It's All True' is quite confusing

What do you get when you put together Marxism, New York, sexual ambiguity and a few powerful voices? Unfortunately, not much.

It's All True, a play by Jason Sherman, is now running at the Lyric Stage Co. in downtown Boston. The play is based on what happened behind the scenes of The Cradle Will Rock, a play Orson Welles directed in 1937 that lost its federal backing for purporting socialist sentiments. If you noticed too many prepositions in that sentence, you have already picked up on half the problem with the play _ a behind-the-scenes look at a play that itself is a behind-the-scenes look at real life, the script lacked immediate contact with its proposed themes of theatre, political ideology, and lost love in Depression-period America.

Perhaps the premise is too full of possibilities for just one play. Marc Blitzstein, a widowed playwright with a passion to broadcast his support of the union and the wishes of his dying wife, proposes The Cradle Will Rock, a dowdy musical about disillusioned steel mill workers, to director and radio-broadcaster James Orwell. Blitzstein is thrilled and astonished to see Welles' enthusiasm for the play, until he realizes his ulterior motive. Welles' wants to manipulate the play in order to make it convey his socialisit messages. To this end, he convinces anyone who opposes his direction _ using his eloquent and booming radio voice _ that his ideologies are in line with theirs.

Surrounding this dynamic are the actors Orwell stomps on, the wife he ignores in favor of younger women and work and the strange ghosts of dead loved ones that haunt both his and Blitzstein's consciences. There is also an ambiguous sexual attraction present throughout the play between Orwell and Blitzstein, which keeps renewing itself and disappearing without ever seeming to justify its significance to the ultimate resolution or point of the play.

The acting is the saving grace of the show. Geoffrey P. Burns, whose voice as Orson Welles bellows with the conviction of an avalanche, is especially convincing. Julie Jirousek, who interestingly plays Blitzstein's memories of his late wife as well as a character in his play, is as charming as a Russian intellectual rebel-rouser as she is a sweet, self-conscious housewife-turned-actress.

Her affair with fellow actor Howard Da Silva (Neil Casey) leaks too much love into the play and must be destroyed _ by the ever-divisive Welles _ in order to maintain the purely political aura of the production. The scheme leads to some poignant quips, such as "no time for love when you're saving the world!" But even this romantic storyline falls flat on its face, for there is no reconciliation for her lost love, either on her part or on the part of the other characters.

The side plots of this play seem to wander off the main path in too many directions. Perhaps Sherman is showing us what the union attitude was about _ the development of the individual character made inconsequential for the sake of societal evolution.

I am no enemy of socialism, but I do expect that a play elucidates a problem with the intent to resolve it later on. When The Cradle Will Rock defies the "fascist" government and goes up with a flourish, as indeed it did in 1937, the audience is left with a feeling of triumph that is neither founded nor touching.

Sherman invites his audience on a spectator's jog through the evolution of a play that changed theater's relationship to politics, but it only left me with a shot of adrenaline. Either he led me off the path, or I just wasn't fit to keep up.