Maaike Laanstra-Corn, Elisa Tarquinio, and Gabriela Veciana Photo by James Leynse

The play opens with one of the more original scenes I've encountered on stage, the calf scramble of the title. A calf scramble is a sponsored event, perhaps part of a rodeo or a county fair, in which donated calves are set loose and youth participants compete to chase them down and secure them with a halter. Rules vary from event to event, but, in Carr's play at least, winners are allowed to raise their calves and later show them and auction them off. The proceeds are split between the young person and the sponsoring organization, in this case the local chapter of Future Farmers of America.

Do note that there are no live animals on stage. Instead, each of the cast members doubles up as one of the calves, both in the exciting rough-and-tumble opening scene and at various intervals over the course of the 90-minute play. The five of them, portrayed by Ferin Bergen, Maaike-Laanstra-Corn, Marvelyn Ramirez, Elisa Tarquinio, and Gabriela Veciana under Caitlin Sullivan's fast-paced direction, manage these metamorphoses with splendid clarity and aplomb, and the first creatively staged minutes suggest we're in for an evening of imaginative, possibly surrealistic performances.

There is some of this, certainly. The scenes in which the teens are working with their calves are beautifully unconventional. And there is one thrilling lightning-and-thunder infused scene in which at least one of the girls is convinced she is about to experience the event evangelical Christians refer to as "The Rapture," the sudden uniting of "true believers" with Jesus.

Unfortunately, much of the rest of the content deals with the more conventional stuff of a bildungsroman, with the girls dealing with matters of self-discovery, friendship, competitiveness, and sexuality. These kinds of issues are addressed here in short bursts of exposition. Other plays such as Sarah DeLappe's The Wolves and Candrice Jones' Flex have presented similar ideas far more interestingly and in greater depth.

Watching Calf Scramble, I kept thinking that its mixture of realistic and offbeat moments might come across more effectively in a medium like film rather than on stage. Or maybe we city folk just need more information than we are being given about the insular farming community and the lives of these burgeoning young women, whose voices are seldom given free rein on a New York stage.