Rabbit redux

CAMBRIDGE - If I could travel back in time to an era when I was fascinated by science fiction, moody pop music, the line between reality and illusion, the Meaning of Life, and, above all, my conviction that no one had ever pondered these subjects as profoundly and perceptively as I, would I be entranced by "Donnie Darko"?

Perhaps. Or maybe I'd just stock up on Clearasil.

It's not that I am immune to the charms of adolescent angst. Especially from a distance, the obsessions and fancies of youth have an irresistible energy, and Richard Kelly's 2001 film bottles that energy in an idiosyncratic, visually inventive form. So in a way it's easy to see why the stage director Marcus Stern would want to create a stage version of Kelly's script, with its troubled teenage hero, its doom-saying rabbit, and its coiling plotlines of time travel, social manipulation, and suburban trauma.

It's even easier to see why the American Repertory Theatre, as hungry as any other company for young blood, is staging Stern's adaptation at the Zero Arrow Theatre. "Donnie Darko" the film, after its initial failure in theaters, has become a precious artifact to a whole subculture of viewers. Their devotion extends to obsessively detailed websites and other interactive responses to the original - so why not extend the multimedia interpretation to the stage?

Well, for one thing (and stop me if you've heard this one before), movies are different from plays. This movie, in particular, derives most of its appeal from exactly those qualities that are impossible to translate to the stage: the way it looks, the way it sounds, and its deft marriage of cinematography and soundtrack to create a polished, subtly off-kilter, and utterly idiosyncratic representation of 1980s suburbia. And its weaknesses, unfortunately, land precisely in those areas most likely to be highlighted by adapting it for live performance: the lapses into pretension and incoherence of its text.

Thus many lines, lines that sound vaguely cool or Meaningful when heard in passing as we're immersed in the gleaming surfaces of Kelly's cinematically surreal world, thud with painful portentousness when they're uttered by a person standing right in front of us onstage. Everything is underlined, particularly because Stern encourages his actors to emphasize every word in a starkly declamatory style.

Visually, Stern and his set designer, Matt McAdon, make some clever translations: a toy house to represent the Darko home when a jet engine mysteriously crashes into it (though it's a mystery why a whole toy plane juts out of the roof, even though the script still refers to a lone engine), a sloping Astroturf patch to represent a whole golf course where Donnie wakes up after one of his sleepwalking episodes, a shadowbox cut out high up on the back wall to stand in for a whole range of locations. Stern also finds amusing corollaries to film-editing techniques, as when he has Donnie run from one "shot" to the next as he tries to save the world, or at least figure out whether he has to.

But in attempting to evoke the look of a quick cut or a two-shot, Stern sometimes ignores the imperatives of theatrical space: We're asked, impossibly, to focus on both outer edges of the stage at once, or we're reduced to watching Donnie and his girlfriend (the suitably brooding Dan McCabe and coltish Flora Diaz) stand dead center, with nothing visually going on in the vast spaces around them, as if we could crop out the background as effortlessly as a camera does. We can't, and imaginative theater doesn't ask us to.

As a play, "Donnie Darko" has moments of strangeness, flashes of invention, and even a few laughs - particularly in Karen MacDonald's hilarious portrayal of a tightly wound teacher/dance coach/control freak. It also manages to tell Donnie's story with a certain economy, though I found myself wondering if a person who hadn't seen the film would be able to follow this version.

In the end, though, the play feels weirdly trapped in some wormhole between two media: It has lost the fluidity and understated oddity of the film, and yet it has not fully created a persuasive theatrical language of its own. Like Donnie himself, it's at an awkward stage.

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