J.S. Streible Photo courtesy of the production

Billed as "the world's first Neo-Appalachian, Afrolachian, Southern Pop Revusical," Gloaming, Nowhere certainly boasts an ambitious conceit. Writer and performer Streible plays six characters and renders more than a dozen songs with titles like "Whale in a Bucket," "Seeing Sound," and "Plug Me In."

A gifted musician, moving skillfully between acoustic guitar and piano, Streible has energy to spare. The chief problem, though, is that Streible's characters and combustible delivery rarely bring the audience into the brief stories that straddle both corporeal and spiritual, and mythical and literal worlds. Consequently, after eighty-five minutes (including a fifteen-minute intermission), the overall effect is more enervating than energizing.

The evening begins with a Storyteller explaining that "the Story Well's run dry," but he lands upon a story of a young man, which, "Hell, might even be true." The Man, as he is identified, is an anomaly in this Appalachian community. "Is he black is he white," the Storyteller sings. "He's got Asian eyes/ He talks real funny."

Restless and feeling out-of-place, Man embarks on an odyssey of sorts to find where he belongs. Along the way, he comes across the Queen of Waho, a deeply unsatisfied woman who is determined to start a new life but is unable to extricate herself from the old one, and Methuselah, a 963-year-old man who has seen everything but remains restless and finds salvation only in alcohol and cocaine.

Over the course of several years, the Man continues to search for an indefinable something that will give his life purpose and clarity. Abandoned by his creative muse and then by his lover, whom he refers to as an "Appalachian Gothic Hippie Chick," he sinks lower and lower until he is just a shell of a person. In the end, the grizzled yet rejuvenated Storyteller reveals that this is his own story, and he imparts the message in the bluesy "The Gloaming." He sings, "It's taken my whole life just to figure out/ Gotta drown in the silence before you hear the sound." And later, "Somewhere a rooster crows, a fire is glowin'/ When you're lost within the gloaming."

Structurally, the piece is reminiscent of Passing Strange, Stew's rock musical about a middle-class, African American man's quest to find "the real" and his own place in the world. The Youth, as the searching character is dubbed in that show, travels from, among other places, Los Angeles to Amsterdam to West Berlin and finally back home. In contrast, the Man in Gloaming never ventures very far from Nowhere, and the individuals he encounters are not clearly differentiated.

Streible's show would surely benefit from the contributions of a director and/ or a dramaturg to help mold, illuminate, and strengthen the material and performance. The vignettes, for instance, are not always clear, and the thick Appalachian accents he applies do not register well with New Yorkers' ears (or at least not this New Yorker's ears). In addition, the performer is prone to overdramatic outbursts, and on a mostly empty stage in the intimate Huron Club in the SoHo Playhouse's basement, the result is more distancing than encompassing. The songs, several of which are quite good, would be more effective if bolstered with better staging. Rather than end strong, for example, numbers tend to fade out, leading to awkward transitions.

Perhaps with further refinement, Streible might fully embrace the darkness, the brightness, and the magical possibilities of inherent in the gloaming.