This 'Girl' has an abundance of ideas

Kirsten Greenidge has no shortage of ideas, characters, images, or story lines. In fact, she stuffs so many different elements into "The Gibson Girl" that the play just about bursts at the seams.

That's too bad, because some of its parts could add up to more than this motley, distractible, and ultimately frustrating whole. At its heart, "The Gibson Girl" addresses important questions of race and freedom in the United States, and it does so with imaginative language and vivid characters. But the play, making its Boston debut in a Company One production at the Boston Center for the Arts, takes far too long to bring its disparate threads together. And then, when it does start to make sense, it does so with a thudding obviousness that makes the earlier incomprehensibility all the more inexplicable. If that's what it's all about, why did it take us so long to get there?

Let's begin at the beginning, though: Two girls in parochial-school uniforms are talking in a school restroom, where one of them has decorated a stall with posters of Angela Davis, Ralph Ellison, Malcolm X, and her other heroes. A middle-aged woman is consulting a young psychic. A janitor is ranting about beautiful women in a utility closet. Another woman is testing a radiation detector in her barricaded apartment. One of the girls from the bathroom, now in a nightgown, creeps out to a tree at the corner of the stage, takes one of the buckets hanging from its limbs, and slurps the contents.

And around we go again, again, again, gradually gleaning information about each of these characters. The girls, Valerie and Win, are twin sisters, one light-skinned and one dark, and they're old enough to be wondering about that; that's why their mother is consulting the psychic. Those buckets are indeed collecting sap to make syrup, which the mother believes will lure her ex-husband back from Vermont. (No, I don't know why either.) And the janitor and the other woman - well, we won't find out about them for a long time, long after we've seen the woman's brother wrestling with yet another woman over a jacket at Goodwill.

There's much, much more, all of it apparently aimed to build into a collage of magic-realist images, intriguing quirks, and fabulist storytelling. By intermission, though, more than an hour in, we're still baffled and confused, and not in a good way. Mystery and ambiguity delight only so long as they hold a promise of resolution, and "The Gibson Girl" feels like a jumbled collection of bits - right up until the playwright pushes all the puzzle pieces relentlessly, and unbelievably, into place.

What's frustrating is that Greenidge displays a lot of promise, both in her imaginative reach and in her affinity for rich dialogue. But in "The Gibson Girl" (and never mind about the title; it's got something to do with the false idealization of women, but how a turn-of-the-20th-century illustrator fits into this mix is a puzzlement) those gifts are overburdened by the unwieldy weight of ideas, the wildly disparate characters, and the implausibility of the resolution.

Even so, you can see why Company One remains committed to Greenidge's work, and you can only admire the company for its textured, skillfully performed staging of the play. Young Nyla Wissa and Brittnay Lang are particularly energetic and engaging as the twins, Valerie and Win, and the adult members of the cast also make the most of their challenging, if not impossible, roles.

But I still don't get it about the syrup.

Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.