Under the right circumstances — say, a Fringe Festival production or a developmental workshop — “¡El Conquistador!” might be viewed as a piece with real potential, a diamond with a decent, but not insurmountable, amount of rough.

As it happens, this strenuous bit of foolishness has existed in both of the above incarnations, and many others, during the past three and a half years. A timeline included in the program lists mountings and developments on three different continents during that time. Thaddeus Phillips’s ramshackle look at a starry-eyed Colombian doorman has just flown in all the way from Groningen, Netherlands, and Ljubljana, Slovenia. And its travels have taken their toll. The play’s not tired, exactly, but it is flabby.

But while the end result should be funnier and more focused, Mr. Phillips’s collaboration with Tatiana and Victor Mallarino, two stalwarts of Colombia’s telenovela industry, does give its oddball story an agreeably high-tech sheen. And Mr. Phillips’s central creation — Polonio, a Colombian peasant who comes to the big city of Bogota in search of fame and romance — has a hangdog charm that frequently transcends the formless goings-on.

After a brief English-language prologue (the rest of “¡El Conquistador!” is performed in Spanish with English supertitles) and an even briefer sequence set on a farm, Polonio heads to Bogota, intending to work on telenovelas, the country’s enormously popular nighttime soap operas. Instead, he ends up holding down 24-hour shifts as the doorman to the Nuevo Mundo (New World) apartment building. Here he interacts, almost entirely via video intercom, with many of the building’s inhabitants — all played in the show by leading telenovela performers in pretaped footage. Before long, he is involved with shady drug deliveries, bungled assassinations, and a long list of unlikely romantic dalliances.

The set, also designed by Mr. Phillips, is devoted almost entirely to a dangling Plexiglas frame that can be lowered to create everything from Polonio’s doorman station to a large video screen to various other settings (from the Atlantic Ocean to the roof). The screen is where Mr. Phillips and the Mallarinos — she is listed as director and co-playwright, he is credited with “collaborating,” and both also appear in the performance as tenants — focus most of their stage trickery. Polonio deftly moves between the stage and the video footage, and a series of camera angles redirects the audience’s vantage point to different areas of the apartment lobby.

At times, the production appears to have bit off more than it can chew, technologically. The operator of the English supertitles had a hard time keeping up with Mr. Phillips at a recent performance, and the synchronization of the video footage with the onstage action grew sloppy from time to time.

Almost as sloppy is the creators’ overlay of magical-realism political commentary involving Christopher Columbus. After the play opens with a strikingly simple invocation of Columbus’s 1492 voyage to the New World, the villainous tenant Didier (Mr. Mallarino) dons a Columbus costume for a party and issues a diatribe against the cultural imperialism that the explorer embodies.

But hold on a second. Don’t telenovelas represent another incarnation of cultural imperialism? Mr. Phillips speaks admiringly in the prologue about how one Colombian title, “Cassandra,” has proliferated as far as Serbia. (Now the shows are even challenging the voracious American market on its own turf, with “Ugly Betty,” based on Colombia’s “Yo Soy Betty la Fea,” winning over critics and audiences in recent weeks.) As Polonio’s schemes catapult him into a telenovela-esque world, complete with evil twins and fireside seductions, is he part of the solution or part of the problem? Or both? That these unresolved questions don’t do more damage to “¡El Conquistador!” is a testament to the fertile imaginations of Mr. Phillips and the Mallarinos.

That extended list of the production’s many past lives includes a New York workshop earlier this year. Mr. Phillips tried out the piece at Mark Russell’s prestigious Under the Radar Festival at the Public Theatre — where, it is said, the piece “fail[ed] miserably.” This latest go-round may lurch and founder here and there, but it certainly doesn’t fail. While it has its occasional technological and theatrical glitches, they actually work in its favor: Mr. Phillips’s goofball charms would probably evaporate in too polished a production. And while the decision to have Mr. Phillips impersonate some of the building’s tenants is underdeveloped, it’s only a testament to his deft creation of Polonio, who is more than capable of holding the audience’s interest. Although he almost never stops talking, his actions bring to mind the antics of a Chaplin or a Keaton. Polonio is another plucky, decent Everyman whose grandiose dreams and increasingly elaborate schemes get him in way over his head. Coupled with the curious inhabitants of the Nuevo Mundo, in other words, he’s sufficient company.

But the narrative muddle bespeaks a bit of timidity on the creators’ part, an unwillingness to follow any (or even all) of his plot threads to their riotous conclusions. If only Mr. Phillips had taken Columbus’s gamble and been willing to truly sail off the deep end, he may have discovered a truly new theatrical world. As it is, “¡El Conquistador!” splashes around in some shallow, if frequently refreshing, waters.

Until October 22 (79 E. 4th Street, between Second Avenue and the Bowery, 212-239-6200).