a father who buried two wives. The youngest son (Gercke) stays, expecting to one day take back the land that he believes rightfully belonged to his mother. But Eben’s new stepmother also has designs on the land.

In a series of vignettes punctuated by blackouts, Murray effectively and simply delineates the unspoken desire smolderingbetween the rivals: Abbie sweeping the floor, lost in a moment of wonder. The young bride alone in her bedroom, sewing. Abbie watching Eben, as he stalks into the house after working the fields.

What begins as manipulation by both turns to genuine love, but the twists and turns of their machinations culminate in a terrible tragedy.

Gercke and John drip sensuality as the doomed couple. John’s Abbie is seductive and manipulative, but more cold calculation would give the character – and the play – greater complexity. Gercke must be both “hard and bitter” and “soft and simple” as Eben. He skews more toward the “softness” in his character: Eben is the ultimate mama’s boy, and overtly Oedipal as he prays for his father’s death and sobs in the arms of his stepmother, who caresses him with a mix of lust and maternal love. Gercke’s restrained performance early on gives force to the character’s sense that something – his rage, his desire – will soon burst forth.

But the play is as much about Ephraim as it is about the young lovers. The pious old patriarch (who’s Biblical name means “fruitful”) is connected to the land in a way that that those who covet the farm are not. Ephraim has made corn grow from stones, through a lifetime of hard labor. Just as his sons hate him for being hard, he hates them for their softness.

Chovick gives a powerful performance as the aging but still mighty workhorse, delineating Ephraim’s belief that “God’s hard, not easy. God’s in the stones.” Though Eben is in some ways the “spittin’ image” of his father, they are also opposites. So while Gercke comes from a place of restraint and builds to bursting, Chovick comes on imperious and cantankerous right from the start, giving startling emphasis to moments of quiet tenderness or whooping joy.

“Desire” is a play about loss and loneliness, and in its final moments, Ephraim is alone, doing the only thing he knows – moving stones and working the land. In O’Neill’s world, life is as inhospitable as the land. It’s a fittingly elegiac image to end this desirable production.