Any local theater company that tries to produce plays by local playwrights deserves a great deal of credit.

Carol Zippel at Windfall Theatre has been committed more than most to giving local writers a chance to get their works staged. She should stand tall and proud over this effort.

The latest example of this philosophy is the production of "Identita," which opened Friday night and runs through Oct. 11. The show comes written by Louise Zamparutti, a Ph.D. student in the english department at UW-Milwaukee where she also teaches professional writing.

I hardly know where to begin with this production, which takes an idea that hardly anybody has ever heard of, wraps it in a confusing collection of ever increasingly incredible ideas and casts it with some of serious overacting.

Let me try to boil down the story, just to get this task out of the way.

Josh, 25, lives in America. He travels to a small Italian village where his father was killed in a car accident. There he meets a girl named either Yulia (or Julia) who runs a small cafe and bar. She won’t tell him why she has two names. He also meets his great aunt Vida, who is married to Aldo, and his great uncle Fabio, who is married to Paola.

Roughly in order of appearance, the following things happen.

Josh finds out his dad left him land. He believes he must decide what to do with the land in a day and a half or else the local village government will confiscate it. He thought his dad was a geologist invited to Italy every summer to work as a geologist, but in reality, an American university sent him so he could write poetry. Josh is very surprised. There is a mystery about the car accident, just as there is a mystery about an almost identical accident that killed Josh’s grandfather.

We then find out that Vida and Fabio may have been on different sides as resistance fighters during World War II. She was a Yugoslavian, he was an Italian.   

Here are some of the elements that raise their ugly heads in this story. We have Russian buried ammunition, CIA buried ammunition, Yugoslav secret police, Communists, the "incident" that we hear about once but never again, Nazis, a prison sentence for Josh’s grandfather, important rare guns on Fabio’s wall and flirting between Josh and Yulia/Julia. There's also a cellist who plays mournful tunes during scene breaks, either to set a mood of mystery or misery.

I am now out of breath.

I quickly grew out of patience with this play. Each scene seemed to end on the kind of note where you expect (and I hoped) intermission was coming. But there was no intermission. Just an hour and a half of meaningless drivel. I found myself asking, "What’s the point here?" I did not come up with an answer.

Let me offer a few suggestions, and I do this in the hope they are received in the spirit in which they are intended.

The first thing a playwright needs to do is create characters that we can care about. The characters in this play had no draw. Everyone acted like crazed eight-year olds at recess and these were supposed to be adults.

The second thing a playwright has to do is figure out what the story is. It can’t be a dozen stories, all of equal importance. There needs to be a story. If the story in this one was the interesting fact that a brother and sister fought on opposite sides of the resistance during the war, it was very hard to find that story.

And finally, a good playwright needs a good dramaturg, someone who can say no, someone who can point out the weaknesses.  

In addition, a staging has to have actors who understand what it means to be an actor. It is not just memorizing words and striking poses. At one point or another during this show, every single actor – save the lone American – made the stereotypical Italian gesture where you close your forefinger and thumb into a circle, turn your hand upside down and move it back and forth. I know lots of Italians, and I’ve never seen one of them really do it unless they were telling a joke.

Windfall is a tiny space, and the actors sounded like they were in a 5,000-seat theater. The noise level was excruciating, and – the worst sin of all for an actor – nobody was listening to any of the other actors.

I really wish that this had been a good play with good actors. I want local playwrights to be successful. But this is one playwright who needs to go back to the drawing board and maybe even take her own course.