"What is this place?” the unnamed protagonist of little world hollers about halfway through the show. “A therapy tank for psychotics? The Picture of Dorian Gray with puppets?” She’s standing in a living room, while three beret-and-striped-shirt-wearing French men who occasionally sing and smoke cigarettes sit above the fireplace, with nearly every part of the set rigged to move and interact with her—books knock themselves off shelves, the fire dances and whispers, puppets arrive periodically from backstage to redecorate, give dance lessons, or just hang out. “This place” appears to be a world inside her head; as she points out, it’s hard to know if it’s therapeutic or just the rambling landscape of a broken mind.

The designer of this “little world,” Carol Wolfe Clay, and the writer of the play that brings it to life, Ki Gottberg, coincidentally spent time together in Seattle Children’s Hospital a few years ago, each caring for their gravely sick or hurt child. They made this piece in response to “the deep and complicated processes of grief” they endured (both children survived). The protagonist is a woman recovering from a not-quite-specified trauma—which appears to be the loss of a child—and retreating to, well, her little world.

The design is more appealing than the script, which jerks from sappiness to its occasional greatness, letting the zaniness run away with the show when it needs gravity. But the puppets and their expert animators are almost worth it. Sitting through stretches that don’t work (like a chintz-obsessed interior designer throwing doilies everywhere) will get you to a puppet called “Sad Boy,” who can’t be more than 14 inches tall but who has more emotional weight than the rest of the play combined. Actor Jená Cane brings him to moony, perfectly voiced life, stripping away the rest of little world’s dancing slippers and fuzzy blobs and faux-French accents. “How old are you?” our pained protagonist asks him. “A hundred and seven,” he replies, effortlessly radiating the pain and innocence at the heart of the show. “That’s how it is when you’re sad—add 100.” When he asks to be told an adventure story, our protagonist starts to talk at length about her son. Sad Boy delivers a line that’s part admonishment and part observation, and a surprisingly self-aware critique of what we’ve been watching: “This is a story about you, not him.”