Written and directed by Marie Brassard. An Infrarouge production presented by the Firehall Arts Centre and Ruby Slippers Theatre.

At the Firehall Arts Centre until May 8

Only about 15 minutes of this 80-minute show are interesting--and half of the good minutes introduce ideas that never develop.

At the beginning of Marie Brassard's La Noirceur (The Darkness), two dimly lit figures--Brassard and a male actor--stand and talk about bedtime rituals, taking on a variety of characters as they do so. What they say is full of quirky, movingly human detail. A woman tells us that she reads the dictionary at night: "It relaxes me and I feel like I'm going to sleep a little smarter." An older character says a gentle prayer of thanks to the spirits of her bedroom for her husband and her comfort. Wittily, poetically, Brassard invokes meditations on loneliness, the fear of death, and our relationships to sex, our bodies, and nature.

Unfortunately, the intensity and originality of this opening movement are rarely equalled in the rest of the show. Instead of exploring its ideas, Brassard launches into a deliberate description of the difficulties of her writing process: "I'm trying to write a story about someone who has lost someone...about someone who has lost space." This gets really tedious really fast.

In the body of the work, Brassard spells out a set of themes that's considerably less subtle than the invocations of the beginning. She tells us that she hopes to investigate violence, ignorance, and the difficulty of expressing oneself to others--hence the self-consciousness about her process, I guess. This list is typical of one of the big problems with La Noirceur: Brassard repeatedly tells us what she's thinking instead of investigating what characters are doing or feeling.

And when the playwright does start to advance two parallel stories, both turn out to be weak. The first is an account of how she and many of her friends were booted out of their lofts in Montreal to make way for the development of luxury condominiums. I agree wholeheartedly that an unfettered real-estate market is destroying communities and doing serious damage to individual lives, but Brassard never made me care much about this particular scenario. The people affected are young and apparently resilient. Feeling displaced, a friend of hers moved to New York. She misses him. So what?

The second story works for a brief, glorious flash as Brassard finally lets her intuition flow. Embodied by the other actor, a young man from a photograph that Brassard has been examining explodes into a wild, thrashing dance. In counterpoint, this man's timid mother attempts to groove to lounge music, her movements somehow comically defiant and fragile. As the mother speaks, the realities of a complicated relationship and of their hard lives as factory workers begin to emerge. Unfortunately, this tale quickly deflates into a sentimental melodrama concerning the death of the woman's second child, a daughter.

In Alexander MacSween's multitextured sound design, the characters' speeches distort, echo, and overlap. Cécile Babiole's time-lapse video sequences of cityscapes have a Piet Mondrian ­like charm. But the pieces don't add up. I suspect that's because Brassard tried to think her way through La Noirceur rather than follow the wisdom of her instincts; the superiority of that source of knowledge was evident in her first script, Jimmy, which she performed here last year.