For those of us lucky enough to have had one, the treehouse brings to mind memories of childhood’s innocence. The treehouse was a place that was all ours, a refuge, a hideaway in the sky for make-believe and discovery. In playwright Scott Hudson’s one-act “Sweet Storm,” having its West Coast premiere at Carlsbad’s New Village Arts Theatre, the treehouse is also a hideaway in the sky. But for newlyweds Bo and Ruthie, the make-believe masks feelings crying out to be expressed, and the discovery is one of innocence lost.

It’s a September night in 1960 in woodsy Lithia Springs, Fla. The rain’s pounding down, the mournful whistle of a distant train slices through the humid air and signs of human life are scarce. But in a treehouse built high among the remote burg’s venerable oaks, young Southern preacher Bo and his high school sweetheart Ruthie are to begin their lives together as husband and wife. The outdoor boudoir, stocked with jars of gardenias and bottles of Coke on ice, is a surprise conceived by Bo, who first courted Ruthie in the vicinity of these trees and, he tells her, fell in love with her there.

Romantic intentions aside, Ruthie is alternately impatient, frightened, irritated and exasperated with Bo, whose eager-to-please smile and unfailing good-naturedness are at odds with her inner torment. Her outer torment we perceive immediately: Ruthie has lost the use of her legs after an accident, and she has lost her faith as well – in God, in herself and, possibly in Bo, who has carried her up into the treehouse and who must lift her into a bedpan in those humiliating moments when she has to “wee.” But Bo is never defeated by Ruthie’s petulance, never taken down by her sadness. His faith is unwavering. He has even carved the biblical word “Ebenezer” into a treehouse limb, reminding himself and Ruthie that the Lord will always be there to help them.

“Sweet Storm” builds on this parallel reality: Bo is God-fearing. Ruthie is all-fearing. The wedding night, with its customary awkwardness and uncertainty intensified by her own self-doubt and suffering, is a microcosm of Ruthie’s apprehension about the rest of her life, even hand-in-hand with a man who clearly adores her. Ruthie’s and Bo’s path to understanding and embracing their love for each other, and the love of their maker that Bo swears will never abandon them, is a poignant and bittersweet one.

Adam Brick as Bo and Kelly Iverson as Ruthie demonstrate the chemistry that otherwise lacking would exacerbate our doubts as well as the new bride’s about what waits beyond the wedding night. With his hounddog eyes and “purty” pronouncements, Brick’s Bo is part Gomer Pyle, part Jim Carrey, and he gets a gold star for uninhibition, spending most of the play’s 70 minutes on stage in only his underwear. Iverson, seen in NVA’s most recent production, “Simpatico,” is confined to a bed throughout, as Ruthie can’t walk, and her emotional evolution from nervousness to anger to tears (and to a cathartic surrender to passion) is soft and persuasive.

At the end, both a “slow dance” and the arrival of a hurricane that coincides with the couple’s joining seem predictable devices – Bo’s and Ruthie’s chocolate cake “fight” is more unexpected and more real. Yet the newlyweds’ reaching physical and spiritual accord, by any means, is what we wished for them from the moment their heads popped up from the trap-door floor onto the theater’s treehouse set.

Atmospherics, including the sound of rain pattering on the treehouse’s tin roof, the tooting train and Santo & Johnny’s surf-guitar ballad “Sleepwalk,” heighten the drama and the intimacy of “Sweet Storm,” as do the dim stage lighting by Christopher Loren Renda and Tim Wallace’s treehouse concept.

It didn’t rain outside the theater on opening night, but inside it was wet and, ultimately, warm.