Sila

Chantal Bilodeau's spiritually-rooted, ecologically-minded play "Sila" seems meant to reflect, and reflect upon, both from the Inuit word for "breath" (or "spirit") and the related name of the deity Silla, the god of weather and of the sky.

The title is fitting: While human beings scurry, bustle, collide, and even (on occasion) connect, nature (or maybe that should be Nature) transcends, persists, and endures. The skies serve as repositories for timeless things, as well as traditional tales relating to the constellations. Nature is given voice by a mother polar bear and her cub, a pair of puppets manipulated by the cast; their wanderings across the disintegrating ice underscore and parallel the dramas taking place among the humans of the piece.

Those humans are a fractious lot, embroiled in cultural, political, and familial dramas. Leanna is an activist whose painstaking research and plea for cultural protection from the reckless conduct of greenhouse gas producing nations is on the verge of being dismissed out of hand because it is, as Al Gore famously termed it, "An Inconvenient Truth." But other truths plague Leanna, even as she's fighting the good fight and allowing it to consume her: At home, daughter Veronica (Sophorl Ngin) and her son need Leanna's help and support, but Leanna is too busy jetting around (ironically leaving a huge carbon footprint) in the cause of making allies to spend much time at home. Veronica's husband, Kuvageegai (Jaime Carrillo), is a native Inuit attuned to the weather, but Jean, the scientist who has hired him (Nael Nacer), has little inclination to take his traditional skills to heart, worried only about numbers and other hard data. Meantime, a pair of coast guard officers, Thomas (Robert Murphy) and Raphael (Danny Bryck) witness first-hand both the needs of human commerce and nature's fury; they're caught up in the eye of the man-made climate-change storm.

Both Man and Bear have their prerogatives, their stories, and their tragic losses. The play seeks to find a place of poise to occupy between them, but if there is such a spot it's hard to find; "Sila" suffers from a tendency to anthropomorphize, as well as a structure that runs toward vignettes that only loosely fit together. Director Megan Sandberg-Zakian isn't able to smooth out differences in the actors' styles, with the result that some characters come across as outsized, shrill, or cardboard while others take on deeper, more nuanced layers -- a disconnect that emphasizes a similar inconsistency of tone between the human and natural narrative strands. The story is clear enough, but there's a lack of essential tension that should be there to keep this beautifully designed play taut and on track.

And the design is beautiful, the more so for its simplicity: Scenic designer Szu-Feng Chen uses layers of white fabric, stretching from ceiling to floor, to suggest vast white polar distances, along with sheer material that add texture to the play's projections (we get Northern lights and some fabulously conceptualized mythology-driven imagery). The physical puppets, designed by David Fichter and built by Brad Shur, Matthew Woellert, and Penny Benson, are only part of the play's fantastical, elegant design; shadow puppets are also deployed, in decided contrast to the minimal, but concrete, set elements that define locales such as Veronica's apartment, the Coast Guard station, and a local bar.

Bilodeau draws not only parallels, but direct connections to the loss of balance and nature, and losses that affected and afflict human life. There are no complicated explanations given, no numerical tables or graphs; instead, we get a musical keening of wind from sound designer Emily Auciello and some pure poetry of both the design and spoken varieties. All of this makes the play accessible in an emotional sense, but risks the point -- and given the urgency of the crisis, the point ought not to be blunted. Climate change is real. We are responsible. The fact is that we will suffer the consequences, but so will the rest of the world's continuum of living creatures: We sin against others as much, or more, as against ourselves. That sentiment is here in "Sila," but in whispers and fragments, a radical message about deeply frightening things that's delivered in gauzy wisps and fragments. Maybe that's how it has to be, otherwise we'd be too scared; the truth is, there are monsters in this story, but the monsters are not polar bears or ancient gods and demons. The monsters are us, and we flinch from seeing it.

"Sila" continues through May 25 at the Central Square Theater, 450 Massachusetts Avenue, in Central Square, Cambridge. For more information and tickets, please visit CentralTheater.org