‘The Wholehearted’: Making Old Wounds Feel Angry and New

NEW YORK — On camera, talking about the time her husband tried to kill her, first with a hibachi knife and then with a Glock, Dee Crosby is the picture of professional composure. A boxing champ, she knows her way around an interview.

“So what did you do to fight back?” the reporter asks, and this is the question that finally flusters Dee. “I know you didn’t go down without a fight.”

“I didn’t go down,” Dee says. “I’m here.”

“The Wholehearted,” a multimedia, almost-solo play by Stein/Holum Projects, unfolds in the grubby backroom of a gym where Dee is hiding for the night. Charlie, her husband and trainer, is getting out of prison and heading home. With a gun of her own, Dee is preparing to seek revenge. Then, if all goes well, she’ll drive cross-country to California and restart the life she left behind more than 20 years earlier.

Written by Deborah Stein, performed by Suli Holum and directed by both of them, “The Wholehearted” is a fast-jabbing fantasy where sweaty physicality rubs up against shape-shifting surreality, with a little country music thrown in. (The composers are James Sugg and Heather Christian.) In the playhouse at Abrons Arts Center, the audience sits onstage, surrounding Amy Rubin’s set on all four sides, like spectators at a boxing match — close enough to spy, on Dee’s body, the scars Charlie left there.

Dee smashes away at the punching bag in the corner, or fights the air as she relives a match in her head, and we see video (designed by Katherine Freer and Dave Tennent) on big overhead screens: some footage prerecorded, some shot live (by Stivo Arnoczy) and some brilliantly intercutting the two, blending past glory with present determination.

Other times, Dee records herself on video, speaking to Carmen, her long-lost sweetheart — the girl she jilted for Charlie all those years ago. Holum also plays Carmen, and when we meet Charlie, Holum slicks back her hair and becomes him, too.

She gives a clear and lithe performance, and the production design is excellent. But the show as a whole feels skimpy and incomplete, touching too briefly on too many charged elements and allowing too little space for Holum’s winsome humor to break through. For all the kinetic energy of the staging, the story seems stalled — like Dee with her revenge, on the verge of action but not taking it just yet.

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“The Wholehearted” runs through April 1 at Abrons Arts Center, Manhattan; 866-811-4111, abronsartscenter.org. Running time: 1 hour, 5 minutes.