There's a punch of visual and emotional energy in the University of Hawai'i Lab production of "In the Heart of America," but Naomi Wallace's highly personal study of love in the midst of war stirs up a crowded stew without ladling out a satisfying meal.

You might call it "Five Characters in Search of a Focus." The five characters are passionately etched but swim in a multidimensional milieu that is neither linear nor fully realistic.

The playwright's mantra is that war is filled with four kinds of people — those who die, those who kill, those who watch and those who love. All are equally represented by the script's five characters, although the dramatic scales tip toward Craver and Remzi — a pair of American soldiers who become lovers in the Iraqi desert.

Because this pair carries the weight of the drama, but gets only a quarter of the playwright's attention, the audience must decide the focal point for itself. We piece together our own action line and would welcome clarity rather than ambiguity from the playwright.

Director Peter Ruocco gets strong performances from his cast and avoids inserting signposts into the script. And while each actor represents a category, we feel the flesh and blood beneath their labels.

Curiously, the soldiers are the ones who love. Christopher Cappelletti is tough and curt as the wiry Craver, self-proclaimed Kentucky white river trash. Andrew Valentine is softer — yet more insistent — as Remzi, a Palestinian-American who enlisted for the Gulf War. They are an unlikely pair who talk of ordnance as a substitute for foreplay and practice how they will walk the final 30 yards to each other's dead body. It seems neither has shed blood.

Alan Shepard represents those who kill in a blended role that sometimes is Boxler — a universal soldier and drill sergeant to the other men — and that sometimes represents Lt. William Calley, the central figure in the 1968 My Lai massacre. The blended character is unsettling, violent and crazed.

Polly Zi Hong Nakamura, as a Vietnamese woman, a Calley victim and his self-appointed nemesis, represents those who die. The role of those who watch defaults to Libette Garcia as Remzi's sister, an angry searcher crippled by a malformed foot.

Justin DeLand's stage design results in a startling transformation of the Earle Ernst Lab Theatre's black box, configuring it as a thrust stage surrounded on three sides with seats near the action.

The floor is covered with the front pages of newspapers, each with a prominent war headline. The papers move up a fourth wall, punctured by bomb-blasted openings. In the center of the playing area is a small well. A blurred American flag hangs over all.

In one short scene, the well is used to conceal and reveal integral objects, but otherwise the vivid background is not integral to the action.

"In the Heart of America" juxtaposes the anguish of Vietnam with the confusion of Iraq and mixes characters, living and dead, in a netherworld of probing without answers. It's political, yet personal — freewheeling, yet intensely specific — and always trying very hard to say something.

War, of course, is hell. And hell is where Boxler says he wants to go, if he isn't already there. Perhaps that's enough for this play to say.