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Back in June, "Next Fall" was the sleeper hit of the off-Broadway season. Geoffrey Nauffts’s relationship drama was a boy-meets-boy tale that asked if love could survive a huge gap in religious faith, when one person’s a fundamentalist and the other’s an atheist. Now this smart and enormously affecting gem has transferred to Broadway, and it’s made a believer of me all over again.

Adam is your typical neurotic New Yorker -- a secular, sarcastic hypochondriac. When he meets the sweetly optimistic Luke, Adam is attracted but wary. The two get romantic and that’s when Adam realizes his new squeeze isn’t just young and hunky, but a hardcore Christian who believes homosexuality is a sin. Deal-breaker, right?

But their affair continues and deepens over five years. Then fate, or whatever you want to call it, strikes, and Luke is critically injured in a car accident. The action cuts back and forth between the hospital where Adam, Luke’s out-of-town parents and two friends wait anxiously, and flashbacks showing the men negotiating their clashing world views. Sparkling, natural chemistry between Patrick Breen’s Adam and Patrick Heusinger’s Luke makes this "opposites attract" premise work.

The six-person cast is uniformly expert, rendering their parts with intelligence, wit and subtlety. Maddie Corman mixes humor and heartbreak as ditzy mutual friend Holly, Sean Dugan crafts a complex portrait of a man whose gay and Christian identities feed off each other, but not in a good way.

As Luke’s down-home Southern parents, Connie Ray and Cotter Smith could be caricatures, but they’re imbued with nobility as well as weakness. Smith is especially powerful as the classic disapproving father who would rather his son be miserable than openly gay.

Nauffts’s script is a deft blend of urban comedy and pathos, exploring the legal rights of same-sex partners, religious tolerance and the crucial moral importance of speaking the truth before it’s too late.

"Next Fall" is a solid piece of "you'll laugh, you’ll cry" storytelling. It’s an intimate play with no stars or dramatic gimmicks, but that’s no reason it shouldn’t be as big on Broadway as it was off-Broadway.