Terri Weagant. Credit: Don Daly/Urbanite

About four-fifths of the way into Elizabeth Heffron’s Bo-Nita, the wisecracks stop and the play suddenly gets serious. For the first time we’re allowed to see 13-year-old Bo-Nita not as a madcap comedienne in a downscale funhouse but as a vulnerable, needy human being trying painfully to find some peace in a brutal world. Now Bo-Nita’s not searching out the comedy in attempted rape, successful murder, a broken home, an irresponsible mother. Now she’s not regaling us with just what sort of pulp the battered face of her abusive ex-stepfather has been beaten into. Now she’s lonely and emotionally fragile. There’s nothing funny about it, nor should there be.

I would contend that these few moments of serious drama are the best things in Bo-Nita, and that their absence from the rest of the play is what keeps it from fully succeeding. Yes, the production at Sarasota’s Urbanite Theatre is topnotch, with the remarkable Terri Weagant playing a half-dozen parts with great virtuosity. And yes, the laughs are real as she conducts us through a grotesque world of umpteen-time losers and their absurd shenanigans. But even as I laughed, I was becoming angry at a play that acknowledged the looniness of its characters without admitting their despair, their pathos, their abandonment to the wrong values. Only when that poignant section finally arrived did the play seem to have any purchase on the truth. If the whole piece had been written that way, it would have been wonderful.

To begin at the beginning: Weagant, dressed by Summer Dawn Wallace in torn jeans and a ratty sweatshirt (and looking confusingly older than 13), walks out onto Jeffrey Weber’s excellent set — a brick wall, some damaged street signs, a traffic light, a bench — and tells us, in the guise of Bo-Nita, about the time her ex-stepfather had a heart attack just as he was about to batter her for resisting rape. Suddenly she’s Gerard, the would-be rapist, clutching his chest and calling out for some nitro, which Bo-Nita happily refuses him. Then Weagant is Mona, Bo-Nita’s waitress mom, coming home with her 47^th lover, Leon — also played by Weagant — and finding dead, mutilated Gerard (Bo-Nita went to town on him once he was immobilized) on her floor, and what to do? She comes up with a plan: she’ll dress dead Gerard up in drag, and leave him in his car some miles away, where it’ll look to police like he was the victim of a gay-bashing. But first Bo-Nita and Leon have to get him undressed and into fishnet stockings…

Weagant plays six characters in all, including the title role. Credit: Don Daly/Urbanite

One thing leads to another, certain cosmetic fixes are accomplished with Gorilla Glue, Leon explodes when he’s called “Leroy,” everyone ends up at a planetarium, and all this is punctuated by flashbacks involving Bo-Nita and her tough Grandma Tiny (anyone remember Mammy Yokum?). What’s offered throughout is the extreme, the ludicrous, the unspeakable. At times it’s very funny. But at a price: at the expense of our sympathy for the doomed. Because these benighted, wrongheaded goofballs are their own worst enemies, and if character is destiny, these wretches have long been toast. Except, maybe, for Bo-Nita. Who has that tender moment.

Weagant is a talented chameleon. As Bo-Nita, she’s kinetic, assertive, indomitable, while as Mona, she’s a veteran of so many romantic wars, she’s come to expect a good shelling every other day. As Gerard, Weagant is crude and vindictive, and as Leon, she’s almost “normal,” but comically shocked to find herself in a tale of violence rather than sex. Weagant’s also first-rate as Grandma Tiny and a certain Colonel T., and best of all are those moments when three or four characters are all going at each other but we’re easily able to keep them straight because of this actress’s precise performance. Director Kirstin Franklin does a tiptop job of holding our attention for the 90 uninterrupted minutes of the play; one of her key allies is Ryan Finzelber, whose versatile lighting tells us where to focus. Once again, the Urbanite team insists on excellence in every particular.

But is the script excellent? Heffron’s writing is certainly superior — there’s not a cliché anywhere in the vicinity — but a play is more than its English, it’s also an interpretation of life, and I think this interpretation falls short. The main characters of Bo-Nita are human car wrecks heading heedlessly for the next collision and the next. If this is comedy, so is the smashup on the highway you passed the other day, the one with the ambulance and the stretchers. Which is to say, such a story isn’t comedy at all. That it’s mostly treated as such is too deep a flaw to be forgiven.

Bo-Nita

Urbanite Theatre, 1487 Second St., Sarasota, Thru April 30. 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sunday. Tickets $28, under 40 with I.D., $20; students with I.D. $5. 941-321-1397, urbanitetheatre.com.

Rating: Three stars