Local playwright Terry Earp’s 2001 play “Love Waits” took the sweet plot points of two supernatural romance movies — 1990’s “Ghost” and ’91s “Dead Again” — and distilled them in an Irish spring for a tale of love, fate and reincarnation.

It’s a sturdy script, certainly deserving of the renewed life she and director A. Nannette Taylor have given it in a charming new production in Phoenix, in the same playhouse where it made its debut exactly three years ago.

This “Love Waits” — in which a young woman is led mysteriously to a cottage in Ireland where she meets a ghostly lover from a past life — doesn’t throw any unexpected plot curves; in fact, it’s comfortably predictable. And save for one bad apple in the cast (we’ll get to that later), the performers play their parts with heart and soul.

Amanda Nichols plays Emma, a wide-eyed innocent who follows a hypno-therapist (Joy Bingham Strimple) to a haunted cottage in Ireland. Its ghostly inhabitant (Michael Peck) is there waiting for his wife, lost at sea nearly a century earlier, to return. Through the magic of hypnosis — and a healthy bit of flashback — we spend the meaty middle of the play learning of his woeful story of love and loss. For Emma, the ghost satisfies a hidden void. (“It seems like there’s this big gap in my life and nothing can fill it in,” she says.)

In many ways, this is Peck’s show — first, as he haunts the edges of the stage, fleshing out each emotional turn, then in flashbacks as headstrong Thomas who wins his love in a footrace against another village boy (Jason Chambers) only to lose her so soon after. Nichols keeps pace, morphing from rudderless Emma to Thomas’ equally headstrong Annie Rose.

When not flashing back, the play’s bookended moments in modern day are nearly ruined by Chambers, which is surprising since he’s got the best credentials in the cast (a few soap opera gigs, stints on reality TV shows like “Fear Factor”); he plays the hypno-therapist’s son, a callous jerk who’s in love with Emma. His jerkiness — a contrast against the ghost’s pure love — is unrealized, sloppy and cringe-
inducing.

But don’t let that scare you away from what’s ultimately a hauntingly beautiful tale of otherworldly yearning. There are moments in “Love Waits” that reach for the heartstrings and give them a tender pluck. That’s a tune you could listen to over and over again.