Currently playing at the Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre at Pershing Square Signature Center, Heather Christian’s “Animal Wisdom” is a self-described “requiem within a requiem” that got terribly lost at the Mass’s Introit and never found its way back to the spiritual center it promised to disclose to the audience.

Christian bills the piece as multiple things simultaneously: her life story, a Requiem Mass, an active ritual letting go of trauma in front of an audience, and a lecture demonstration of channeling through music. What arrives onstage is an exhausting two hours of autobiographical storytelling about ghosts, dead grandmothers, and childhood trauma that never coheres into the transformative spiritual experience it claims to be. The show asks audiences to participate in what Christian insists is “real” ritual—complete with Coca-Cola communion, bell-ringing, and extended periods of total darkness—but delivers neither the catharsis of meaningful drama nor the comfort of genuine spiritual practice.

The production’s fundamental flaw is Nick Kourtides’ sound design. While spoken dialogue comes across with passable clarity, the sung word—which comprises the vast majority of the piece—is largely unintelligible. Christian’s compositions, performed with considerable zeal by a seven-member band that also serves as backup singers and ghostly presences, disappear into muddy acoustics. When Christian promises “a lecture demonstration of channeling through music,” that promise requires the audience to actually hear and understand the music. Without intelligible lyrics, there can be no channeling, no spiritual communication, no transformation. Emma Duncan, performing the role of “H” (Christian’s autobiographical stand-in) at Friday’s matinee, speaks clearly but becomes incomprehensible the moment she begins to sing. This is not a performer problem—Duncan works hard to convey emotional urgency—but a fundamental design failure that undermines the entire enterprise.

“H” declares early on that “there is a crossroads in a wheatfield that separates the land of the living from the land of the dead.” That divide is never crossed in “Animal Wisdom.” The six ghosts that “H” carries on her back and the two already inhabiting the theater space never truly materialize despite lengthy descriptions. We hear about great-grandmother Ella (now a skunk), grandma Heloise (now living in plants), godfather Myles (now in cicadas), and the terrifying Uncle R.L. (a presence so dangerous that H refuses to name what they have in common). Band members don costumes and accents to portray various spirits—piano teacher Doris in wigs and bangles, the menacing R.L.—but these performances feel like theatrical drag rather than genuine channeling of the dead. The spiritual world they claim to inhabit remains theoretical, described rather than summoned.

Emmie Finckel’s scenic design, built from recycled and repurposed materials meant to evoke “psychic debris,” feels cluttered rather than sacred. Shrines to Ella and Heloise sit onstage covered in pennies and ferns, but there’s no sense of void, no emptiness where spirit might take form. Masha Tsimring’s lighting does better work creating spiritual atmosphere through shadows and sudden bursts of illumination from unexpected angles, but even her efforts cannot rescue the extended period of complete darkness during the Dies Irae section of the Requiem Mass. This darkness—not theatrical dimming but true blackout—is meant to be the show’s climactic moment, the “darkest and most important part of the mass” where “all the work is done.” Instead, it becomes an endurance test. An unseen community choir “rehearses” sections of the Requiem while the audience sits in disorienting darkness, unable to see, unable to understand the words being sung, feeling no sense of the repose that a Mass for the Dead is meant to provide. I felt fidgety and uncomfortable, not transformed.

The audience participation elements feel similarly gimmicky. Small cups of Coca-Cola are distributed as a Eucharistic act (Christian’s grandmother kept holy water in a Coke bottle, so the logic goes), and bells are handed out for audience members to ring during the final “In Paradisum” section. These gestures toward communal ritual lack the weight of genuine liturgy. They’re theatrical choices masquerading as sacred practice.

The seven-member band—El Beh (cello), Alexandra Crosby (music director/piano), Francesca Dawis (violin), Caro Moore (percussion), Kris Saint-Louis (bass), and Zack Zaromatidis (guitar)—brings considerable musicianship to Christian’s genre-colliding compositions. They shift between roles as instrumentalists, vocalists, and embodied ghosts with impressive flexibility. When they join Duncan for ensemble singing, the lyrics become slightly more intelligible, suggesting that the sound design might work better with multiple voices sharing the load. But ultimately, they’re fighting a losing battle against acoustics that swallow their work.

Director Keenan Tyler Oliphant, fresh from acclaimed work on Heather Christian’s “Terce: A Practical Breviary” and Nazareth Hassan’s “Practice” at Playwrights Horizons, stages the piece with clear intention. The structure follows the Catholic Requiem Mass faithfully—Introit, Kyrie, Gradual, Tract, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, Offertory, Communion, Dies Irae, In Paradisum—and individual moments have theatrical interest. But no amount of skilled direction can solve the core problem: Christian’s script is so dense with autobiography, so packed with stories about catfish and kudzu and piano teachers and dream dogs, that the spiritual work gets lost in the telling. The piece privileges Christian’s personal narrative over the communal ritual it claims to enact.

When I was in seminary many years ago, I attended the service of a nearby Spiritual Church out of curiosity. As a young seminarian, I was impressed with the solemnity of the worship leader as he summoned the spirits of the dead for his congregation, giving them comfort in their time of suffering and grief. I truly felt spirit presence—whether the Holy Spirit or the Great Spirit or the many summoned spirits of the departed. The service was comforting, as was the meal provided afterward. There had been a sense of catharsis, of redemption and release. There was a “Balm in Gilead.”

None of that is present in the cluttered caverns of “Animal Wisdom.” H declares that she has “come here to let something go” and invites the audience “to do the same.” That redemption and release do not happen. Because the audience cannot fully appreciate H’s internal struggle through singing we cannot understand, because the ghosts remain abstract concepts rather than felt presences, because the extended darkness produces discomfort rather than transcendence, “Animal Wisdom” does not succeed as the “letting go of supernatural/psychological/spiritual trauma” that Christian hopes to achieve. And that is unfortunate, because that kind of catharsis is at the heart of meaningful drama.

Despite the efforts of Emma Duncan, the talented band, and director Keenan Tyler Oliphant, “Animal Wisdom” feels more like an act of self-indulgence than an act of redemptive grace. Christian has created an elaborate apparatus of ritual—Mass structure, shrines, darkness, communion—but the spirit never arrives. What remains is two hours of one person’s ghost stories, told at length, without the transformation that would justify asking an audience to sit through them.