The Unicorn’s Lasso of Truth is a bit more teach-y than taut

The Unicorn Theatre’s latest production — a rolling world premiere of Lasso of Truth, by Carson Kreitzer — performs a feat worthy of Wonder Woman. Structurally, the play doesn’t quite work. But in theme and execution, it’s a home run.

The bulk of the action takes place in the late-1930s home of William Moulton Marston, an academic psychologist who has invented a device that he hopes will become the first lie-detector test. The play is less about Marston’s ambition, however, than about his attitude. Marston happily plays second fiddle to his more successful wife, Hannah, curling up in her lap at the end of each day — and curling up in her ropes in the bedroom, where the two play out sub-dom fantasies. “To love a strong woman,” Marston says, “is to acquaint yourself with the delicious chaos of uncertainty.”

Chaos compounds when his young research assistant, Lily, joins him and his wife in a polyamorous (but egalitarian) relationship. Inspired by their relationship, Marston finds a new outlet for his thirst for truth: Wonder Woman, a character he imagines will usher in a utopia for Amazons and the men who love (to be tied up by) them.

Martin Buchanan is exceptional as Marston, a creative man alternately enlightened and emasculated by his appetites. In Buchanan’s care, Marston doesn’t come across as a pervert; rather, his predilections become a rallying cry for the virtue of male helplessness. “There’s only so much a man can take before he needs to be hogtied!” he bellows. To that, the opening-night audience cheered.

Carla Noack is equally strong as Hannah, cultivating real chemistry with each of her co-stars. And Vanessa Severo charms as a bewitching and surprisingly demure Lily, refining her usual feline attack into a period-appropriate purr.

Playwright Kreitzer’s scenes are telegraph short, with each moment so surprising and funny that we don’t mind being whipped back and forth by the swings of Wonder Woman’s lasso. Even so, we spend too much time away from the Marston plot, watching instead the play’s alternate storyline: a budding romance between two comic lovers in the 1990s. It feels stolid in comparison, though the performances in that part of the play are also strong. Laura Jacobs brings the right edge to her 1990s feminist, a Wonder Woman fan identified in the program simply as “Girl.” And Jamie Dufault gives sympathetic voice to his comic-shop owner, who isn’t quite on Marston’s side. (“Man-ipulation,” he grumbles.)

Director Johnny Wolfe turns to the design team — and a diverse palette of multimedia elements — to unite the two halves. Scenic designer Ryan Zirngibl has transformed the stage’s thrust into a comic-book panel, its edges alternating between rounded speech-bubble humps and Wonder Woman’s angular insignia. A triptych of angled backdrops looks, at first blush, like a set of simple projection screens, TV static crawling up their faces. But the projections mask hidden panels, which actors pull out like drawers or flip down on hinges, transforming the set into dynamic new arrangements.

Graphic artist Jacob Stoltz provides handsome pop-art renderings of the characters for the show’s many projections. And costume designer Zoë Still seems to relish the task of clothing a multiperiod show: From wing-tip oxfords and floor-length silk robes to moto jackets and grunge-gray jeans, each character has a statement piece to anchor his or her era’s style.

Some filmed sequences depicting Gloria Steinem and her assistant (played by Noack and Severo) are less successful, the colors skewed (perhaps through post-process filtering) and at times out of sync with the audio. But even that part of this show’s media mishmash seems appropriate for the script’s competing critical concerns. Kreitzer crams enough controversy into this show to fill a women’s-studies reading list: polyamory, second-wave feminism, the currency of sexual power and how it changes when you’re holding the ropes. For the most part, the center holds.

But the 1990s scenes feel unnecessarily defensive, a way for the playwright to address an imaginary opponent. When the lifelong Wonder Woman fan bizarrely decries its creator as a “bondage perv,” we hear Kreitzer imply that feminists can go too far. No one had asked her to concede that point. And the Girl’s hints at a tragic childhood story feel like a MacGuffin, explaining little when the story finally arrives.

Still, the references to academic feminists provide useful connective tissue for Kreitzer’s message, particularly Susan Faludi’s analogy of the tilted screw: the idea that every advancement in equality has an accompanying backlash, a screw circling back on itself even as it bores on. Kreitzer makes her point: The decade of Wonder Woman and Rosie the Riveter was followed by 1950s housewives and Leave It to Beaver, and the era of free love came due with a final trouncing of the ERA.

Lasso of Truth still has some syncopation issues to work out. But the Unicorn’s handsome and well-acted production highlights deeper truths that don’t need a lasso — or a lie-detector machine — to bare.