Naomi Iizuka's ambitious After a Hundred Years sparks interest, but she stuffs too many moral issues into a text that is sometimes poetic but more often predictable, and her earnestness lies close to the surface, making Hundred Years a message play.

In its world premiere at the Guthrie, the play takes its audience to post-genocide Phnom Penh in Cambodia and to betrayal, moral relativism and entangled lives, in which everyone is complicit in harming others and the silenced past intrudes on a painful present.

Luke, a go-getter American journalist, has secured a rare interview with Phan Mok, a dying Khmer Rouge leader, who is about to be tried for crimes against humanity. Luke stays in Phnom Penh with his old school friend, Tim, an exhausted doctor working with HIV-infected child prostitutes, and with attractive Sarah, Tim's restless wife. Mysterious Helene Chea knows everybody's business, and both Sarah and her house-help, Narin Rath, were participants in childhood acts that still scar both their lives.

On Brian Sidney Bembridge's minimal set of a backdrop of squares that serve as light boxes, a projection screen and a gallery for Khmer Rouge execution photos, six actors play eight roles in acting that, although often passionate, also felt stiff, so that I remained conscious of watching a play.

I suspect that the source of the somewhat stilted feel of the play lies with the predictable nature of the dialogue and with the play's unsympathetic main characters. Actors Peter Christian Hansen as the journalist, Luke, Robert O. Berdahl as the doctor, Tim, and Stacia Rice as his wife, Sarah, are all good within their roles.

The most appealing character is Narin Rath, Sarah's helper, played by Sun Mee Chomet. Intelligent and compassionate, Narin lives with the horror of being involved in her father's execution by the Khmer Rouge. James Saito's Phan Mok, an imprisoned Khmer Rouge leader, has the strongest lines. As Luke interviews him, he is evasive and poetic. He likens the truth to a sleek fish in the river. You think you've speared it, he says, and it's gone. When Luke challenges him with a question about his actions that killed hundreds of thousands of his fellow Cambodians, Phan Mok replies by asking, "Would you rather die as a human being, or live as an animal?" Fine writing, but it is not consistent throughout Hundred Years.

Lisa Portes directs with some nice touches. A checkered design beneath the table at center stage suggests a chessboard and maneuver and counter-maneuver, underpinning the theme of characters strategizing to achieve their ends, both self-serving and selfless. The Khmer Rouge photographed and catalogued every victim of torture and execution, and Portes alludes to this cold efficiency by multiple camera flashes on a darkened stage and the noise of shutter exposures, after scenes involving Cambodian characters.

I'm pleased to have seen Hundred Years, and to have insights into the heart-rending struggle of the very poor in Cambodia and into those who use them and those who try to help them. But as a play, it needs to allow more room for the audience to fill in the gaps and to intuit moral horror from a less didactic script and to focus on fewer issues in order to energize its dramatic arc.

After a Hundred Years June 11 - June 29, 2008. Call for times. Tickets $18 - $34. Call 612- 377-2224 or go to www.guthrietheatrer.org. Dowling Studio, Guthrie Theater, 818, South 2nd St., Minneapolis.

- Elizabeth Weir