In the first scene of Tom Stoppard's "The Real Thing," a man is carefully building a house of playing cards on a living room coffee table. A woman enters, slamming the door and collapsing the delicate structure.

It could stand as a metaphor for the inaugural production by the newly formed Hawaii Repertory Theatre, directed by Susan Kee-Young Park at the Princess Kawananakoa Auditorium in lower Nu'uanu, where careful crafting doesn't hold up.

In the play's final scene, a character who has not previously appeared is smacked in the face with a bowl of cream dip. In between those two visual bookends, the production flounders in a series of unfortunate choices.

On the grounds of Kawananakoa Middle School, the theater is hard to find, and the school's approach on Funchal Street deceptively doubles as a Pali Highway on-ramp. The cavernous auditorium lacks air conditioning and good acoustics, resulting in an opening night during Kona weather that sounded like an airplane hangar and felt like a steam bath. The best seats are crowded down front on armless, straight-backed chairs.

Discomfort is joined by frustration when the British accents adopted by the cast — clipped, burred and buzzed — sound like speech delivered in some undecipherable code.

Stoppard is best known in the U.S. for his early theater work, "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead" and his screenplay for "Shakespeare in Love." And "The Real Thing" won the 1984 Tony Award for Best Play. But its arcane story line makes the plot difficult to follow.

It is never precisely clear that the first scene is a play-within-a-play written by the central character (Walter S. Eccles II as Henry) and featuring his actress wife (Eden-Lee Murray as Charlotte.) As the action continues in the second scene, we meet the actor from the first scene (Rob Duval as Max) and his real-life wife (Kristine Altwies-Nicholson as Annie.)

Then Annie leaves Max and Henry puts aside Charlotte to take Annie as his second wife in a soap-opera double reverse that would take months to unravel on television but which occurs in "The Real Thing" while nobody seems to notice. Later, Annie persuades Henry to rewrite another play written by a political prisoner whom she has befriended.

Anyone who can keep up with Stoppard's intricately wordy manipulations under the auditorium's adverse conditions deserves to earn back the price of admission. Somehow, the dialogue underscores the futility of communicating with words and reveals the deception that divides feeling from reality. What is "the real thing" and does anyone ever find it?

The production is not compelling enough to make us care.

On the plus side, Brian Lee Sackett has designed two full wagon sets that impressively pivot across the large stage to change scenes. And Altwies-Nicholson shares a short scene with a fellow actor (Paul Mitri as Billy) that is neatly focused and brings momentary clarity to the muddle that comprises the rest of the evening.