||: Girls :||: Chance :||: Music :|| ★★★

Sometimes a play announces it’s going to be different just with its title.

Eisa Davis, Pulitzer finalist for Bulrusher, and co-collaborator with Lin-Manuel Miranda on next season’s highly anticipated adaptation of the 1978 movie and 1965 novel The Warriors, has written and composed such a show with ||: Girls :||: Chance :||: Music :||, which is having its world premiere at Vineyard Theatre in a co-production with American Conservatory Theater.

Apropos to its unusual title, ||: Girls :||: Chance :||: Music :|| plays jazzily with narrative structure, veering from group scenes — where music is played or character interactions occur — to monologues, verbal arias where the titular girls express their thoughts and feelings. Fax (Hillary Fisher, the show’s standout), a singer with a perfection complex and high levels of anxiety, gets the first one in a section called “Fax in light” where she tries to stave off panic at the summer music program she’s attending:

FAX

okay okay you’re okay

okay she’s okay

Margot with a T is okay

she’s improvising

Rile is improvising

and you’re not

you’re not

okay that’s okay everything is okay

remember you’re here at the GIRLS Music Program and it’s summertime which is your

favorite and you’re not at school where there are BOYS and

boys just have a different set of rules for how you do things

and you always feel like you’re going to be laughed at there

not here not here

Improvisation is a major component of the production, the chance aspect of the title. Immediately prior to “Fax in light” is a section named “tone row”, where the four young cast members repeatedly sing a tone row — first individually, then as a group.

The script holds specific instructions. Before the show, 12 audience members select a note from G to the F# above, and those selected members then assign numbers from 1 to 12 to their chosen notes. Together, those ordered notes form the tone row later used throughout the performance.

It’s an exciting concept, one that is likely simultaneously nerve-wracking and thrilling for the talented cast, excellent musicians all, but it all happens offstage, and most audience members — including this reviewer — won’t realize the full improvisatory nature of what is occurring, thus diminishing the accomplishments that the cast is achieving live and on the spot.

When all is said and done, ||: Girls :||: Chance :||: Music :|| comes across as a work that is more exciting conceptually than in performance, and unique concepts alone do not a satisfying evening of theatre make. The narrative advances in fragments but never coheres into a dramatically engaging whole, and the four girls mostly seem unchanged from start to end of the remembered summer, with one character in particular feeling notably underdeveloped.

The entire design team executes top-notch work, particularly Nina Ball and her puzzle-pieced set of a school music building, and director Pam MacKinnon brings a polished look and feel to all the proceedings, but one can’t help but suspect that this is one of those experimental shows where the very talented people involved had more fun making it than the audience could ever hope to when seeing the result staged.