Most of Eric Nemoto's "Dancing Between Heaven and Hell" feels like the plot has been pushed into so many corners that it will never regain a recognizable shape. Ultimately, he ties up the loose ends, but tracing them back to their origins feels like untangling a 1970s macramé plant hanger.

Nemoto credits this Dark Night production at The Actors' Group to Jeff Katts' concept of "Soul Savior," in which ordinary people are enlisted into the ongoing battle between good and evil. He also shapes it to fit the courtroom set for TAG's current production of Ayn Rand's "Night of January 16th."

So, in the primary plot, the current Soul Savior is a prosecuting attorney who is stabbed to death by her client's deranged husband. (The devil made him do it.) But that courtroom murder is bracketed by similar trials in Heaven and Hell that call angels and devils to task for shortcomings in their perpetual struggle.

Nemoto's plot doesn't really get cranking until Act 2 when, 25 years later, the dead prosecutor's daughter — a dance teacher who is auditioning for "A Chorus Line" on the side — channels the ghost of her dead mother to bring peace to several people involved.

Mixed in are some dance numbers by members of the jury and a couple of gratuitous original songs.

As a result, it's hard to put a label on this show. It's part allegorical gothic fantasy and part music and dance — alternating moments that can only be described as truly artless melodrama with others that are brazenly self-mocking. There's enough humor to support the contention that Nemoto isn't taking the awful parts totally seriously.

Thomas Smith plays the chief villain in leather jacket and eye shadow and gains increasing laughs with lines like, "A rose by any other name would make me vomit."

He's aided by Deanne August as a self-absorbed troublemaker in a dominatrix get-up.

The other side of the equation is delivered by Curtis Duncan as an Irish-accented angel cum leprechaun, who gets his wings clipped for acting all too human.

When a playwright directs his own work, as Nemoto does, he shapes his own vision, but loses perspective and artistic distance.

If this were a musical, the battered wife's song would make more sense by connecting with the rest of the story line. If this were a realistic drama, the dancing daughter wouldn't have to wade through swamps of insipid dialogue. And if this were a play with a cleaner concept, Renee Garcia as the soul-saving attorney wouldn't have to sing, dance, and stalk like a zombie through a netherworld existence.

Ultimately, "Dancing Between Heaven and Hell" is a bit of all those things, placing the audience in a theatrical limbo where they are condemned to sort out the parts in the absence of a clear guiding light.

Joseph T. Rozmiarek has been reviewing Hawai'i theater since 1973.