Alliance stages little hoop on the prairie

7:30 p.m. Tuesdays-Thursdays. 8 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays. 2:30 p.m. Saturdays-Sundays. 7:30 p.m. Sundays. (No 7:30 p.m. performance March 30.) Through March 30. $25-$38. Alliance Theatre, Hertz Stage, 1280 Peachtree St. N.E., Atlanta. 404-733-5000, alliancetheatre.org.

Bottom line: An intense if somewhat wobbly game of hoops.

Just two years after her play “The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls” had its world premiere in Atlanta, Meg Miroshnik dribbles onto the Alliance Theatre stage with “The Tall Girls,” a period piece about a girls basketball team during the Dust Bowl era.

While “Fairytale Lives” described an American girl’s labyrinthine journey to her mother’s homeland, “Tall Girls” takes us to the prairie, where 15-year-old Jean has come to care for her motherless, out-of-control cousin, Almeda. Waiting by the train tracks at the beginning of the story, Jean (Emily Kitchens) has a charged encounter with a mysterious man named Haunt Johnny (Travis Smith), who seduces with poetic talk of sunsets and “whiskey-flavored pipe smoke.”

As it turns out, Haunt Johnny is the town’s new school teacher. In his croker sack, he carries a basketball, an object coveted by tomboy Almeda (Kally Duling) and her friend Inez (Lauren Boyd), who leads a hardscrabble life and is fighting to save her family’s farm. Pretty soon, Haunt Johnny has organized a team. And in the fashion of “The Music Man”’s Harold Hill, he beguiles the town with basketball.

Directed by Susan V. Booth, this oddly splintered little play explores the dangerous games that girls play in pursuit of status, acceptance, romance and friendship. Though basketball would seem to be the equalizer that unites this hierarchical group around a common goal, any pretense of loyalty and camaraderie is undone by a cold, methodical witch hunt. As the girls take their shots, dark secrets are revealed, and everything falls apart in a dance of deceit and betrayal.

As she did with “Fairytale Lives,” which won the 2011-2012 Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition, Miroshnik weaves a complex tapestry, brimming with ideas. “Tall Girls” is a fascinating tale peopled with six distinctive characters — from town harlot Lurlene (the hilarious Veronika Duerr) to goody-two-shoes Puppy (the lovely Hayley Platt).

Though every girl has a backstory — and an agenda — it is hard to figure out exactly whose story this is. (Presumably, the focus is Jean. But Lurlene hogs a good bit of the narrative, too, while Inez, Puppy and Almeda sort of dangle in the margins.)

The tone is also hard to read. The energy is so tense, the strings so tangled, that it takes most of the first act for the show to settle into itself. Just as soon as it relaxes, it recoils: What appeared to be a “Little Hoop on the Prairie” dissolves into a kind of “Ethan Frome” meets “The Crucible.”

Set designer Chien-Yu Peng conjures the prairie as bare and desolate, with the bones of civilization off to each side. Pete Shinn illumines the panorama with evocative lighting. Lex Liang’s costumes are appropriate to the time frame, the social milieu and the personalities — uptight, messy, coquettish. (It’s funny to think that even back in the ’30s, sneakers conveyed social status.) And his bloomerlike basketball costumes are just plain fun.

In recent seasons, the Hertz Stage has seen productions with Segways, simulated bicycle riding, “World of Warcraft” games and, now, basketball. Having the women dribble and shoot so close to the audience adds a sense of danger and excitement to the production and provides the show’s central metaphor: that life can be messy, imperfect and risky. And nice girls don’t always win.