A view of Garland at the ‘End of the Rainbow’

8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays. 2 p.m. Sundays. Through June 15. $26-$45. Actor's Express. King Plow Arts Center, 887 W. Marietta St., Suite J-107, Atlanta. 404-607-7469, actors-express.com.

Bottom line: Natasha Drena will give you goose bumps.

By the time Judy Garland checks into London’s Ritz Hotel in late 1968, her world is closing in on her. Shattered by the pills and the booze, the bad debts and the troubled marriages, Dorothy has come to the end of her proverbial rainbow.

And yet, as we see in the opening moments of Peter Quilter’s play about the last few months of Garland’s turbulent life, there are glimmers of hope. She’s in love with Mickey Deans (the man who will become her fifth husband), and she’s on the verge of yet another comeback: a sold-out run at London’s Talk of the Town.

That Garland can never reconcile the dueling, highly toxic, interconnected demands of her private and public personae is the tragic foregone conclusion of any biography, including Quilter’s. Still, there’s a fascinating upside to watching a star at the height of flameout.

And in the production that runs at Actor’s Express through June 15, that energy is channeled by actress Natasha Drena, who imbues the Garland mystique with the megawatt intensity of a supernova.

I am not quite sure that Drena masters the nasal vocality and twitchy energy that made Garland so delicious — and dangerous. But I am dead certain that when the curtain goes up on the star’s storied London gigs, and Drena sings the torch songs that made her character famous, time stops.

Give Drena’s Judy just one of those little pills she begs for, and she’ll show you her every scar and bruise. Give her two, and she’ll cut you to pieces.

“You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want to Do It)” is one number that defines both Garland’s relationship with her fiance (played by Tony Larkin) and her career. By all accounts, Garland’s first public appearance occurred when she was 2 1/2; thereafter she was condemned by her vaudevillian mother to a trunk that she was never able to climb out of. (Thus the paralyzing claustrophobia of her Ritz Hotel room, handsomely designed here by Leslie Taylor.)

While not every performance in director Freddie Ashley’s production quite rings true, I can’t give anything but love to Bill Newberry’s sweetly sensitive account of Garland’s accompanist, Anthony. It has been said that Anthony represents all the gay adoration bestowed upon Garland. As portrayed here by Newberry, he is a truth-teller who wants to be a ministering angel. Anthony smells trouble in the mercenary motivations of Deans, who is played with a rather one-note whininess by Larkin. (Newberry, by the way, is also a terrific pianist.)

WABE-FM listeners will get a kick out of seeing radio host John Lemley in the cameo role of, well, a radio announcer. You aren’t likely to hear an interview on Lemley’s real-life “City Cafe” program quite like the one his character endures here. (Although it might be fun if you did.) In his “kaleidoscopic” sweater, Lemley’s zany, earnest Brit suffers the indignity of a disoriented, Ritalin-agitated Garland in her most cringe-inducing state — when her personal demons tumble out into the public domain.

Though this show can be a tad uneven, it sure got me to thinking. Do we choose self-destruction, or does it choose us? Who, or what, really killed Garland?

On that topic, Quilter’s play is hardly the final word. Of the entertainers who transmuted their pain and suffering into great art, Garland sits on the very arc of the rainbow — beautiful, fragile and gone in a minute.