Out of that temporal current, Jose Rivera’s “Marisol” arrives at The Allways Lounge. The most recent offering in Cripple Creek Theater Company's challenging season, the 1993 drama follows the spiritual awakening and fantastical adventure of Bronx resident Marisol Perez. A copy editor in Manhattan’s not-too-distant future, Marisol inhabits a world that is literally on fire and has lost the moon. Played by Jessica Lozano, Marisol’s solitary existence in the neighborhood of her birth is ripped from its safe assumptions with the arrival of her guardian angel. Played by an imposing Monica R. Harris, The Angel has a chilling message for the immediate future, and it is on that revelation that Marisol’s nightmare begins. Before all has come to pass, innocents are slaughtered, Skinhead Nazis run rampant and self-sacrifice must be imposed if the world is to be set right.

Because the magical realism of “Marisol” leaps tonally and stylistically, it is a difficult play to stage. It forces directors into an internal eclecticism with both their design and performance choices. While director Emile Whelan’s production is a shattering success on the design front, she fails to gain a handle of the human energy of the evening. Because of this, “Marisol” ends up a visually striking, emotional exhaustion. It is to be admired more than enjoyed.

“Marisol” is structured like a time bomb with a two-hour fuse. It needs to simmer its way across the gunpowder with natural, organic acting until the emotional pyrotechnics blow. And for parts of its first half, the show does just that. The play hints toward magic with The Angel flying towards a great confrontation, and yet, it exists in a realistic world where Marisol is caught in the middle of scenes like the sibling argument between her officemate June, portrayed by a sloppy but terrific Jennifer Pagan, and her schizophrenic brother Lenny, played by Ross Britz. That isolated moment provides the evening’s most thrilling acting as the pair engages in a give-and-take of lifetime resentments. They employ every tactic at their disposal until the final decision seems one of sad resignation rather than vengeful anger. It is a beautiful contrast. Pagan refuses to lose focus on the objective, while Britz uses a machine-gun delivery that shifts tone but never speed. Both actors were obviously aware of their entire surroundings and the emotional weakness of their opponent. It is some the best acting I have seen in the city, and it had me prepared for a great evening of theatre.

But that scene turned out to be the exception. After it, the production’s energy never changed. Whelan simply lost control of the emotional content. “Marisol” is a single note of rising rage and confusion. Much of it is due to the performance style. After her terrific early exchange, Pagan misses plot points in atonal shouting; at times, Harris often forgets she is a fully drawn character rather than an expositional device with a great voice, and Ian Hoch, as a series of New York denizens, confuses screaming like crazy with being crazy. He needs to remember that many mentally disturbed people think they are sane and behave accordingly. In the title role, Lozano spends so much time shouting that the performance ultimately descends into shrillness and effectively ceases to emotionally engage. Under Lozano’s construction, "Marisol" is all shock and no awe. She regains the viewer with a final monologue that was simple and clear in its story, but by then, it is too late.

If all if this sounds exhausting, it is because it was. Actors can only expend so much energy before they wear down their audience. It is a complicated game, because a performer giving their all is, in actuality, taking from the viewer. Being shouted at for two hours turns the brain off from receiving crucial information. Situational humor, refocused energy, and basic storytelling are the prayers a dramatic artist makes to ask for grace. But one too many screeching entities, ear splitting angels, and static-channeling head-cases leave the ear surfeited by a fury and sound that breaks the play’s narrative integrity. The production’s hyperbolics shatter its organic moorings, and somewhere early in the second act, it ceases to be either magic or realism. After the break, “Marisol” becomes a ponderous lurch from one preciously framed shouting match to the next, until it cannot get any louder. Only Britz’s reappearance as Lenny and Chris Lane’s lost soul who forms a temporary bond with Marisol prevented the act from becoming unbearable.

It is fascinating, because, like Southern Rep’s “The Magic Tower”, its shortcomings are not from a lack of skill. Whelan directs the hell out of it, and it seems that was her intent. Like the production or not, she is the star of the evening. Aside from a few moments from the house, she entrenches her production behind the proscenium. But then, with great relish, she proceeds to blow out the back wall. Aided by Selena Poznak’s magic box of a lighting design, the director creates a consistent world of grime and fear. She engenders livewire performance turns like Andrew Doss as an ice cream-eating lunatic, and arrests a stunning image of horror by evening’s end. Like Whelan’s joyfully humanist “Mad Woman of Chaillot”, “Marisol” comes across as a clinic of the theatrical possibilities at The Allways. In order to make that journey happen, Whelan has assembled a design team capable of undertaking the frightening adventure. Their work together is the high point of the evening and bears individual mention.

Poznak flickers fluorescents into snapshots of evil, Alden Eagles’ sound design ominously pulses the approaching apocalypse, and Katie Gelfand’s costumes facilitate more than one monstrously schizophrenic collision. Whelan and Gelfand’s nightmarish vision of a Woman with Furs, played to full throttle by Hoch, felt like it channeled Cruella de Ville, Beetlejuice, and a French boulevard mime into a single entity. It was a manifestation of reconstructed identity.

And Adam Tourek’s brick wall set breaks, scatters, and reassembles. It allows Whelan to move not only through a New York worthy of Snake Plisken but also Marisol’s disintegrating sanity. You could feel Cripple Creek’s growing ache for a more vast space to make their dark visions come to life. The only sightline problems are caused by Whelan’s desire to keep expanding the picture rather than a lack of attention to detail. This is not a slick technical production; its magic is rough; it is all on a shoestring. Nonetheless, it completely works. Every instance of the gifted design seemed crafted to create imaginative effects and to electrify precisely in the moment.

I believe it is that abundance that unravels “Marisol.” It lives only in and for those moments. And while the moment is where actors stake their claim, directors and designers exist in the ones before and after. It is part of tying it all together. In its intention to demonstrate the endless possibilities of theatre, the production forgets the foundational emotional rhythms necessary to insure those payoffs. Energy taken in one scene must be given in the next. “Marisol” is the journey of a woman holding on for dear life in the face of a world spinning off its axis. It never comes up for air. It is not merely an amusement park attraction of oohs, ahhs, and tight clutches. The average dark ride lasts no more than ten minutes; if one did, it would have to tell an actual story. “Marisol” gets lost in the ride and joins the growing ranks of shows in this town that feel the need to insist upon their talents.