NEW YORK — “I should let you know I am not OK,” said actress Maddie Corman, 49. She was in gray jeans and a T-shirt, barefoot in a small studio on the first day of rehearsal for the play she has written and will star in, “Accidentally Brave.” “This is not one of those shows where I’m here to tell you that I was OK, and then I wasn’t OK, but now I am.”

Corman gestured behind her, where an image of her and her husband, director Jace Alexander, would be projected onto a screen. They would appear alongside an article from The New York Times highlighting the couple’s wedding 21 years ago.

At the time, a friend described a young Corman as “incredibly open and loving” — a rarity in the world of film, he said. “Oddly,” he continued, “she’s only become more so, which makes me fear for her at times, but I also admire her bravery.”

“Brave” was not what Corman set out to be. But 3 1/2 years ago, while driving to work on a “semi-terrible TV show,” as she put it, she got a phone call that can’t even be described as the kind of call nobody wants to get because it would never even occur to most people that this call would be possible. The police were at her house, her teenage daughter sobbed through the receiver. Her husband had been arrested on child pornography charges.

What do you do when your husband of two decades — father of your three children — is suddenly revealed publicly to have a shameful and disturbing secret?

If you’re Corman, at first you think there must be a terrible mistake. This was a man who, as she says onstage, “listens to NPR and makes bad jokes and sings songs at the piano and reads The New Yorker and plans for the future and who doesn’t flirt with my friends.” How can this be? she recalled thinking.

When the police made it clear it was not a mistake, she pulled over to the side of the road and threw up. She picked up her husband on a street corner in Brooklyn, after he was released on bail, and she asked him if it was true (yes, and he said he needed help) and if he had ever touched anyone (he swore he had not). Then she punched him, and she sobbed, and she called her kids and reassured them that everything was going to be OK, even though, as she puts it in the play, “I do not recognize the voice coming out of my mouth.”

Corman returned to the set of the semi-terrible show the next day, because she had to — who knew if her husband would ever work again — and she bummed a cigarette even though she didn’t smoke, and she somehow did her lines, and she kept wondering, do I tell anyone?

That question became irrelevant, because an article about the arrest would soon appear in The New York Post.

But this was just the beginning of a journey — “Oh my God, I hate the word ‘journey,’” Corman said during rehearsal, opting instead for “thing” — she would embark on, which is not yet over. Somewhere along the way, she began writing it all down, workshopping it with a friend, the director Kristin Hanggi, who reached out in one of Corman’s low moments and who seemed not to be judging.

Hanggi encouraged her to turn the writing into a one-woman play, which opens this month at the DR2 Theater. It is directed by Hanggi (“Rock of Ages”) and produced by Tony winner Daryl Roth (“Gloria: A Life”), who said she had “admired Maddie as an actress, and am now equally impressed with her writing.”

The title — “Accidentally Brave” — is a reference to the people, the many people, who kept telling Corman “how ‘brave’ I was,” she said. “I didn’t mean to be brave, but this is what I was dealt.”

Oh, and here’s what she calls the spoiler: Nearly four years later, after rehab, an ongoing 12-step program, couples therapy and much anguished wrestling with questions of ethics, family and the nature of forgiveness, she and her husband remain married.

At home on a recent morning in Harlem, where she now lives with her husband and their 15-year-old twin boys (her daughter is away at college), she sat cross-legged on her bed, her husband beside her, ticking off her list of fears about making their story even more public than it already is.

“I mean, a new fear pops up every day,” she said.

She is afraid she will hurt her children more than they’ve already been hurt. She is afraid of what people will say — not just about what her husband did but of her decision to stay with him. She is worried that, by virtue of staying, she is somehow undermining the women who have so bravely spoken up to say #MeToo — of which she is also one. (Last year, Corman was one of nine women who spoke out against playwright Israel Horovitz.)

“And then there are the technical fears: How is it all going to come together,” she said. “So it’s the fears of a writer, the fears of an actor and the fears of a human all combined into one soup.”

She paused. “But then I do remember that living it was scarier than doing this.”

In 2016, Alexander pleaded guilty to two felony counts related to possessing and sharing illegal and obscene performances of sexual conduct by a child under 17. He was sentenced to 10 years probation and had to register as a sex offender.

