Richard Greenberg (Take Me Out, Three Days Of Rain) challenges us with a play that initially pastiches Oscar Wilde, but later aspires to tragic proportions.

The Violet Hour begins in a hopeful 1919, with John Pace Seavering (Erik Ransom) venturing into publishing with demonstrative assistant Gidger (Mike Dees). For contrived reasons, he can only publish one book. He could choose The Violet Hour, written by his best friend, Denis (Jered McLenigan), whose frenetic wit and aristocratic ambitions suggest F. Scott Fitzgerald. If Denis doesn't prove his worth by being published, he will lose rich fiancee Rosamund (Erin Reilly) to an arranged marriage.

The other choice is a memoir by Jesse Brewster (Karen Vicks), an exceptional black singer who's achieved fame in Europe but must conduct her Stateside affair with John in secret. Will he choose friendship or romance?

This rickety premise slips to a deeper, albeit similarly unexplained, level when Gidger discovers a bizarre device (in both sellnses of the word) offstage spewing pages (I imagined a manic photocopier) from future books that, coincidentally, all concern these characters. It's hard to follow — and even harder to swallow.

Director Kathryn C. Nocero tries to help, but the leap from Wildean quips to philosophical quandaries about fate is too difficult — through a flimsy trick that even a science fiction fan like me can't accept — for this production. The play's success rests on young Ransom, a likable actor who struggles to realize the depths of John's terrible dilemma.

The Violet Hour nevertheless entertains, with superbly stylized, yet sincere, performances from Reilly and Vicks (resplendent in period dresses by Millie Hiibel) and McLenigan's moving portrait of a promising writer whom fame and love will destroy. Dees' Gidger seems modulated for the high school auditorium, not the intimate space framed by Dirk Durossette's elegantly simple office set, but provides an effective spark.

This first glimpse of The Violet Hour provides the play's many laughs, but not the nightmarish chills its deeper themes require.

(m_cofta@citypaper.net)