In “Gone With the Wind,” when Scarlett and Rhett lost their daughter in a riding accident, their grief was a beautiful storm. Rhett shot his daughter’s pony in the head and then locked himself in with the child’s body for days, refusing a burial. It was magnificence in mourning.

The question the Salem Repertory Theatre asks with its new play, “Rabbit Hole,” is what happens when real people suffer horrific loss? When the rage and blame is portioned out in tiny bits with discomfort and awkwardness replacing breakdowns and tears, what does that look like?

Rabbit Hole opens in the lives of a couple, Becca and Howie, eight months after the accidental death of their four-year-old son, Danny. It is a study of grief in all of its complications; all its tiny effects and crushing stages.

Larger venues make use of revolving sets and full décor to establish Howie and Becca’s Larchmont home. Set-designer David-Michael Scott finds power in minimalism, representing their home in hard black, broken only by a gash of red on the furniture and the decoration of a dead child’s toys.

Lead actress Patricia Ferguson’s Becca is trapped in hard blackness herself. She tries to keep hold by bending her suffering around tight emotional control. She is trying, in a civilized way, to remove Danny from her life; his clothes, his sticky fingerprints, even the house he lived in. But Danny and the pain his death left will not be removed. It continues to batter through Becca’s defenses.

Her husband Howie finds comfort in the many reminders of his son and resists Becca’s cleansing. Ted deChatelet plays Howie as the modern good guy, supportive and open, making all the more painful the moments in the play when Howie’s pain cracks him wide open.

In the periphery of the process are Becca’s mother Nat and rowdy sister Izzy. They make it nearly impossible for Becca to express her grief the way she wants. Nat’s audacious empathy from the death of her own son, and Izzy’s increasing stability and willingness to push forward with life, contradict Becca’s natural grieving instincts.

Andy Hillstrom plays the gentle teenage driver who set the whole tragedy in motion. Hillstrom’s Jason is aware of what he has caused, but the knowledge is tied up inside a boyish straightforwardness that sits uncomfortably with a family trying so hard to keep their pain quiet. One of the most simple and heartrending scenes of the play involves Jason politely eating a lemon square and recounting to Becca his recent prom, one of the many small stories her own son will never tell her.

Though the focus of the production is pain and loss, director Michael Philips keeps the play as far away from melodrama and histrionics as he can. The play and its actors do not trod the well worn dramatic paths to grief. Real misery mixes into our every day lives and never has a set stopping point.

As Nat describes it, the best you can hope for is that it will become “like a brick in your pocket.”

In real life, as Rabbit Hole shows, you don’t shoot the pony. Instead, you send the pony to your mother’s and you have a hard time looking at it for awhile. However, you know that shooting it won’t make you feel any less guilty.