It hadn’t occurred to me that this was an itch that needed scratching, but all right: Quincy Long has written a play about a stripper, a school board, two kinds of aliens, a Sufi square dance, and Charles Darwin. An unexpected play, and an unsuccessful one, but not an altogether unwelcome one. “People Be Heard” is hobbled by problems in design and execution. Still you have to admire what it tries to do. Its heart is in the right place.

And not just its heart (he types, stifling giggle). In some semi rural patch of middle America, an exotic dancer named Rita tries to raise her son alone. (Are there no happily married strippers out there?) No sooner is she tapped to fill a vacant seat on the school board than the issue of teaching creation in biology class begins to vex. Rita doesn’t know all that much, but wants to do the right thing. As played by committed, lovely Funda Duval, she becomes a kind of Erin Brockovich of the fossil record.

School boards have not heretofore been thought a rich vein for palpitating drama. (“Let the record reflect that it was Mr. Frye painted the doors to the Middle School,” says the board president in one spirited exchange.) So the playwright and director Erica Schmidt punch up the action with frequent detours to a different sort of deliberative body, the Wiggle Room. There may be some deep meaning for why Rita sheds more and more clothes in successive dances, arriving at last at full, grinning nudity; but unpacking metaphors was not foremost in my mind just then.

Getting Gypsy Rose Lee and Stephen Jay Gould to shake hands is only the start of Mr. Long’s idiosyncratic project. He treats the sentiment expressed by the play’s title with refreshing respect. He actually drags out the meetings, having board members interrupt each other to double back and conform to the proper procedures. As we’ve all been reminded lately, the rule of law can be an awful drag when you’re trying to do something really exciting. What the show loses in tautness it partway makes up in a kind of romantic civic-mindedness. “Coming together and talking the issue through like we’ve been doing here tonight in an intelligent and civilized fashion – that is America, okay,” says the board president.

A really ardent defender of Mr. Long might claim that all the overwriting and awkward subplotting is intentional. The sluggish, aimless script (this argument would run) is actually an ingenious metatheatrical statement about the sanctity of our democratic processes, an allegorical demonstration that we can take the time to hold Senate hearings and debate war resolutions and talk out our differences, and still end up caring about the spunky stripper and her tow-headed tyke in the end. You won’t catch me going that far. Mr. Long’s play really is sluggish and aimless much of the time, without cause. Ms. Schmidt does a nice job of pushing the action from scene to scene, but the dynamics between characters lack sharpness, and a lot of the comedy is forced. Admire the intention; regret the result.

The story is populated by the kinds of rustics we’re accustomed to seeing in plays about the square states (so to speak). It’s hard to resist condescending, I realize. With their round vowels and sincerity, these are the kinds of people the Onion blissfully obliterates each week. And the secondary characters in this kind of comedy will always tend to be broadly drawn, no matter the setting. Still it would be easier to overlook the fringe on Rita’s husband’s black leather jacket, and the apple shaped eraser on the board secretary’s pencil, if the creationist Linda Vobiato (Kathy Santen) weren’t brittle, officious, and high-handed. As the board president, at least Conrad John Schuck provides gruff honesty and unfussy sensitivity without seeming foolish.

Playwrights Horizons advertises the show as a “comedy with songs.” At one weirdly charming moment, Rita’s Sufi neighbor (Dashiell Eaves) takes her to a square dance. But mostly the music, by Michael Roth, does more to divert than to bolster. The show’s energy isn’t helped by the musicians who stroll onstage from time to time to accompany a song. Sometimes the music is pretty apparently just a cover for offstage costume changes; at others, a song disrupts a scene that would have been better if left in prose.

Ms. Duval is at her engaging, earnest best when she sticks up for Rita’s dignity. But in a late scene, a compelling argument between her and Linda trails off into a goofy dance. And at the finale, a cartoonish Mother Wit (the funny Annie Golden) materializes in a daydream to lend her counsel. At Rita’s crucial moment of deliberation, the show slides into corny musical comedy. Thomas Jefferson gave all for this?