Victims in an Unnamed Land

Michael John Garces sets his new play, "Points of Departure," in an unspecified Central American country. The Spanish-speaking, peso-using town of San Bartolome is under the control of an unnamed military regime. Nearby, anonymous armies skirmish. It's a scary corner of a troubled region, a place where family members are casually murdered, where refugees flock to the borders.

This fuzzy, out-of-focus background might have been a strength, had there been sharply chiseled characters moving in front of it. But Mr. Garces's quartet of principal characters - a maid, a shopkeeper, a bureaucrat, and a refugee returning home - are given just the faintest of outlines.Their histories and personalities are cursorily sketched. They remain symbols, not people. The problem is, it's hard to care about a symbol.

The action is set in motion by Marquez (played by the capable Alfredo Narciso, of the Roundabout's "A Streetcar Named Desire"), a native of the country who fled as a 14-year-old boy, became an American citizen, and has now returned to San Bartolome on what he insists is a mere "visit." What Marquez really wants is to get to the mountain village of Chenalho, where he hopes to discover the fate of the siblings he left behind. But for reasons that remain shadowy, to admit to having family in one of the villages could cost Marquez his American passport. So he makes up transparent excuses for the trip and brandishes his dollars before a shopkeeper and a government official.

His is a dangerous, foolhardy request in the witch-hunt atmosphere of San Bartolome, where even speaking a mountain tongue can get you called in for questioning. No one wants any part of Marquez's mission - everyone in San Bartolome is trying to stay out of trouble. Marquez's insistent approaches to the shopkeeper and the government official only get the three of them arrested and loaded into a truck.

Director Ron Daniels (who has held posts at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the American Repertory Theater) comes up with enough inventive staging and effective lighting to whisk us through the first act. Somehow the story fights through the over-stylized, stuttering dialogue ("I need, now, need -" / "You have something else" / "Need you to, to - I don't" / "Your business, here? Is?").The plot is compelling enough, and Mr. Daniels's competent direction and Mr. Narciso's well-modulated performance as Marquez are good enough to cut the play some slack for its occasional melodrama and those overused guitar-and-spotlit-singer interludes.

But in the loosely attached second act, which takes up the story of the hotel maid who cleans Marquez's room, the weakness of the material is all too evident. The dialogue gets artsier; Petrona (Sandra Delgado), the maid turned refugee, delivers long, manic monologues that sound like Shakespeare crossed with Gertrude Stein. Her blurry story frustrates; not only is it vague and confusing, but she takes so long to tell it. Two hours in, those endless canciones and rambling passages of dialogue feel self-indulgent.

The vulnerable individual versus the tyrannical, faceless state is an old story. The question is: What is Mr. Garces going to do with it? He seems to want to go allegorical, moving his figures across an ethereal, timeless plane - hence the lack of specifics and the broad, archetypal characters. And he manages well enough in the first act, when Marquez, the misguided but passionate petitioner, is onstage.

But when Marquez recedes, we are left with a cast of victims who do little to inspire our sympathy. Mr. Garces leaves a handful of refugees onstage and seems to think it sufficient to point out that they are suffering unjustly. Politically, that may be enough - indeed, the play stirs up concern for victims of distant dictatorships. But artistically it will only take him so far. As his play shows, an audience cares about characters not because they are suffering, but because of what they are trying to do about it.

Until April 16 (410 W. 42nd Street at Ninth Avenue, 212-279-4200).