Fortune, by Deborah Zoe Laufer, is a story about what we can miss when we shut ourselves off or give up on something we really want, and also when we limit ourselves by others’ expectations.

Now playing at Theatre NOVA here through Feb 25.

A third-generation fortuneteller, Maude (Josie Eli Herman), who works under the nom de guerre of Madame Rosa, lives a sad existence knowing precisely how many days she has to live, having been advised of this by her mother and Grandmother. This prompts her to avoid the normal layers of life…and love, isolated in her psychic reader parlor and behind a veil on her face.

She meets a client, a “nebbish” accountant, Jeremy, played by Russ Schwartz, who is forlorn and desperate to find love. His future seems pretty bleak to him without a life partner/soul mate, and he is talking about doing himself in. So, Maude takes an extraordinary step of making up a story about a red-haired woman that he is destined to meet.

Maude stages a series of schemes in which she disguises herself as a different ginger “soulmate” each week, hoping that one will give Jeremy the love connection he’s seeking—a secretary, a biker girl and a woman who is fairly tarted up with make-up and showing a lot of leg. She puts on an Eastern European accent while Madame Rosa, but a more urban voice for the series of red-heads she plays to try and win over Jeremy.

Maude is essentially a troubled introvert, and the revealing of her interior is at the center of the comedy and the romance. Herman expertly handles this characterization, especially in the penultimate scene as Maude risks her previously restrained heart. Indeed, she and Schwartz do better with the material, probably thanks to Milarch’s direction, than the writing on the page supplies.

This play was originally two hours with an intermission. But over the pandemic pause in theatre, Laufer appears to have trimmed it to 100 minutes while eliminating the intermission. It could probably use another 20 minutes of editing, while eliminating an intermission, to keep it all moving more briskly. There is still too much air in the script.

There are a lot of worthwhile lessons here: not letting others define you; the importance and significance of intervening with others who seem ready to play their last card of life; the importance of letting yourself make connections. In all, Fortune is a rom-com bauble right for the love month of February. And the actors do a good job of getting the audience to root for their characters’ happiness.