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When he was a child, Jake Tomlinson was a piano prodigy, but an accident left his hand grotesquely deformed and unable to play.

But when life hands you lemons....

“Jake realizes he has a perfect bowling hand,” said Morgan Grahame, the actress playing his third wife, Loretta, in the regional premiere of Stephen Dietz “More Fun Than Bowling,” going up next week at the Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati.

So bowling becomes a way of life for him.

“He buys a bowling alley, so it becomes his livelihood, but it’s also more than that,” Grahame said. “He sees it as a parallel to life.”

In his bowling lessons, he describes the bowling ball as Death trying to kill the 5-pin, and the bowler has to be clever enough to get around the other pins that protect the intended victim.

“He feels that everyone is out to get him,” Grahame said. “He can’t control much in his life, but he can control the bowling ball.”

The script does not tell the story in a linear way, she said, but jumps around in time exploring Jake’s three marriages and his freakish accidents more or less simultaneously.

“On one hand, it’s a very  dark comedy with characters in weird situations,” Grahame said. “Parts of it area very sad, but what happens is like real life and it definitely has something to say about life and love.

“Instead of giving up and saying he’ll never love again, he makes the decision to bounce back and take care of his daughter,” she said. “He doesn’t fit in this little bowling town, so he has to find himself and in the course of the play, we find him, too.

“All of the characters are honest and spontaneous. They know what they want and go after it. Jake really is full of love, but if you’d ask him about it, he’d deny it.”

• WHAT: “More Fun Than Bowling” by Stephen Dietz
• WHERE: Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati,
• WHEN: Oct. 17-Nov. 4
• COST: $27-$35
• MORE INFO: (513) 421-3555; www.cincyetc.com