PROVIDENCE, R.I. — A Google search spurred Jackie Sibblies Drury’s first produced play, and she peppers her stage directions with smiley or frowny emoticons to suggest a line’s emotional color. But these aren’t the reasons this 31-year-old is a playwright of the moment.

Rather, it’s because she manages to bridge the gap between plays that start as scripts and those that are collaborations among actors, a director and a writer.

Her breakout work, the exhaustingly titled “We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, from the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915,” put that very process onto the stage, detailing the fraught, often painfully funny efforts of six actors to create a play about a little-noted African genocide. Developed as her graduate playwriting thesis at Brown University, it went on to well-received runs at Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago and Soho Rep in New York, both directed by Eric Ting. A production is scheduled at Woolly Mammoth Theater in Washington next season.

Ms. Drury has returned to Providence and to the Trinity Repertory Company (affiliated with Brown), where she was commissioned to create a play with the theater’s resident acting ensemble. The result, the bleakly comic “Social Creatures,” running here through Sunday, depicts a zombie apocalypse, not a genocide, and it’s not about actors making a show. But in a site-specific twist that influenced the development of the script, the action is set in an abandoned theater very much like Trinity Rep’s downstairs space, where a band of survivors has barricaded itself on the stage.