On its face, Dan Clancy’s new play, “The Timekeepers,” looks like yet another case study in concentration-camp psychodrama.Throw two contrasting characters — in this case, a Jewish artisan and a gay hustler — into confinement and watch the sparks and, inevitably, their unconquerable common humanity fill the room. Is this sanctifying ritual really worth another candle?

In this case, yes. For while “The Timekeepers” boasts few subtle or original insights into the Holocaust, the care and detail of its characterizations make it a lovely, engaging acting duet. And the director Lee Brock’s luminous production is blessed with sharp, well-modulated performances that make its familiar paces feel fresh.

As Benjamin, a sober-minded Berlin watchmaker whose trade has earned him a relative reprieve at the Sachsenhausen camp, Seth Barrish hunches over his tools with the tensile focus of a man trained to miniaturize his movements, not only by his delicate work but also by a hostile world.

The homosexual Hans, somewhat implausibly introduced as Benjamin’s new assistant by the casually brutal capo (Chris Cantwell), has a wider range of survival tactics: whatever it takes, from servicing guards for a helping of marmalade to doling out news about Benjamin’s family in return for watch-repair lessons.

Eric Paeper plays this needy, pushy diva definitively, undaunted by the role’s flights of fancy and feeling. Even as the two men bond, a little too easily, in a shared love for opera, Mr. Paeper edges Hans’s swish with a darkly flashing melancholy.

He also keeps our focus on the grubby, self-interested compromises of camp life; at times Hans seems less a gay martyr than an erstwhile habitué of the “Cabaret” Kit Kat Club, rudely awakened in a tomorrow that doesn’t belong to him. This isn’t just a welcome complication to the show’s moral starkness; it’s true grit in the gears of the play’s clocklike progress toward hard-won empathy.