Florida Studio Theatre’s venerable Keating Theatre has over the years become the company’s go-to for smaller-scale, more intimate pieces, and it feels like just the right space for Dorothy’s Dictionary, playwright E.M. Lewis’s two-hander about very different people who need each other.

The play is set in a fairly comfortable room in a convalescent nursing center, which is where troubled teen Lyzander “Zan” Hardt (Ethan Jack Haberfield) and ailing librarian Dorothy Ross (Alice M. Gatling, welcome back at FST after previous roles here) meet. He’s doing community service after lashing out at a fellow student at school; reading books aloud to her, since her eyesight is not great, is the price he pays for avoiding time in juvie.

Naturally, there’s a gap between them, not only age-wise or color-wise (Dorothy is Black, Zan is white) but between their lives and interests. Dorothy has devoted herself to her library work, books, friends and taking off on travel adventures when she can afford them. The isolated Zan has never set foot in a public library before picking up books there for her, and he lives alone with a much-absent father, never even seeing the ocean that lies just a two-hour bus ride away.

Nevertheless, a bond develops, and, fittingly, the story of that bond is told in 12 “chapters” of the pair’s story—often short scenes alternating between humor and darkness, as Zan’s life begins to open up even as Dorothy’s, inevitably, must narrow. (The whole show runs just 70 minutes, with no intermission.) You may think you know where this tale is headed, and perhaps you do, but Lewis and director Kate Alexander make it a special journey anyway.

They’re aided by the authentic-feeling set (designed by Isabel A. and Moriah Curley-Clay), often subtle lighting by Andrew Gray, and what seems like a genuine rapport between the two actors here. Both characters range in their emotions from anger to tenderness to just plain enjoyment of the pleasures of spending time together in that book-filled room, where imagination makes more things possible for each. The play is a reminder that, in a time when smartphones and the internet so dominate our lives, that human interaction—and books—still matter.

Dorothy’s Dictionary continues at the Keating through Aug. 10. For tickets, call (941) 366-9000 or visit floridastudiotheatre.org.