Sometimes watching a play about torture in a war-torn country can be torturous in and of itself. And while we would not say that about A.C.T.'s latest offering, Scorched, we will say that parts of it — especially the first act — feel, at worst, like school, and at best, like the genre of movies that Syriana and Waltz With Bashir belong to, and which have education about war time as one of their primary objectives. The play, starring acclaimed actor David Strathairn, written by Wajdi Mouawad and directed by Carey Perloff, is a compelling puzzle about the impact of the Lebanese Civil War on one family, told without any direct reference to Lebanon or political discussion about the war itself, and in that respect it's a thing to admire.

This is serious theater, and from the ominous soundtrack and jagged, bleak, stucco set, one understands this quickly. The story evolves out of the reading of a will, with a quirky notary named Lebel (played by Strathairn with great, clipped nerdiness) revealing to two twins the post-mortem wishes of their mother. We learn that the mother, who we only get to see in her elder form in the second act in flashback and imagined vision, went silent for the last five years of her life for reasons the children never understood. We learn that she was a cold and inscrutable person whom the children knew little about. And we hear that she wants to be buried naked, with no coffin, face down into the earth, and that she said things like "childhood is a knife stuck in your throat."

It turns out the mother, Nawal, was once a young girl in love who got pregnant at age 14 and was forced to give up her baby. We learn that she later become a rebel fighter of sorts, imprisoned, tortured, and raped. Eventually we learn the reason why she went silent, and it is truly devastating. It is a story about the fog of war, the incessant, meaningless brutality of tit-for-tat combat and terrorism, and about love, especially a mother's love, and what happens to children who never — or only barely — have it.

We found ourselves only slightly intrigued by the end of the first act, due largely to the pacing and how abstracted the story is during the initial unfolding. But the second act is far more riveting, and dramatic, and ultimately delivers a punch that we wish we could say we felt, viscerally, in the gut. But it didn't quite get us there.

The performances here are fairly strong, especially by Strathairn in a modest role; Nick Gabriel as Nihad, a joyously crazed sniper turned torturer; ACT company member Omoze Idehenre; and by Babak Tafti as the angry, confused boxer son Simon, twin brother to Janine (played ably if a bit stiffly by Annie Purcell). But the script, a translation from the Quebecois by Linda Gabriau (the playwright is Lebanese-Canadian and writes in French, and part of the play takes place in contemporary Canada, though that is never explained in the text) tends toward melodrama at moments, and lacks any unique lyricism, though the story and characters are compelling. As the older Nawal, Jacqueline Antaramian comes off the most monotonously, which is unfortunate given that she has the job of delivering what ought to be the gut punches contained in several long monologues in Act 2. The direction, overall, feels rote and uninspired, with a number of speeches that get delivered standing in place, and very little motion that livens the stage save for one set piece involving a sprinkler at the end of Act 1 that we won't reveal here. It also feels like the actors were not pushed to imbue this text with anything more than what was on the page, letting the drama of the words speak for themselves. But we could have just read the play for that.

Promotional materials for Scorched call it an "internationally acclaimed thriller," and a film version of the play (under the French title Incindies) was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language film in 2010. But we'd hardly call it a thriller. It's a devastating and tragic tale, competently written, with a horrifying twist at the end. But the suspense doesn't carry one from scene to scene until, perhaps, that last fifteen minutes. The rest of the tale is a conventional war drama / period piece, told as conventionally as it could have been.

Scorched plays through March 11. Get tickets here.