A boisterous medieval mishmash

WATERTOWN -- Moira Buffini's "Silence" has plenty of appealing elements: comedy, sex, politics, big ideas about religion and history and power, small gags about corsets and erections and magic mushrooms. But, at least in its New England premiere at the New Repertory Theatre, this medieval comedy never finds a way to pull all its disparate parts together into a whole. It wants to be a bubbling, complicated stew, but it's more like a muddled casserole of whatever was in Buffini's fridge.

To be sure, director Rick Lombardo serves it all up with brio. But there is just too much going on here. In veering from broad humor to cautionary political tale, with a few steamy embraces and heady speeches along the way, "Silence" takes us through a dizzying range of tones, plot and character developments, and emotional effects, but it leaves us neither wiser nor more amused at the end of the ride.

It's a fool's errand to try to render a coherent plot summary here, and there's also a Big Secret lurking. But here goes: Ymma, a headstrong Norman princess, lands in England around the year 1000, sent by her brother to be punished by King Ethelred. (Yes, the Unready.) The childish, cowardly monarch, for geopolitical reasons having to do with fending off Viking invaders, marries her off to one Lord Silence of Cumbria, a 14-year-old whose desperate wish to grow up and become a man faces a few huge obstacles.

On the wedding night, while Ymma and Silence are grappling with the Big Secret, Ethelred decides he should have married Ymma himself. When he tries to annul the marriage, she assaults him and so must flee. Off the newlyweds head for Cumbria, along with Ymma's resentful maid Agnes, a sexually tortured priest named Roger, and a big brute with the porn-worthy name of Eadric Longshaft.

Along the way, various members of the party fall in love (or at least lust) with each other, suffer crises of faith, wrestle with their own demons and one another's, and, in one extended and meandering scene, ingest the aforementioned hallucinogenic mushrooms. There's also a lot of vomiting, urinating, crotch-grabbing, and bodice-heaving, perhaps to remind us that we're in the Dark Ages. Or perhaps just to distract us from the growing fear that all of this is not going to get us anywhere.

Meanwhile, there's Ethelred, increasingly power-mad and lusting for blood. Clearly Buffini wants him to make us Think Seriously about the corrupting influence of absolute authority. Probably we are even supposed to draw some contemporary parallels, as we are with many of the play's observations about gender inequality, religious zealotry, and class differences. Fine. But it would help if these observations felt fresher and more cogent than they do.

It would also help if "Silence" found a way to marry its politics more persuasively with its humor. As it is, we're whipsawed between serious thought and broad comedy, particularly as Lewis Wheeler plays Ethelred with a wildly unsubtle brand of manic glee.

That's apparently what the production is aiming for, though. Wheeler is matched in over-the-top extremity by most of the cast; Marianna Bassham's Ymma and Anne Gottlieb's Agnes yell more than they speak, and Michael Kaye makes the priest's weak flesh only too powerfully obvious. Only Emily Sproch, as little Lord Silence, and Christopher Brophy, as the murky-brained Eadric, find moments of subtlety.

Like the actors, the designers have done a lot of hard and sometimes effective work here, creating a medieval/modern look that strengthens the play's efforts to bridge the millennia. But hard work and energy aren't enough. What "Silence" needs is to figure out what it wants to say.