By Tanya Marquardt. Codirected by Tanya Marquardt and Heidi Taylor. Copresented by Chrysalis Theatre and Proximity Arts. At Box Studios on Tuesday, February 17. Continues until February 28

Writer and codirector Tanya Marquardt’s Transmission is a beautiful thing, especially when the signal is clear.

Tucked into the tiny, warehouselike Box Studios at 1622 Franklin Street, Transmission is a full-body, full-mind exploration of loss. David Bloom plays a man whose sister has disappeared. At times, he speaks into a microphone as if broadcasting his ruminations to a radio audience, in an isolated but yearning attempt at connection. He evokes poetic images of other disappearances: a prisoner who dissolves into thin air, her shackles falling to the ground; a woman abducted by aliens who holds her half-human baby only once.

Deanna Peters dances and speaks the role of the sister. She seems to have gone missing in a foreign country, and her fate comes wrapped in images of torture: “Electric shocks used on the head/on the genitals/on the feet”.

The complex textures in the physical mounting are compelling and seamlessly whole. Marquardt’s script and Emma Hendrix’s sound design combine miked and unenhanced voices, individual and simultaneous speech, and a score that’s sometimes subtly ominous and sometimes physically abusive; at one point, Anne Murray’s “Could I Have This Dance” plays at ear-splitting volume, underlining the relentlessness that sentimentality can bring to mourning.

Dancer Peters is restless, frank, androgynously sexy, and full of joy. And veteran actor Bloom delivers a masterfully calm performance, breathing naturalistic life into the abstract text.

Unfortunately, the script gets less rewarding as it goes along. With its evocations of torture, Transmission starts specifically. It doesn’t take long before we lose the thread of what happened to the sister, though, and wander into philosophizing that can feel wanky. Bloom’s character expounds, “Or/to take/an even more/Radical/Monist/stance:/Time never started at all/Chaos never died/The Empire was never founded.” Maybe he’s talking about the way that emotional intensity can release you into the present moment, but who knows?

Late in the game, the siblings launch into a reminiscence of their drunken, abusive father. In several ways, they’ve told us that whatever gets in the way of life “must be removed/must be destroyed”. Did they kill Daddy? And is their love incestuous? Perhaps. The brother says, “If you were here/and I kissed you/they’d call it an act of terrorism.” Or is this just about the creative reinvention of the self that grief necessitates? And how does this all relate to the politics of Sis’s death?

Complexity is great—within a sustained vocabulary or metaphor. Transmission provides too many competing lenses and, in doing so, creates static. Still, its strengths win out.