Of the story she is telling with “Wilderness,” Ms. Hamburger knows one side intimately: that of a parent so alarmed by her child’s behavior, so frightened by her inability to reach him, that she would grasp at the hope of wilderness therapy.  Two years ago, during a fraught summer when her teenage son was overwhelmed with depression and anxiety, and would leave the house only to visit his twin sister at work, Ms. Hamburger and her husband sent him to an Evoke program in Oregon. He spent 11 weeks there, and she believes it saved him — though healing for him and their family didn’t neatly end there.  “Looking back,” she said, “it takes a long time. Eleven weeks of wilderness won’t do it on its own.”  Ms. Hamburger wrote “Wilderness” with its director, Seth Bockley, 34, based on interviews with other families that have used wilderness therapy and people who work in such programs. At the center of the story are a half-dozen kids who have found themselves — generally not by choice and often without warning — removed from their regular lives, transported to this remote patch of southwestern Utah and dropped into a group of troubled strangers, where they may or may not begin to get better.  With actors playing teenage clients and the staff members, “Wilderness” is part drama, part straight documentary. For each child onstage, all based on real people, there is a real parent or set of parents on video or audio, filling in the story from another angle. The show traces the traumas and crises that led them here and gives a not-always-comforting glimpse of how their lives have played out afterward.  The teenagers Ms. Hamburger and Mr. Bockley met in Utah on an overnight trip this summer, when they went to gather some final video footage, aren’t portrayed in the show, but they have a lot in common with those who are. “Realistically,” a boy said one August afternoon, sitting on the ground under the stand of oaks where Group 6 had made its temporary camp, “we all went down the wrong path somehow.”  The lemon-yellow tarp where they would go that day for individual therapy was off in the distance, but they had communal therapy in a circle under the trees, where they spoke of pain and shame and fear with a sometimes startling vulnerability.  Sessions dealing with particularly sensitive issues began with a promise to keep one another’s secrets. “This group is kind of like Fight Club,” the girl said at the start of one of those. “You don’t talk about it.” (Evoke allowed a reporter and a photographer for The New York Times to accompany Ms. Hamburger and Mr. Bockley after they agreed to respect the teenagers’ privacy and not depict them in ways that would make them identifiable.)  Ms. Hamburger, who lives in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., and the Chicago-based Mr. Bockley first teamed up when he directed “Basetrack Live,” a 2014 documentary theater piece about returning combat veterans, for her company, En Garde Arts. They had been to this grove before, on a weeklong research trip in 2015. Behind it rises a craggy peak that they’d hiked then, “where I literally thought I was going to die,” said Ms. Hamburger, a former Disney executive and admittedly not an outdoorsy type.  This year she arrived in pristine white pants, then swiftly, nonchalantly got them filthy, kneeling in the earth to try to spark a fire in the way the kids learn: zero matches, lots of friction and some juniper and sage, which grow in abundance here. When a game of Wiffle ball started up, she joined in with Mr. Bockley. From first base, Ms. Hamburger stole her way to second — a green water bottle stuck upright in a cow pie.  For Brad M. Reedy, an Evoke owner and its clinical director, allowing Ms. Hamburger and Mr. Bockley that kind of immersion was part of “a gradual trust process,” he said as he watched the game. An adviser on “Wilderness,” he had rejected numerous requests from reporters and reality-TV producers seeking access over the years. He did allow in the actor and documentarian Justin Baldoni (“Jane the Virgin”) to shoot a possible series, but mutual concerns about disrupting the therapeutic process led them not to pitch the show.  Shortly after her son completed therapy, Ms. Hamburger approached Mr. Reedy with her idea for “Wilderness.” An enthusiastic theatergoer, he liked the idea of actors portraying the clients onstage. “I finally found a medium that I thought could protect these guys,” he said. “I didn’t want them to be exploited like zoo animals.”  Ms. Hamburger promised her son that his story wouldn’t be in the show, and it isn’t. She and Mr. Bockley chose Utah over Oregon for their field research mainly because it’s easier to get to, flying to Las Vegas, then driving a few hours through the desert — a journey from neon-lit hedonism to grubby asceticism.  Wilderness therapy has some of the crunchy-granola elements of camping, like the songs sung a cappella or to acoustic guitar that inspired the flavor of the music in “Wilderness.” There’s a lot of hiking, too, and arduous, compulsory work on emotional health, overseen by staff members who project an uncanny blend of laid-back kindness, firmness and hypervigilance. It isn’t cheap — $525 a day, on top of a nearly $3,000 flat fee for clothing and gear.  Free-range cattle roam this landscape, where phone calls come by satellite and bathrooms are nonexistent. When a teenager goes off to relieve himself, he has to shout his name every 10 seconds so the staff knows he hasn’t run away or hurt himself. Anyone deemed a suicide risk, like a girl in Group 6 who soothed herself by filling notebook after notebook with poetry and intricate drawings, has at least one staff member by her side at all times.  Some of the teenagers use the brims of their sun hats the way prisoners might use cell walls, making one little pen mark for every day spent here. At night, they bed down on the ground, each with a tarp for shelter. If the weather is nice — as it was one clear, moonless night this summer when Ms. Hamburger and Mr. Bockley joined them, spreading their sleeping bags out in a field — they don’t bother with tarps and simply sleep under the stars.  The teenagers have a term to describe the controversial way some of them got here, which begins when they’re awakened, often before dawn, by a stranger or two. Hired by their parents, these people bring them, usually by plane, to the wilderness program. The official name for this is transporting. The slang term is gooning, as in taken by goons.  Owen Jenney, Ms. Hamburger’s son, got gooned, though he said his goons turned out to be “really nice guys, actually.” He is 19 now, a freshman in college, and he remembers arriving in the wilderness frightened and confused, angrily convinced that sending him across the country to Oregon was “way out of proportion” to the situation.  Speaking by phone on a long weekend home from school, he said he has come to think differently — to see that he was “a complete emotional wreck” then, that this was “the only way” after other attempts at therapy had failed.  “It’s not a cure-all,” said Mr. Jenney, who went on to a residential treatment center after he completed the program. It helped him, though, to be away from phones and screens and everyday worries, to be forced to live in the moment, out in nature, and concentrate only on getting well.  “I was like, ‘This is a prison,’ but now that I look back at it, it was a freeing, freeing experience — something that I’d love to relive,” he said. With one difference, he added: This time he’d like to be able to shower.  There is a character in “Wilderness” known only as Mom. Ms. Hamburger wrote the role, and the voice sounds a lot like hers. Mom’s son has locked himself away in his room, and she is beside herself, fearing the worst. Filled with self-doubt, feeling like a failure as a mother, she wrestles with how to do the right thing for her son.  And that’s the other wilderness that the show is about — that place of darkness where a gulf separates children and parents, and there’s no knowing whether anyone will get out of it safely, or together.  A version of this article appears in print on October 23, 2016, on page AR7 of the New York edition with the headline: When Therapy Becomes Theater. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
The new multimedia piece, at the Abrons Arts Center, was based on the producer Anne Hamburger’s experience with placing her son in wilderness therapy.