Written by Michelle Deines. Directed by John Murphy. A Working Spark Theatre production. At Little Mountain Galley theatre on Friday, March 28. Continues until April 6

Ghosts in Baghdad wants to be a play about ideas but settles for being a melodrama about people—which is disappointing, but not fatal.

In her program notes, playwright Michelle Deines writes “Over the course of researching for this play, I’ve come to believe that art and cultural objects are not just physical things: they symbolize our culture, our history, our identity, and sometimes what we see as the best of ourselves.” Anyone who’s ever spent an afternoon in a great gallery or anthropology museum is likely to agree, and early on in Ghosts in Baghdad—set mostly in the title city’s Iraq Museum, which was looted following the U.S. invasion of 2003—it seems as if we’re going to get a poetic meditation on the enduring power of art.

Quoting from an ancient Assyrian text, museum director and academic Khalil Najim tells of how the great bird Anzû stole the Tablet of Destinies “and the radiance of the earth faded”. Isn’t that what always happens when language and culture are stolen? It happened to the Assyrians when the Babylonians took power in the Middle East; it happened right here in the Pacific Northwest, almost within living memory; and it happens every time cultural treasures are claimed by force.

Applying this logic to the situation in Iraq could have resulted in a powerfully metaphorical script, but after a few promising steps in that direction, this play turns into an Indiana Jones–style thriller: will the bad guy outwit the gentle professor and his troubled female sidekick, thus winning access to the secret vault?

It’s a credit to the cast and crew that even this shallower conceit holds the audience’s attention quite nicely. In the role of Najim, Alec Willows initially seems too flowery, too highfalutin—until it becomes obvious that this is part of the character’s nature. (Najim’s students, we learn, referred to him as “the epic poet”.) As his former pupil and current assistant, Malika al-Nadi, Sarah May Redmond is incandescent: she fully inhabits her part and provides Ghosts in Baghdad with its vivid centre. Joshua Drebit, playing a museum guard turned thug, offers credible threat in a compact package. Only Gili Roskies, playing the displaced teenager Noor, is less than convincing. One of Ghosts in Baghdad’s pivotal moments should come when her character’s true gender is revealed, but because no one’s ever going to buy her as a boy, this falls as flat as a failed soufflé.

Producing Baghdad in the authentically crumbling confines of the intimate Little Mountain Theatre is a stroke of genius, and Working Spark made another smart move in hiring Corwin Ferguson to design the projections—mostly photographs of the Iraq Museum and its lost holdings—that animate an otherwise ultraspare set.

There’s a lot to like here, although there could have been more.