How good to find a recent play about 12 distinctive people rather than the thin gruel of one- and two-character plays the theater has been feeding us for years. So it's frustrating to report that Shipping Dock Theatre's production of Lillian Groag's impassioned, full-bodied play, "The Magic Fire," doesn't work. Marcy L. Gamzon is a skillful director, but even at its best, the cast rarely picks up the rhythm of the language or the pace of a scene. More often than not, this complex, well-written play about the treachery of living in the past falls flat.

The play is memory. Lise Berg, now grown, tells us the story of her family's flight to Argentina and then, after the death of Eva Peron in 1952, their need to flee again to escape Juan Peron's repression. They are intelligent, cultured people who live for music and ideas, but they believe they can create a sanctuary rooted in their self-delusional memories of life in Europe. They fool themselves into thinking that as long as Wagner and Puccini soar on the phonograph, they will be safe.

The family defines itself in terms of its passion for music. On one side, the Bergs are assimilated Viennese Jews who have intermarried easily. On the other, they are Italian, and Lise's father Otto'ssecular father-in-law, Gianni Guarneri, still makes the sign of the cross in difficult moments. He and Otto have spent years lovingly blustering over the merits of composers and singers. Only Guarneri's 98-year-old mother has the common sense to detest everything fascistic.

When the brother of the Bergs' housekeeper seeks temporary haven in their kitchen, and when their friend, an outspoken journalist, disappears, the problems become unavoidable. Yet the family continues its evasion until Otto finally arranges for passports from a Peronista friend. As Lise says early in the play, immigrants live on shifting sands.

For Lise, the struggle to remember and understand is filtered through the memory of a child. Groag plays with time and space as Lise enters scenes to question what happened and why. Knowledge is risky and self-knowledge even riskier. But she persists, for good or ill, and Groag draws her characters both sympathetically and honestly.

After a first act to introduce characters and draw lines of conflict, three generations along with assorted cousins and aunts gather at dinner for Lise's birthday. The wonderfully noisy scene weaves both sustained affection and long-held resentments with the family's passion for music and the inescapable intrusions of politics. As the scene accelerates, some of the acting intensifies but most of it continues to plod as if without direction. Too much sloppy line-dropping and bumping into furniture kept shattering the mood. I can only hope that sort of thing was a one-performance anomaly.

That said, Fred Nuernberg gave a nuanced performance worthy of Otto Berg's complexity, and Ginni Pierce made Otto's visiting aunt someone who understood her world - and preferred it. Morry Fazzi's Guarneri was emotionally alive and Trish Ralph, though no master of Italian dialect, portrayed Guarneri's mother (and Lise's great grandmother) with force and humor. The rest of the cast demonstrated little sense of character at all.

Despite the problems with the production, this is a play worth seeing because it speaks to issues clarified in times of war. It is not about soldiers in combat, nations occupied, or families left behind, but it does show us the terrible results when people confronted by governments that seem to know no limits refuse to speak out or act.

The Magic Fire

Shipping Dock Theatre

31 Prince St, 232-2250, shippingdocktheatre.org

Through December 23