J. Stephen Brantley’s Pirira, now playing at Luna Stage in West Orange, NJ, has an epic vision and noble ambitions , but, alas, in its execution, cannot live up to its lofty goals. There are two principle narratives at play: Gilbert (Kevin Hillocks) and Chad (David Gow), two workers in the store room of a florist wholesaler in New York, deepen their relationship beyond casual acquaintances; Ericka (Naja Selby-Morton) and Jack (John P. Keller), two American NGO workers in Malawi, hide from an angry mob in a store room in Malawi. Eventually, the two strands will tie together at the end through the unseen title character Piriria.

Brantley attempts something quite complex in trying to forge connections between two disparate points in the world and uniting them together through shared connection, grief, and loss. This technique is one with which the likes of Caryl Churchill and Tom Stoppard have experimented. When it works, the various pieces come together and forge a theatrical musicality that transcends any one element. Alas, with Pirira, the whole is not greater than the sum of the parts.

Firstly, the action moves too quickly from one store room to other. Just as the audience is beginning to get a grounding in one place, we jump to another. Churchill in Cloud Nine and Stoppard in Arcadia give space to allow the different worlds to breath. For instance, in Arcadia, a given scene in, say, the early nineteenth century can last a good 10 to 15 minutes before moving to a scene set in the late twentieth century. Only at the end do the two worlds blend together.

Secondly, in this age of smart devices, we tend to want our plays to be short. That instinct, however, does not serve this work. There are four characters on stage – and Brantly should be commended for crafting equally complicated, flawed, nuanced, and three-dimensional characters – as well as the unseen Pirira. But the play is so rushed at 70 minutes that these characters suddenly feel compelled to tell their rich back stories not in a way that is organic but rather because we are nearing the climax of the play and we are required theatrically to have an epiphany here. Also, I lost track of Pirira in this, who obviously should be important but comes across as a last minute device. Chad, for instance, is a former undergraduate from Georgetown who experienced a great personal tragedy which prompted him to make a terrible mistake and now he is for some reason working at this flower shop. He comes across in the opening as a figure of white privilege, then becomes the voice of moral outrage, before, finally, allowing his defenses to drop away to emerge as a tragic victim. It can work and could work beautifully. But all that needs time for the character to live, breathe, show and not tell. The character of Ericka has similar problems with her trajectory, moving far too quickly from spoiled city girl to something more vulnerable (and I am not sure I bought the spoiled city girl piece of her character either).

Thirdly, ultimately, crises of Malawi should be center, but too often it feels like that this is seen too much through an American lens. (I do not necessarily know how to move past this as this is an American production by an American writer.) But it does feel that the scales of the play are tipped so that Chad has the moral high ground over Gilbert.

The actors are all at the top of their games because the script does provide a lot of meat for them to chew on. Keller imbues Jack with the right amount of world-weariness and damaged but still present hope. Hillocks subtly builds the fear beneath the anger of Gilbert. Selby-Morton digs into  Ericka’s past and ably and fully creates a person of contradiction and has that made those contradictions clear so the audience can embrace her empathetically. Gow travels the distance from comedy to drama with an effortlessness that marks an actor on the pathway to greatness. He makes the audience feel every horrific beat in his monologue about what happened to his lover back in Washington, DC with an elegiac percusiveness. Director Ari Laura Keith keeps the proceedings at a brisk pace, which is usually something productions should strive for, but here a slower tempo would have served the play better. She was not aided by the space, which often forced the audience to bounce back and forth between the two couples like they were at a match at the US Open.

There is a great a play inside Pirira, but it needs expansion and further development.