NEW YORK - Even in this confessional age, it’s probably the rare parent who would consent to have the details of her marriage’s dissolution laid out onstage by her child.

But when the Civilians, a company that specializes in what it calls investigative theater, began making a piece about divorce, researching the actors’ own families seemed a necessary component. They interviewed other people, too, but as they workshopped the show, audiences responded most strongly to the performers’ conversations with their parents.

The Civilians’ new piece, shaped entirely from those transcripts and tapes, is “You Better Sit Down: Tales From My Parents’ Divorce,’’ which had its world premiere at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in August. ArtsEmerson brings it to the Paramount Center Mainstage this week for a six-show run beginning Tuesday.

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“I’d spoken to my mom several times before that about the divorce and about details,’’ says Robbie Collier Sublett, who plays his Texan mother, Janet, in the show, “but I would not have had the carte-blanche badge of courage to venture into all the unknown territories that I was able to by doing this project. And she has said to me explicitly that she probably would have spoken about it to somebody else, but not in the same detail.’’

“You Better Sit Down’’ combines and intercuts sections of the interviews, which are performed as monologues by each parent’s own child. It’s a more natural transformation than one might think, the actors say.

“I feel like I’ve been preparing to play my mom my whole life,’’ Sublett says, sitting beside fellow company member Jennifer R. Morris in a restaurant on the Upper West Side. “I’ve been imitating her since as long as I can remember.’’

“I mean,’’ says Morris, a native New Yorker who channels her mother, Beverly, in the performance, “doesn’t everyone imitate their parents?’’

But not everyone asks their parents’ help with that, inquiring into difficult memories that will be shaped into a narrative for public consumption. The company’s previous projects - including investigations of evangelical Christianity in “This Beautiful City,’’ the notion of loss in “Gone Missing,’’ and the issue of urban development in “In the Footprint: The Battle Over Atlantic Yards,’’ which the Civilians performed at the Paramount last January - have tended to fit more comfortably with its preferred mode of journalistic reserve.

“Our whole goal is to be objective interviewers, and that’s just virtually impossible in this particular scenario,’’ Sublett says.

“I think the nature of the interview was just different than the other interviews that we had, because of the level of intimacy, obviously,’’ Morris says.

“I feel like there’s a built-in dramatic tension because it’s a parent talking to a child,’’ she says, and that affects “what they choose to say and how they choose to say what, and what’s being said for effect. Because it’s a different relationship than a stranger.’’

Interviewing his mother over the telephone, Sublett found himself worrying when she would respond by asking, “Why do you want to know all this stuff?’’ In retrospect, he believes she was distancing herself from the pain the conversation conjured, but after they hung up, he feared he had not been clear enough about the project.

“So I called back and I said, ‘You know why we’re doing this - we’re gonna take this interview and edit it into a script that will become a show,’ ’’ recalls Sublett, who shifts from his standard American accent into a kind of Southern sorghum to imitate his mother. “And she goes, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, honey, I know.’ She’s like, ‘As long as it’s gonna help your career, I’m all for it.’ ’’

Three of the actors interviewed only one parent. The fourth, Matthew Maher, whose monologues include references to the Cambridge of his childhood, interviewed both his father and his mother, and plays each of them.

“For me,’’ Morris says, carefully, “part of the problem, too, was you’re only getting my mom’s side of the story. And there’s clearly a whole other side of that story, which I think comes through because of the nature of my mom’s character.’’

The audience first encounters her mother as she’s discussing the most contentious item of property from her marriage: a Tiffany lamp that belonged to her ex-husband’s family, and that she refuses to hand over to him. In her daughter’s portrayal, which she has seen, Beverly comes across as a character in the colloquial sense of the word.

Morris says her father’s absence from the piece makes her feel protective of him. It was his choice not to be represented in the show, “which I understand and totally respect,’’ she says. “But I sometimes feel badly about that because he doesn’t get to tell his side of the story.’’

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