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I had misgivings when I heard the title of Transparent Theater’s second play of the season – “Eternity Is in Love with the Productions of Time.” What a mouthful. I prayed that Transparent would unsort this knot of rhetoric and unravel its mystery by means of an absorbing play. 

But alas, the knot remains pretty tangled at play’s end. The struggle to fashion something absorbing from it results in more frustration than enlightenment. “Eternity Is in Love” has keen and even powerful moments, but these are swamped by bewildering symbolism, muddled intentions and lackluster drama. 

Opening with a scene in which a young man is brutally beaten by an official for spray-painting a wall, the play is set in a nightmare version of the Soviet Union. It moves to a freezing winter night, when a doctor is roused from his marital bed on a call. A stranger who emerges from his cellar offers his car, and the doctor drives that car to a house, where a young man with a rose-shaped wound, infested with white worms, lies ill. Is he the young man with the spray can? Is the wound a result of the beating or has someone been reading too much William Blake? His mother hovers. Meanwhile, the doctor’s wife and the strange man make love. 

It turns out that the stranger is a poet (known only as “The Poet”), and the patient (”The Patient”) is the poet’s son. The official who beat him is known, for reasons we can only guess, as “The Angel.” Is he some sort of avenging angel? The two wives have actual names. The poet’s dark-haired wife is Masha. The doctor’s blonde wife is Rose, and the play traffics in reoccurring rose symbolism. 

Discovering his wife’s infidelity, the doctor reports one of the poet’s subversive works to the secret police, who arrest the author. A further detail, which is not likely to help you any more than it did me, is that all the characters, except the doctor and the Angel, are authors of poems or songs, perhaps the music of a nation’s repressed soul. 

What to make of this? Clearly the play is about the war between art’s right to speak the truth and repressive regimes that try to choke truth off. Though it’s similar to Berkeley Rep’s current “Menocchio,” in which an independent thinker gets in hot water with the 16th century Catholic Church, its method is less genial. Its abstract and schematic. Furthermore authors Tom Clyde and Coley Lally stuff big chunks of the words of 20th century dissenters, from Franz Kafka to Bob Dylan to Anna Akhmatova, into their character’s mouths. This makes for stirring poetry reading, if that’s what you want, but it often stops the story dead. 

Transparent gives the play a decent production. Anne Goldschmidt’s austere set, designed in Soviet red and muted gray, features tall stairs, a claustrophobic bedroom, a central pit. Soundman Daniel Feinsmith supplies ominously ticking clocks agogic harangues, along with dissonant violi music played by Alyssa Rose. Coley Lally’s costumes express a bleak world of fear, and Colin Kaminski provides effective lighting. 

Among the actors, John Nahigian, as the poet makes the strongest impression (too bad he vanishes at the end of act one). Michael Shipley infuses his son with youthful ardor. As the doctor, who warns, “Don’t create anything, it will be misinterpreted,” Lasse Christiansen has an appropriate slump to his walk, and as his wife, who insists, “You can’t fight with silence,” Lucy Owen is a lovely enigma. David Austen-Groen is unnerving as the Angel. Melanie Flood is a warm and earnest Masha. 

Now in its second season Transparent Theater is a welcome addition to East Bay theater, but it’s far too young to go out on a limb with a play like this. Theater of ideas, yes, experimental theater, yes – but at the expense of story line. The chill blowing from “Eternity Is in Love” is more than the chill of a bleak Soviet winter.