“Grace and Glorie” is a play about opposites. Grace Stiles is 90 and dying. Gloria Whitmore is in her late 30s and looking for life. Grace is the country mouse, uneducated and illiterate but noble and wise. Gloria is the city mouse, hypersuccessful and enlightened but provincial in her worldliness. In Tom Ziegler’s two-act play, currently running at Winterport Open Stage, the two women find out that opposites attract and, finally, aren’t so opposite.

All that said, there are only two words you really need to know about this production: Charlotte Herbold. Herbold shows up from time to time on the stages of those remarkable little theaters tucked away in Maine towns. She is the proverbial nugget of gold, a title which she upholds in her performance of Grace Stiles.

It would be easy to turn Grace into caricature, to make her a crotchety, bitter, shrill, old woman. But Herbold finds Grace’s inner strength and delivers a character whose pioneering spirit goes far beyond her ability to start a wood stove or run an apple orchard. Death may be knocking, but Grace isn’t opening the door until she’s good and well ready.

Zeigler’s script can often be flat and cliched. Grace’s land is being plowed down by developers whose machinery hums constantly in the background. Gloria, whom Grace calls Glorie, needs to find a receptacle for her unfulfilled life so becomes a volunteer hospice worker when her lawyer husband takes a job in rural Virginia. You can guess many of the outcomes.

Less predictable is Herbold, who reaches right in and boldly pulls out the spunk and humanity of Grace. In a backwoods Virginia accent, she admonishes and teases and provokes. Because her character is essentially immobile, Herbold gives Grace a whirling energy that comes from other places — from raising a defiant eyebrow, smacking her cane on the bed or wrapping her voice around a gospel tune.

Amy Kulesza, as Glorie, has a crisp voice and an unmistakably eager freshness. Glorie is a bit of a cipher with her rise to success in New York City, her wobbly marriage, some residual guilt from the death of a child, and her retreat to the Blue Ridge Mountains to find herself. It’s not a particularly original dossier, but Kulesza is vibrant in the role. In contrast to Herbold, she virtually dances through the show. In fact, she has a certain incessant cheerfulness that, at its worst, is annoying. She also has the distracting habit of not looking directly at her co-actor or at placing her gaze upward, which steals from the intensity of the relationship between the two.

Christopher Bates has directed this work with sensitivity and thoroughness. The pacing can drag and blackouts last longer than they should. But the show is funny and, at the end, may even bring on a tear. Bates’ trump card is clearly Herbold, but Robert Deslauriers’ construction of a backwoods cottage with all its quilts and unfinished walls pulls in the audience, and Reed Farrar’s sound design brings the encroaching technological world nearly through the doors.

“Grace and Glorie” is about life and death, and each of its characters has something to learn. It’s never too late for that, and the show is a good reminder of the way women bond and care for each other.

Winterport Open Stage will present “Grace and Glorie,” 7:30 p.m. Feb. 27 and 28 at the Wagner Middle School in Winterport. For information, call 223-2501.