TO CREATE THE SET for The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, designer Etta Lilienthal removed the backrests from a couple dozen wooden and metal chairs, lining them diagonally across the stage to simulate train tracks. The look is clean, spare, functional -- exactly the right space to hold an edgy psychological study propped against the backdrop of Depression-era America. Too bad the writer, director, and actors had to mess it all up.

Set in 1936 in Anywhere, USA, The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek begins and ends with the sexual and social awakenings of its two lead characters; 16-year-old Dalton Chance, and Pace Creagan, a tomboy two years his senior. Pace gets off on trains -- on beating the relentless beasts' progress across the trestle before they bear down and crush her. Having already lost one companion whom she raced across the trestle, Pace challenges another, Dalton, to try it with her again.

At this point, playwright Naomi Wallace has enough background, character, and thematic fodder to feed a solid one-act. Instead, she overloads the essentials with two hours' worth of extra characters (Dalton's parents, the father of the boy who died on the trestle), all of whom have the dysfunction of the world on their shoulders and a histrionic urge to tell us all about it. Since Wallace can't decide if she should focus on the psychological, social, economic, or political forces that lead to her tale's tragedy, she just throws everything at us. Along the way, the play's dramatic core gets plowed under by cumbersome dialogue and so many megaton metaphors that an industrial-grade backhoe couldn't dig it out.

Among the performers, only Deanna Companion as Pace manages to capture her character's dreamlike, emblematic qualities. The others overact themselves out of the play altogether, particularly Charles Leggett, who mistakes Pope Lick Creek for Twin Peaks, and Jerry Lloyd, who confuses Dalton's impotent, out-of-work dad with Charlton Heston's Ben Hur. But who can blame them? Like the playwright, director Sheila Daniels can't decide what's really driving this overloaded, runaway train across the trestle... and ultimately off the tracks.