By Robert Avila

WHEN THE WORLD becomes too unreal to be believed, surrealism can be the best mirror for capturing it. Crowded Fire knows this as well as any theater company. (Although, on the heels of its world premiere of One Big Lie, Liz Duffy Adams's darkly comic and politically pointed musical of gods and mortals, the company's latest and at least superficially similar world premiere risks overworking the formula a bit.) Australian playwright Christine Evans's Slow Falling Bird evokes a dreamlike world halfway between fact and fantasy to illuminate the very real but neglected nightmare of Australia's immigrant detention system. Blending realistic situations and dialogue with some quasi-metaphysical characters, flights of lyricism, and a smattering of songs, Evans explores the shifting lines and ties between insiders and outsiders – all against a backdrop of the harrowing human rights abuses endured by the poorest and most dire of refugees (including recent waves of Iraqi and Afghan war victims).

Originally workshopped and presented in a staged reading at the 2003 Bay Area Playwrights Festival (2005's festival happens to be underway through this weekend), Slow Falling Bird is set in the Woomera Immigration Detention Centre, an inhospitable facility surrounded by desert, more like a prison than not. The play follows the interactions and turmoil between two guards and three recent arrivals, sole survivors of a wrecked boat of refugees from Iraq and Afghanistan. The destinies of three families overlap here: Rick (Michael Storm), one of the two Woomera guards we meet (with Dan Woolf), and his wife Joy (Cassie Beck), an emotionally fragile homemaker desperate to have a child; a recently widowed and pregnant Iraqi mother (Sally Clawson) whose child, Fish Girl (Rami Margron), has refused to be born and instead remains in a kind of limbo just above the world (and stage); and an Afghan brother and sister (Anil Margsahayam and Juliet Tanner) suspended in their own legal limbo, awaiting an asylum interview. A recurring musical theme serves as the aural umbilical cord binding two sets of mothers and daughters, as well as the bond between brother and sister, as Rick's malicious aggression serves as a destructive catalyst for a form of social integration.

A child reluctant to be born, hovering over the stage in a kind of fascinated horror at the carnivorous and cannibalistic world below, is an especially captivating image and a compelling lookout from which to see history churning racism, nationalism, and the most basic of human instincts. But despite some inspired moments, the play remains elusive and unsatisfying on the whole. Slow Falling Bird falls somewhere between its political agenda and its dramatic vision, and ends up reducing each. Too often the playwright's legitimate outrage and political message end up tethered to dramatic dead ends that undermine our ability to connect with the play.

Crowded Fire, a company whose modest size hasn't prevented it from producing some exceptional new work by a far-flung assortment of playwrights, gives Bird a capable and thoughtful premiere, helmed by artistic director Rebecca Novick. The play's inherent weaknesses, on the other hand, contribute to a fitful intensity. Storm does particularly fine work as Rick, the brutalizing Woomera guard who at the same time idealizes his wife, Joy, placing her on a pedestal so high he can be sure never to reach her – despite her own somewhat comical obsession with managing a pregnancy. But Rick is also the most complex character in a play where even the "real-life" characters can tend toward the two-dimensional. The sister and brother, Leyla and Mahmoud, are highly romanticized and thinly drawn, and penned in as much by stereotype as they are by barbed wire, although Tanner and Margsahayam remain stoically competent in roles that limit them to little beyond melodramatic meltdowns.

Joel Frangquist's economical set design utilizes a few stark elements for multiple effects: a line of coiling razor wire replaces a proscenium arch; an abstracted wall of slanting bars becomes Fish Girl's ethereal scaffolding, the adjoining basketball hoop her womblike perch or, later, a dancers' pole at a strip bar. A backdrop illuminated by the rich hues in Heather Basarab's lighting design suggests a vastness beyond the characters and their miserable circumscribed routines, while Cliff Caruthers's deep and haunted sound design adds a powerful undertow to this sea of emptiness.

There's a particular national irony at the heart of the play's situation, since white Australia, once a British penal colony, comprises descendants of undesirables from a distant shore who now persecute a new set of unwanted arrivals in their turn – though the pattern translates readily to a US context, home of self-styled "minute men" stalking the border with Mexico. By extension, the piece also acknowledges the plight of refugees worldwide, and more generally the inhuman treatment of all manner of "detained persons" around the world – not least in the global archipelago of US detention facilities, known and unknown. Regrettably, there's faint suggestion that so much of this mass dislocation burdening the first world comes from war, famine, and economic deprivation generated directly or indirectly by its own imperial engine. At the least, that might have furthered the play's chances of bringing it all back home.

'Slow Falling Bird' runs through Aug. 20. Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m., Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor, SF. $18-$30. (415) 675-5995, www.crowdedfire.org.