On a September morning before rehearsal of “Terra Firma,” she and Ms. Hamill were sitting side by side in a corner booth of a Greenwich Village hotel cafe, each with a bowl of yogurt. The two are so close, so simpatico, that they finish each other’s sentences.

“You can be so rigorous in the work,” Ms. Hamill was saying, “if the rehearsal room is —“

“Generous,” Ms. Nichols supplied.

“Generous,” Ms. Hamill agreed.

This, they said, is the kind of warm, fun, respectful atmosphere that they want to create with the Coop, which counts among its dozens of artist members many Bedlam veterans. (Working with one company does not preclude working with the other.) The actor Jason O’Connell, Ms. Hamill’s fiancé, is on the Coop’s artistic advisory board. Tom O’Keefe, who was in the original cast of Bedlam’s “Saint Joan,” is in “Terra Firma,” which is now in previews and opens on Oct. 10 at Baruch.

Directed by Shana Cooper, the play is set in a micro-nation so tiny you could count its population on one hand, and so precarious that its so-called terra firma is actually an old naval defense platform surrounded by ocean. Grappling as it does with questions of sovereignty and social cohesion, it’s a philosophical fit for the fledgling Coop, which intends to be both a roost for its members to return to and a kind of artistic co-op. (Feel free, its founders said, to pronounce the name either way.)

Ms. Nichols and Ms. Hamill, friends since they met in an acting class about a dozen years ago, used to be roommates on the Lower East Side. It was in their kitchen, pre-Bedlam, that Ms. Hamill wrote “Sense & Sensibility.”

“I bet Andrus $100,” she said, “that I could write a feminist adaptation of a Jane Austen classic, because I was so frustrated that everything was through the male gaze, constantly.” (Her wearing a #TIMESUP T-shirt to pose for the portrait with this story is in keeping with her feminist outlook, though she said she wanted “to let the shirt speak for itself.”)