Despite the seasonal implication of its title, be advised that "Rejoice in the Lamb" is not a Christmas pageant.

Instead, the new play by University of Hawai'i master's degree candidate Kemuel DeMoville is a study of "woman as vessel" that juxtaposes Victorian and fundamentalist Christian viewpoints on the feminine role. It also incorporates references to an 18th-century religious maniac poet and a third-century Christian saint remembered for carrying her severed breasts on a plate.

If this were a video, we'd call it "Footnotes Gone Wild!"

In the theater, however, it's an ambitious mix that swirls around two women called Agatha who lived exactly a century apart, but who each struggled with similar issues in her own way. "Time is like a broken watch," says a minor character. DeMoville's plotting stops time, speeds it up and overlaps it.

The 1900 Agatha English (Uluwehi Mills) is a Victorian housewife, confined by a cold husband to a mental hospital because of stress resulting from a series of failed births. The 2000 Agatha Clair (Danielle Vivarttas-Ahrnsbrak) resists pregnancy from a born-again husband who believes child-bearing to be her greatest duty.

The overdeveloped first act repeats those themes without significantly deepening them. The second and third acts precipitate a crisis and bring the two women together for an unsatisfying but vivid finale.

There is no war of the sexes or convincing underlying passion in this play. Both women are dominated by husbands and other male figures. And each deals with her victimization by further self-destruction. Despite the sharp light that floods the final scene, there is no triumph for the characters nor satisfaction for the audience.

The production is overcomplicated, provoking, mildly pretentious and unresolved, but theatrical and showy.