Not much is happening in Buckstop, Texas. It’s one of those places that most people see only on the way to somewhere else, while to others, it represents the end of the line. This is the milieu of Brendan Bourque-Sheil’s new play “Sunrise Coven,” which opens at Stages on March 31.

“What I was trying to capture in Buckstop was the feel of one of the last nursing homes my mom was in,” says the Houston-based playwright and educator, “because it was so cut off from the rest of the medical system, and so strange and sort of singular, that it sometimes felt like a small town unto itself operating semi-autonomously. And kind of an absurd but very emotionally charged one.”

“日出女巫大聚会”Bourque-S手术后出现heil’s mother’s went badly. As the insurance funds gradually dried up, “she got sort of kicked down the chain” to a progressively lower standard of care that spanned rehab and specialty hospitals, nursing homes and “less well-funded nursing homes,” he says. This went on for 10 months.

“I was the primary person sort of visiting her every day and being the point of contact for doctors and insurance,” explains Bourque-Sheil, who also teaches at Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and the Alley Theatre’s department of community engagement.

“I sort of got an unplanned tour of the American health care system — I saw some health care workers who were miraculously resilient, and then I saw other health care workers who were deeply burned out and resentful of their jobs,” he continues.

As the months went by, “I was beginning to identify with the burnouts and wondering if there was a way to come back from burnout,” Bourque-Sheil says, “and I think trying to answer that question is what started me on the road to writing that play.”

“Sunrise Coven” revolves around Hallie, a nurse whom Bourque-Sheil calls a composite of the many health care workers he encountered who cared for his mother, stalwarts and burnouts alike. Despite the grim circumstances, he found them to be an unlikely but essential source of humor.

“One thing that I, as a comedy nerd, really appreciated about the health care workers who treated my mom is how funny and how ready to laugh a lot of them were, which you begin to realize is just a fundamental coping strategy for dealing with that level of illness and pain day in and day out,” he says. “And so it didn’t seem alien to the world; it seemed integral to the world to me.”

As Hallie loses her eyesight and her nurse’s license, her desire to continue tending to her elderly patients leads her to enlist the local coven, headed up by a woman named Winter Moon. Bourque-Sheil was raised by a lesbian couple who were also Wiccans, so he knew the territory.

“The depiction of witchcraft in this play is largely based on their practice,” he says. “Which came up in my mom’s sickness because that was basically her faith, and so we would occasionally observe a winter solstice in a nursing home. That fusion of witchcraft and medicine seems intuitive to me in writing this.”

Also author of 2016’s “The Book of Maggie,” in which Judas Iscariot and Pontius Pilate try to enter heaven by talking a woman out of suicide, Bourque-Sheil acknowledges, “I don’t seem to be able to write anything other than dark comedy.” For his new play, he wanted to balance that irreverence with a certain compassion for his characters.

“So whether I’m talking about small-town, rural Texans or Wiccans, or drug addiction, I’m trying not to completely relinquish a sense of being respectful to the humanity of those affected people,” he says.

Above all, Bourque-Sheil says he hopes “Sunrise Coven” makes the point that while health care in America may be highly dysfunctional, it doesn’t necessarily have to stay that way.

“I started writing from a place of anger and frustration and wanting to publicly drag the American health care system,” he says. “But I think I ended up in a more peaceful and resolved place that, through the power of community, those things can be addressed. I think that ends up being the optimism of the play.”

Chris Gray is a Galveston-based writer.