THE PUBLISHED EDITION OF Y York’s new play, It Comes Around, has an interesting disclaimer: “This is a Play.” It’s easy to see why York included such a statement—to caution an audience against too closely identifying the play with the author’s life. The sole character in this intense piece is also a playwright, one who has written a children’s play called Froggy and His Friend Forever (York’s most recent piece for Seattle Children’s Theater was Frog and Toad [Forever]). Also like York, the unnamed protagonist has found that despite her preference for writing plays with serious political content, it’s the scripts for tots that pay her bills.

It Comes Around

A Theater Under the Influence

ends April 24

Fortunately, York has not landed in the sort of trouble her fictional persona, played by Lori Larsen, has. The fictional playwright is in prison for a crime that is slowly revealed to us as she narrates her story to her literary agent into a tape recorder. Her extensive confession is an attempt to elucidate, both to her agent and herself, the various motives that led her to her violent act, and it’s a complex and tortuous path she’s traveled: fashion model in her youth; career as a political playwright; and a troubled relationship with the love of her life, whom she can only refer to (for reasons not entirely clear) as “Mister One.”

Whether as a model, a political activist, an artist, or simply as a human being, Larsen’s character is intensely aware of the powerlessness of her life—a situation made worse by her constant need to act in a way that attracts men. “I’ve always been in it for the men, whatever it was,” she admits. “Even when I took up playwrighting, it was for men.” First as a model and “professional date,” then later as a writer, when she found herself working to attract the political writer who was “immune to my glow,” she has never been able to separate her heart from the goals of her life—a failing that is in some way responsible for the crime of passion that has destroyed her.

But while her disclaimer may remind us to not take any of the autobiographical parallels seriously, York’s assertion that “this is a play” is problematic in another sense. There’s something so rigorously stripped down about It Comes Around, something so resolutely definite about a drama that doesn’t even want to name its protagonist or give us an action in the present tense, that in some ways this is less theater than a meticulous experiment in the careful dissection of an individual’s conscience.

At times this is heavy going. York’s steady stream of language can be so dense and unrelenting, so demanding of the full intellectual attention of the audience, that you almost long for a Froggy and His Friend Forever sort of moment of carefree entertainment just to catch your mental breath. It also has an undeniable effect on the performer. Larsen, who is normally a regular lawn sprinkler of emotional energy, is curiously muted here, either because of Mark Lutwak’s direction or the demanding script. This is not a detriment, exactly, though it does take getting used to, and you can’t help thinking that the result would be more interesting if Larsen were allowed to cut loose a bit.

This is also a play that’s as much about theater as it is about politics, and while it’s refreshing to see such sacred cows as political theater (where companies can spend more time making puppets than examining their own beliefs) get some good jabs, there’s an undeniable sense of in-crowd jesting that may be off-putting to uninitiated audiences. (Still, who doesn’t enjoy a good bitch session, regardless of the circumstance?)

When the details of the crime, which involve the just deserts merited on a certain Oil Company CEO, are finally revealed, audience reactions range from gasps to chuckles and even a smattering of applause. Like the playwright, we all can appreciate the cathartic thrill of impetuously meting out justice on the wicked, abandoning the hopeful but helpless dialogue of the good liberal and baring our teeth. But York leaves us with a final image not of triumphant power but of powerlessness; this political prisoner will enjoy no midnight vigils. This is perhaps the writer’s greatest accomplishment: She presents us with a scenario that grows more troubling and contradictory the longer we puzzle it over.