“America is hard to see,” reads the Robert Frost quotation projected onto the back wall during “Jigsaw ion”; nevertheless, the show’s creators are determined to show it to us. A series of overlapping monologues culled from hours of man-on-the-street interviews, “Jigsaw Nation” draws its considerable power from the startling immediacy of real people’s speech. As the five simply dressed actors turn from veteran to teenager, immigrant to red stater, the script’s uncanny ability to deliver the original voices intact makes the characters crackle with life. This may not be America, but it’s a vivid slice of it.

From the opening monologue, it’s clear the show’s interviewer-playwrights (including the 2004 Fringe Playwriting Award winner Malachy Walsh) know how to listen. Their achievement is to preserve their subjects’ original speech patterns: the stutters and hesitations, asides and non sequiturs that define a voice (and, to a great extent, its accompanying personality).

Among the script’s virtues is its keen ear for the American habit of interrupting a narrative to explain the facts of the situation – a veteran expounds on army policy, a Presbyterian describes the church hierarchy, a girl explains how to get in touch with people in jail. Habits of speech and storytelling blend to form convincing characters, such as the slow-moving elderly woman who interrupts her musings on the JFK assassination to explain that she could only see a television set by going to Grand Central.

The range required of the actors is considerable, since each one plays characters of both genders, various ages, and multiple races. (They prepped for their roles by listening to tapes of the original voices, a technique that clearly pays dividends.) But the five solid performers seem glad for the opportunity to speak such good lines, and they fight through the demanding accents with aplomb. Under Hayley Finn’s sharp direction, the actors shift easily from one distinct mood to the next.

Particularly memorable is the excellent Shannon Burkett (“The Ride Down Mt. Morgan”). As a ditzy teenager, Ms. Burkett grabs one leg and stretches it behind her back while chatting with an unseen interviewer about her current-events class, insisting that “We really don’t talk about the war in Iraq because that’s been happening for a while.” Later, in an impressive turn as a Brooklyn divorcee, Burkett puts on the accent and forgets it, allowing the woman’s emerging feminism to surface with just the right degree of self-awareness.

Man-on-the-street interviews are not a new invention. Yet the vast majority of the monologues in “Jigsaw Nation” sound nothing like the precisely edited packages heard on television or on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Here there are people with well-formulated ideas and people who refuse the interview, people who tell random stories, and others who stay on point. It’s this comprehensiveness that makes the show feel fresh.

At this point, the workshop production of “Jigsaw Nation” is a series of stopovers that don’t add up to a journey. It’s a survey, with no real beginning or ending. Moreover, by comparison with other festival entries created in response to the 2004 election, “Jigsaw Nation” may appear naive and exceedingly earnest. The lines sometimes get too broad (“What do you think it means to be an American?”) and the acting too bright.

Yet it’s this same go-for-broke sincerity that fuels the piece’s best moments, like the one in which a man unflinching portrays an infertile woman jilted by her fiance. As he speaks her words about wanting to have a child, his eyes fill with her tears. For the moment, she’s onstage, and there’s a chance to hear one of the many unscripted voices in a vast, complicated America.

August 20, 21, 25 & 28 (380 Broadway, between White and Walker Streets, 212-966-1047).