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Courtney Love, the onetime front woman of the grunge-rock group Hole, widow of Kurt Cobain and she of the often tattered image, is still pushing boundaries. This time though, they’re all her own. 

Courtney Love is captivating. Even in her rather small role in “Kansas City Choirboy,” there is not a moment that you are not compelled to watch her.

Love stayed within bounds and rather wrenchingly portrayed the late girlfriend of the unnamed singer-musician played by the younger Almond.

Todd Almond backs a subdued Courtney Love in “Kansas City Choir Boy” at Oberon.

EDGE speaks to Mr. Almond from his Brooklyn home about the show, its origin and working with Ms. Love.

Love is charismatic. She moves with a sultry swagger and her chemistry with Almond is apparent.

Todd’s stuff is very difficult for me. There’s a lot of pausing, and as he told me, the sex is in the pause. I had to learn that patience and enjoy it. It’s not second nature to me like four-to-the-floor rock is. But it’s new, which is exciting to me.

Well, I think that my favorite aspect of theater is the live quality of it, and the fact that you’re making art with [and] for the people that are in the room, at that exact moment.

Love described the main characters to Billboard as “a boy and a girl that are the coolest in town.” As the too-cool-for-Kansas girl who loves her choir boy but needs something larger from life, Love is perfect: at turns playful, distant, resolute and lost. And for a play with no real dialogue, the relationship between Almond and Love feels genuinely sensual — even when they’re not making out sans shirts (Love keeps her bra on, of course), they move as if magnetically bonded to each other.

But she’s certainly a compelling, ethereal presence, at one point whipping off her shirt to reveal a black bra and later clad in a gorgeous black gown designed by Zac Posen. Effortlessly conveying both a youthful, ingénue-like quality and a harder edge that suggests her character’s dissipation, she’s good enough to make one wish she had given more attention to her acting career, which included a Golden Globe-nominated screen turn in The People vs. Larry Flynt.