As I watched The Compass, the current production at University Theatre, I thought of that famous line from Hamlet. "The play’s the thing/ Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king." In The Compass, playwright Michael Rohd successfully captures the audience’s conscience with the most uniquely constructed play I have ever seen.

The Compass is built around the trial of 16-year-old Marjan (Jayda Smith), a student who, after consulting with an app called The Compass, calls in a fake bomb scare to her school. Why does she do this?

The Compass predicts what people will do — when Marjan asks if she would do it, the app says she would, so she does. While this plot appears to be simple, Rohd successfully incorporates layers of complexity into Marjan's story. She is 16, being tried as an adult. She is a good student in a dangerous school; she trusts few adults and as a young woman of color does not trust the police. Her friend Chaz (Alan Tejeda Montero) loves her writing. Despite all of this, she is a teen, hating to make decisions and addicted to using the app for help on every decision.

The trial revolves around a central issue — how much decision-making responsibility lies with Marjan and how much with The Compass? This leads to a larger question — when does technology's responsibility end and human responsibility begin?

The audience is not left to consider this question alone. Several pauses on stage allow eight facilitators to explore these questions, each working with a group of 20 or so audience members. They pose questions, prompting answers and opinions that they turn into improvised monologues they deliver on large video screens in the role of jurors, turning the audience’s thoughts into part of the play.

From a distance, this might appear to be a contrived theatrical device, something distracting and "too cute."

Wrong. It works. It works very well.

While there is subtlety in Marjan's backstory, and the format is very fresh, there is little subtlety or freshness in the dialogue. This is not Twelve Angry Men meets the 21st century. The actors in The Compass have roles that never change. No one's character evolves. The actors are there to move Marjan's story and the trial along; that, in turn, is the basis of interaction with the audience. For example, the court speeches by the prosecutor (Eloise Slipper) and the defense attorney (Will Grady) were written to remind the audience of the issues, not elicit anything unexpected from witnesses. This is not a criticism of the cast; the opposite is true. The ensemble, 11 actors on stage and eight facilitators, do an excellent job with dialogue and scenes that are, at times, unkind to their skills and training. Two scenes are memorable, though, both involving the two creators of the app, Ada (Marissa Lutzow) and an unnamed entrepreneur (Noah Ehresman). They open the show at the app's product launch, fumbling their way through a series of very funny cliches, the audience laughing — for they are perfect analogs of today's unloved tech titans. Ada closes the show, speaking again of the beauty of algorithms, "the beauty of the math."

The work of the technical design team is outstanding, and so too the work of director Micha Espinosa. The set is perfect: spare, one chair for the witness, powerful jury box railings, elevated video screens stage right and left where jury members share thoughts several times during the performance. It’s all centered around a large computer screen center stage. This display moves the audience from present to past and back to the present, the text scrolling as it would on a phone.

Espinosa has crafted a winning show — when watching The Compass, the play truly is the thing. Despite the uneven script, we accept the characters and applaud their ability to improvise lines. Espinosa's direction smoothly manages the physical challenge of integrating facilitators into the experience with little disruption. Finally, the use of video screens held the play together. Those screens bring us jurors delivering improvised monologues; they move us from past to present and back again; they have us travel from courtroom to high school; they make us stare and laugh at the icons on The Compass app.

Is The Compass a tense, nail biting courtroom drama? No. Is it a truly one-of-a-kind production that will leave the audience thinking, and thinking hard, about a critical issue of our time? Absolutely.

The Compass runs through Oct. 25 at UW’s Vilas Hall-Mitchell Theatre.