Please assure me that there really is all the sweetness and hope in the damaged people around us these days that Lucy Prebble declares in her play “Sugar Syndrome.”

I need to believe that despite all the stresses and threats, our increasingly open and permissive culture really is helping even the hopeless losers grope toward a better place. That’s what Prebble, the new enfant terrible of the British stage, seems to be saying.

Moxie Theatre is doing our local audience a substantial service by bringing to us this fresh, funny, insouciant report from the frontlines of youth in such a dandy production, running through March 8 at Diversionary Theatre.

The play’s tiny universe orbits around a buoyant survivor named Dani, introduced at her computer concluding arrangements for a decidedly carnal liaison. She, her mother and the boy she hooks up with are each a bit of a mess, ranging from geekhood to menopausal denial.

Dani has something for each of them, plus the pedophile who mistakes her online for a boy. Her tolerance and keen perception comes at least partly from her own burden, the dismal cycle of binge and purge known primly as “eating disorder.”

The tangle of these four lives will have positive results for each, according to Prebble, but one has to wonder if even the wisest girls can get all of it right fresh out of university.

Most of the boy and nearly all the mom reads keenly accurate. Dani herself is an intricate construction that one longs to buy, a gutter saint, adorable from many facets, whose scars don’t show. But the guy with the thing for children, as poignant and tragic and tortured as he is, may not be just a hug away from OK after all. As the play ends, there’s a suggestion that he has at least pondered the violent theft of innocence, and that probably lies beyond acceptance by anything legitimately called civilization.

Still, Prebble’s is a voice of urgent eloquence and surprising authority. And Jennifer Eve Thorn’s Moxie production honors the play in many a way, especially the casting.

Jesse Allen Moore is the scruffy youth we all hope we never were but secretly suspect we might have been. The character keeps tripping over his callow inanity and doesn’t handle intimacy well, a sour mix that Moore sketches with more depth, perhaps, than the material deserves.

Terri Park also edges past the stereotype as Dani’s spiritually deprived mother, despite some writing that might turn a lesser actor into just another piece of furniture. But it’s the writing (and Thorn’s thoughtful direction) that helps Sean Cox, rigidly wry and self-controlled, generate a startling degree of sympathy for the outcast.

Dani is yet another triumph for Rachel Van Wormer, a reigning treasure of our stages these days. Van Wormer’s slim, vibrant intensity and deep understanding of timing has never been put to better use. With a talent as overwhelming as hers, roles must be chosen carefully and this certainly is a proper choice.

It’s hard to decide about Amy Chini’s cold, abstract, direct from Home Depot apparently, though Rachel Le Vine’s music selections and Mia Bane Jacobs’ game lighting design pay supportive respect. Jo Anne Glover’s costumes look like stuff harvested from the Hillcrest Streets outside, a crafty illusion.

Moxie Theatre strives relentlessly to make the world safe for wise, funny, eloquent new plays. “Sugar Syndrome” fits the plan delightfully.

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