Shortly after, Corman and Alexander sold their family home in Dobbs Ferry, New York, where they had lived a town over from her father and a few houses away from his mother, actress Jane Alexander. They are now renters. “It’s a really small town,” Corman said of their former home. “Everyone, everyone knew.” Their children switched schools. Corman became the family breadwinner.

Her husband, best known for his work on “Law & Order,” is now producing a documentary — working title: “Tsunami” — about the destructive forces of pornography.

“You’ve had the worst thing you’ve ever done exposed to the entire world,” said Alexander, who spent a month and a half in an inpatient rehabilitation facility and remains part of a 12-step program for sex addicts. “It was incredibly painful and incredibly destructive, but it allowed me to reinvestigate the way I lived my life.”

As for sharing that story with the world, he said, “Maddie has always said to me, a huge element of telling this story is service.”

But this play is not about the details of her husband’s crimes, or what may have led him there (the play hints at “what happened to him in his childhood”). “That is not my story to tell,” Corman said. Rather, “Accidentally Brave” is her story — “my own messy truth,” she said. While her husband, she said, has been entirely supportive of her doing it, she said he has not read the script.

“It feels like there’s this thing in our society where something terrible happens, and then you go away,” Corman explained. “Nobody sees you for a while, and then you come back, and you either say, ‘I’m married’ or ‘I’m not married’ or ‘I’m better’ or ‘I’m not better,’ but here I am. I’m back, and let’s not talk about what happened between then and now.”

“I was just so hungry to know what happened in the middle,” she continued. “Like forget about the topic of what my husband did — that’s taboo enough. But in some ways even more taboo is how you deal with the mess and the betrayal and all of it.”

How do you repair a relationship that has been torn apart at the seams? What do you do with all that anger?

And how do you cope with the everyday things that pop up moment to moment — phone calls about removing your name from charity events, a request to return soccer equipment to the team because obviously your husband can no longer be your kids’ coach, or your daughter needing childhood photos for a school project, which you no longer have because they were all on the hard drive that was seized by the police?

It is not a play with a tidy happy ending, and Corman would not say now that she has a tidy, happy marriage. She is still working through deep feelings of shame and betrayal and suspects she will be for a very long time.

“I’m not going to suddenly be the person that I was,” she said. “I mean, I still wake up in the middle of the night. I have flashbacks. But because I’ve had this happen, I actually have a much bigger toolbox to deal with these feelings when they come.”

And there are times — in the play and just in life — when she can still laugh.

She described a friend who tried to bring over sleeping pills but couldn’t find them so instead brought their dog’s Prozac. When Corman realized she would soon no longer be able to host trick-or-treaters at Halloween, she purchased 27 pumpkins and decorated them all.

In one hilarious scene, she introduces her daughter to a young woman she hopes her daughter might be friends with and is convinced that she made a wonderful impression — only to have her daughter point out that she had been gripping a book in her arms, cover side out: “Mending a Shattered Heart: A Guide for Partners of Sex Addicts.”

“We laughed — hard,” Corman says onstage. “I think we may have even sung.”

And then there were the text messages from friends, trying to be helpful, that read like a staccato of what not to say:

“When are you filing for divorce?”

“Do NOT get divorced”

“My husband has had a few hookers.”

“I watch tranny porn.”

“So he’s at Perv Camp?”

“I hate having sex with my husband.”

“You should see what’s on my laptop!”

“At least he didn’t die.”

“Do you worry that he will kill himself?”

“My husband died which I think is way easier than what you’re going through.”

Let me be clear, Corman said later: Most of the time, it was not funny.

“If I could have kept it a secret, I probably would have,” she said.

But she didn’t have a choice. And so, the way she sees it, speaking about the unspeakable might help someone else whose life is turned upside down, who is forced to test the limits of her own capacity for forgiveness in the face of something terrible.

“I wouldn’t wish what happened to me or my kids on anyone,” she said. “But the way that I feel, and honestly the way that my husband feels, is that when we keep things in the dark, that’s when shame and pain actually grows.”

“Our family,” she continued, “didn’t just stop being because something terrible happened.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.