If the banality of personal advice columns turns you off, “Tiny Beautiful Things” may surprise you. Now running at Old Academy Players, “Beautiful” is a fast-paced, 90-minute play that draws you in with its “radical sincerity” approach to this newspaper genre.

The show’s star is Sugar, the nom de plume of an online advice columnist. Working out of her living room, Sugar gives laptop answers to scores of letter writers who plead for help. Grounded in the mantra, “I am the one who doesn’t know,” Sugar is insistently nonjudgmental. In contrast to the know-it-all approach, Sugar likes to recount her own troubles in storytelling detail.

In real life, Sugar is writer Cheryl Strayed. From 2010 to 2012, Strayed wrote the “Dear Sugar” advice column for “The Rumpus,” an online literary magazine. Strayed curated these articles for her best seller, “Tiny Beautiful Things.” Later, the book was adapted for the stage by Nia Vardalos, debuting at The Public Theater in New York City in 2016.

At first blush, a play based on a personal advice column is not promising. There is no plot, and the stage presence of each letter writer is brief. Sugar is the only sustained character, and Sugar does not present a character arc. You only come to see her changeless reality more clearly.

And yet, “Tiny Beautiful Things” succeeds. Leah O’Hara’s Sugar commands your attention. Her bodily presence is full of modulation, whether in listening to a letter writer or in telling a personal story. O’Hara makes you feel the tension of Sugar’s radiating desire: to line up her own struggles with the letter writer’s field of suffering so as to create a domain of authentic empathy.

Sugar lays bare her troubled life (Cheryl Strayed, in reality). She was sexually molested by her paternal grandfather as a young child. Her parents’ divorce ended the predation, but Sugar was permanently estranged from a self-absorbed father. She is haunted by her mother’s untimely death and struggled with heroin addiction. (In 1995, Cheryl Strayed legally changed her last name to “Strayed,” to true-up her name to her life, following abortion, infidelity and divorce).

Director Jane Jennings helms a taut production. With help from Carla Childs, the set is expressive. Now married again and with children, Sugar’s messy living room is littered with puffy dinosaurs and toys. Sugar folds laundry as she works her column. Using dimmed lights, Jennings stills the show at times, reminiscent of silent moments in a prayer service. The violin of Corey Sammartino-Guzzi mixes in another contemplative element.

Three actors portray multiple advice seekers. In “Dear Stuck,” Rachel Dalton is Letter Writer #2, who cannot come to terms with her teenage miscarriage, a trauma made worse by a brutish doctor. Sugar steps in with a personal story and liberating advice. In “Thief,” Precious Emmanuel is Letter Writer #3, who injects humor into her character’s kleptomania. Sugar assures Thief that she, too, once stole.

But Sugar has no easy answer for Paolo Barolat-Romana as Letter Writer #1, the “Living Dead Dad,” too distraught by the murder of his 22-year-old son to write a coherent letter. His short sentences are like sobs; each sob strikes Sugar like a blow. Sugar responds with uncliched, short sentences that do not insult the man’s suffering, nor her own.

The focus in “Beautiful” is always on personal problems, not socio-political issues. There is humor, as when one letter writer tells us his girlfriend has an erotic Santa Claus fetish, and Sugar gives flip answers to flippant letters. Some letter writer pleas boil down to vague, personal disquiet. Sugar asks, “Why is there no word for that feeling?” “Tiny Beautiful Things” asks a lot of good questions.

Old Academy Players is located at 3544 Indian Queen Lane. “Tiny Beautiful Things” will run through March 22. Tickets are available at 215-843-1109, or online at oldacademyplayers.org