The cast of The Diviners just has too little to work with.

Playwright Jim Leonard gave the actors clunky lines, cardboard characters and vague relationships. Director Kate Ufema denies them set, props and — evidently — rehearsal.

As a result, the show, which opened Thursday at UMD’s Marshall Performing Art Center, is one of the program’s most disappointing efforts in the past 10 years.

The Diviners is the story of mentally handicapped Buddy (David Horn), whose extreme phobia of water, born of his mother’s drowning years before, does not affect his uncanny ability to divine the stuff or predict rain, precious talents in rural Indiana in the 1930s.

When the wandering C.C. Showers (Brian Kess), a disenchanted preacher, arrives and is hired by Buddy’s father, Ferris (Nick Violante), a mechanic, the newcomer quickly develops a bond with the boy that allows him to gradually coax him into bathing to relieve Buddy’s torment from ringworm.

The sun-baked Indiana farmland of the story is represented by a sweeping, dramatically raked stage that only a mathematician could accurately describe, designed by Curtis Phillips and lusciously lighted by Alex Rugowski. A custom music and sound-effects track was created by UMD alum Jacob M. Davis, whose credits include Cirque du Soleil productions and work for the Mark Taper Forum and Pasadena Playhouse in Southern California.

Against such spectacular production assets, Ufema’s choice to have much of her actors’ business performed as pantomime is jarringly discordant. Farmers swing sledgehammers at invisible stakes, hoe invisible soil and dig wells to strike invisible water. Showers and Buddy return an invisible baby bird to an invisible nest in an invisible tree. In a climactic scene, when Showers and Buddy are pulled from a river, Buddy’s glorious crown of curls is as dry and fluffy as when he made his first entrance on a scorching summer day.

But Ufema’s bold choices would have had a better chance of working were it not for the deep flaws in Leonard’s writing, such as having characters address lines to others without having established relationships to give the statements reason to be made. He also repeatedly muffs attempts to establish mood through dialogue, such as when two different characters prate about the community’s eagerness for a preacher that is reflected nowhere else in the script. Or the monologue early on about how the sky darkened, Good Friday-like, the day Buddy died, after which we’re shown the terribly mundane way this sad but all-too-ordinary young man dies.

Each cast member occasionally transcends these fetters to convey credible feeling, but only Kess is able to overcome the handicaps to consistently present a fully developed character.

More rehearsal work might have allowed the actors to develop the relationships and otherwise compensate for the script’s shortcomings, and also would likely have reduced the number of technical miscues in Thursday’s performance, including stray spotlights and the houselights coming up twice during Act II. It also would have improved the chances of setting volume levels so the music didn’t swamp the dialogue at several points in the show.

It’s a Wonderful Life opened last night in what is perhaps the most technically challenging Playhouse production to date and a unique stage version of Frank Capra’s classic film.

Dramatized by James W. Rodgers, this is a condensed and fast-paced adaptation of the beloved film. Fans will notice George’s father never appears and Ernie the town taxicab driver is now a mailman. So do not be surprised when some of your favorite moments and lines are foregone, but rest assured the heart of the tale remains intact.

Drew Autio plays the heroic Everyman, George Bailey, his infectious boyish grin worn away as events drive him to the depths of despair and almost beyond. As Clara, the angel second class in search of her wings, Chani Ninneman works her magic from afar, situated high above the audience on the set’s massive and impressive bridge for almost the entire show.

Throughout the play, scenic designer Curtis Phillips projects images and film clips against the back wall of the theater. When you consider that more often than not the stage is bare except for the performers, those images quickly and effectively establish each sense of place.

The underscore by composer Ryan Rapsys (available on CD online) is quite beautiful, but needs to be turned down a notch or two to keep from overwhelming the actors so often. I especially liked the pieces “Meeting Mary�? and “Skyscrapers�? from Scene 4.

As Mary, Jen Bergum does a wonderful job of giving a fresh reading to the familiar lines I know by heart. The most memorable performance is turned in by Marcus Trudeau as Old Man Potter, who looks and sounds like a smarmy Donald Rumsfeld who almost seduces George to the dark side.

Chelsey Benson also shines as the blond troublemaker Violet Peterson and Tom House does a nice 180 as the irate Mr. Welch suddenly turned into one of the scene-stealer drunken revelers.

One hallmark of a show directed by Cal Metts is the attention to detail. Check out the calves of the ladies on stage and catch how little Cora Godfrey dissolves on stage during George’s tirade in front of his family. Another constant is the uniformly fine work Metts gets from his cast in the show’s several crowd scenes.

The relatively short length of the show dictated the decision to omit the intermission. However, this compels the cast to pick up the pacing a tad too much, which particularly puts Autio’s characterization of George at a disadvantage. The technological elements of this show are great, but ultimately what captivates us is its heart and humanity.

Because of the attention that must be paid to the images and music bridging the scenes, the opening-night audience was loathe to applaud for most of the show. But the standing ovation at the end made it clear that those who attended had a wonderful night.

You’ll love Charlotte. And you’ll want to love her sister, Brenda, but she won’t let you, desperately as she wants you to. Their story is Hummingbirds, by UMD alum Jeannine Coulombe, which opened Thursday in the Dudley Experimental Theatre at UMD.

Directed by another UMD alum, Kelly Grussendorf, Hummingbirds grabs you right from the start with the two sisters frolicking in the snow and carries you through some overwritten scenes on the sheer strength of staging and performance.

Kinsey Diment is the younger but stronger sister, Charlotte, whose character drives the play’s action, virtually all of which takes place in her own mind. Diment’s vivacity energizes the entire play, whether as a youngster literally trembling with excitement at a first snowfall or a grown-up art historian explaining her fascination with the works of Vincent Van Gogh.

As older sister Brenda, Ashley Kuske accomplishes the seeming paradox of portraying mental illness with enormous restraint while at the same time boldly exposing the character’s frailties. Though Coulombe never specifies, Brenda’s behavior smacks strongly of bipolar disorder.

Joe Heaney and Kendra McMillan transcend their closeness in actual age to Diment and Kuske to be convincing as the sisters’ parents.

The burden Brenda’s illness places on Charlotte is represented by Coulombe as hummingbirds who, unable to fly any great distance, hitch rides on the backs of eagles.

Coulombe does a generally good job of showing how the increasing weight of Brenda’s illness—lost jobs, lavish spending sprees, days at a time in bed, then days of clearly implied revelry—slowly crushes the sisters’ relationship. But several scenes drag with repetition of ideas and even lines, as though the playwright doesn’t trust her audience to get them on the first pass. Only the conviction with which the two actresses play them averts a complete collapse of the action.

Flashbacks and time-shifting onstage can be tricky, but Grussendorf and lighting designer Noah Craft never leave the audience in doubt as to where the play is in time. And scenic designer Alex Rugowski’s set, with its raised central platform, provides Diment a podium that she takes to signal reflection.

Coulombe has written 10 full-length plays, one of which, “The Vacant Lot,�? was staged at UMD some years back. It, like “Hummingbirds,�? took a theme of recollection—in that case a young woman dying of AIDS, whose reflections were dominated by the character of her twin brother, who had died at birth.