"WHO WOULD BELIEVE so loud a yarn as mine could speak the truth?" says a grieving, vengeful Houston (Paul Morgan Stetler) in Louis Broome's Texarkana Waltz. It's a tribute to both the playwright and the fine production of his work running at the Empty Space that you not only believe Broome's tall tale, you respond to its zingy, vital, plaintive truths. With high comic and tragic style, Texarkana Waltz croons a whiskey-soaked tale of generational suffering and the stories that both conceal us from and reveal us to each other and ourselves.

In a sudden, unexplained moment that will mark the family forever, Eddie Wickett (Burton Curtis) shrugs out of the waltzing embrace of his wife, Emma (Lauren Weedman), and slashes her throat, making horrified, haunted witnesses of daughter Dallas (Jena Cane) and the above-mentioned son, Houston. "I was having a bad day," is all the taciturn Eddie can say prior to his execution. The act passes on to his children a heritage of intangible remorse, and leaves Houston a dreamy, silent mental patient while an uncommunicative Dallas frustrates her baffled lover, Morgan (Weedman again), when they head off together to fetch the troubled brother.

As it unfolds on a rather ingenious set (which, I should mention, features singularly fine scenic painting) by Adam Stockhausen, the funny, dramatic hyperbole gathers in force until it reveals to both its characters and the audience the malleable power of a good story. Even Broome's missteps are never less than interesting. It might not have been advisable to give a monologue to a man with a tracheotomy (an awkward task for Paul Niebanck as Eddie's father). I'm also not sure how well Houston's Shakespeare fantasia works -- it's a running conceit that has him trying to make sense of his father's crime by envisioning himself with childhood heroes Cowboy Bob (Todd Beadle) and Sheriff Truett (Niebanck), speaking verse in a twangy take on Hamlet. Both scenes, however, are risks worth watching.

The violent act at the center of Texarkana Waltz is the story with which Broome gets at the essentially lonesome uncertainty of life, and it wouldn't work without a convincing messenger. Within the space of a few minutes, Burton Curtis makes a believable transition from wide-grinned, rangy good ol' boy to cowed, death-row inmate; I don't think he's ever been better. Director Allison Narver intricately weaves his regret into the larger fabric of Broome's intentions, and every visitor to Eddie's cell adds another layer to the legacy of blood, pain, and longing. There's an oddly moving scene between Curtis and Niebanck in which the old man can only relate to his lost son through a proud reminiscence of days spent picking his own weight in cotton.

Broome gets monologue-happy, though, and Narver doesn't always conquer it so effortlessly, especially depending on who's doing the telling. While Curtis can deftly make his way through a difficult speech about life's many pleasures ("Her smell. Her kiss. The rhythm of her breathing in the night...."), a more linear monologue from Keri Healey as Eddie's Momma follows immediately after, and doesn't stick. Some of the actors get lost in the playwright's language, with its shades of Tennessee Williams' fragile reveries, and don't create their own way with it. Burdened with holding up the play's modern sections, Jena Cane has a lot of pained exposition and can't quite make her way around it. She fairly blows her big moment (a self-revealing speech about poverty), and she and Weedman don't really connect as lovers, which, I suppose, is as much Weedman's fault as it is hers.

Weedman's particular energy bounces just fine off Curtis in the play's opening, and works wonders walking a fine comic line as Emma's ghost in Houston's Hamlet fantasies, but she seems uncomfortably reigned in as Morgan. As the tormented Houston, Paul Stetler, in what must be Narver's decision, is playing it awfully straight in contrast to everyone else. While the rest of the company tries riffing off Broome's cowpoke and pop culture influences -- Beadle's excellent turns (in addition to Cowboy Bob, he also plays a nurse, warden, and priest) are the high-water mark -- Stetler is perhaps more even-keeled than you might want.

Yet everyone has a moment or two, and no one stumbles to the point of distracting from the pleasures of Narver's careful construction. The evening is a quietly marvelous technical feat -- Timothy Wratten's lighting, at one point casting iconic shadows on the back wall, is smartly complementary -- and by the end, everything has worked to turn Broome's broad, wistful saga into something altogether warm and rewarding. "You take the pieces that remain and turn them into something beautiful," Momma Wickett says about making quilts; and it applies, of course, to what we can make of the songs, memories, mottoes, myths, and pictures that life gives us. Texarkana Waltz is about letting go of the old stories and creating new ones.