photo by Jeff Fohl

Minnie – high on crank and prone to some violent fantasies – threatens to disrupt the curious arrangement Mickey's struck with Nena (Catherine Castellanos), a Filipina immigrant several years his senior who's invited Mickey to stay in her modest apartment after finding him foraging in a nearby trash can. In exchange, Mickey transcribes her life story, a sort of memoir-cookbook dictated in late-night sessions that mix the flamboyant and not entirely trustworthy Nena's mystical visions, flair for preparing her native dishes, and memories of growing up in a family of war refugees. Nena gets Mickey a job at the strip club, offering the reluctant Blauvelt a little home cooking as bait. Soon Blauvelt comes a-courting, closing the Heaven-ly circle in time for the unexpected arrival of Nena's mismatched twin, the deceptively straitlaced and fiercely plucky Fe (Margo Hall).

There's more reason than rhyme to this jumble of incongruent personalities that go into Hagedorn's rumination on the resilience of life amid death and decay. And in collaboration with theater company Campo Santo and director Nancy Benjamin, it can produce some sharp and arresting theatrical moments. But then, despite complex and soulful performances, there's almost too much meaning to successfully take root in the play's single 90-minute act. Hagedorn marks a lot of territory here without fully incorporating it into the drama.

As the complicated relationship between Nena and Mickey makes itself better understood, we might see Mickey (played with quietly intelligent yet boyish intensity by San José) as a return of many things – Nena's lost son, the soldiers who plagued her childhood, an early love, and the memory of her own violent act while in Amsterdam as a passionate young newcomer to the West. The exercise in memory and transformation that is Nena's book project takes place amid a cycle that in some ways looks ready to repeat its worst excesses, especially in the reckless Minnie (Huang even doubles as the young Nena in the flashback sequences). Indeed, despite their consummately American names, Mickey and Minnie – tweaking and trading rhymes on midnight strolls over concrete and past chain-link fences – reflect something essential from the past Nena wants both to flee and to recover. But then it's a small world, after all.

This interconnectedness reaches across geography as well as time, hinting at a subtle dialectic between East and West at the heart of Nena's unfolding story, much of which gets told indirectly, or in flashback sequences and direct addresses by several characters. Especially after her nemesis of a sister drops in (and Hall's wily and ebullient Fe immediately lights up the stage, sparking an electrifying sisterly clash, with Saguar's Blauvelt serving hilariously as the shuttlecock between them), we come to see Nena's very identity as a struggle for affirmation and reappropriation with a vaguely political dimension. (We even learn from Fe that Nena once worked toward a degree in postcolonial studies, deconstructing Western definitions of the non-Western "other.") Before Fe arrives to add a competing version of her sister's personality and past, Nena's stories already reflect her need for invention, or reinvention, even as she works her way toward the confession of a long-buried secret. (Castellanos's Nena, meanwhile – proud, vulnerable, wise, impetuous – retains an intriguing complexity despite the gradual unraveling of her character's mystique.)

Leaving aspects of the story and the characters' pasts shrouded has its purposeful side – reaching across the unknown and unknowable is central to the play's theme and power. Nevertheless, the action feels underdeveloped, ending abruptly with things left not so much unanswered as not adequately engaged. Stairway to Heaven offers vivid performances, moments of genuine humor and dramatic force, and tantalizing thematic richness, but in the end this piquant transcultural stew of memory, restless desire, grief, and forgiveness remains too underdone to leave one completely satisfied.

'Stairway to Heaven' runs through March 7. Thurs.-Sun. and March 7, 8 p.m., Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia, S.F. $9-$15. (415) 626-3311, www.theintersection.org.