The impulse to make art about one's life story has fueled many great artists, but getting it right is a challenge. Dear Jane, a very nice and hardworking play written by Joan Beber and directed by Katrin Hilbe, is tangled in the weeds of the details of its story. I can sense, I really can, how much the production wants me to feel with it, but self-retrospection does not necessarily beget avenues of connection.

Dear Jane’s structure has a playwright named Julie, who seems to stand in for playwright Joan Beber herself, constructing the play Dear Jane, made up of events from her life. The form, then, acts as a metaphor for her confronting those events, and that clarity is welcomed. Yet the events themselves, jumping from one era to another, and never lasting for more than a minute, don’t coalesce into something substantive. We are left longing, at times overwhelmed, with a lot of details and not much understanding.

The short scenes don’t help this. I understand short scenes are in vogue — it makes, like, anything feel sharp and Broadway — but quick moments between characters create more the idea of a feeling than the feeling itself. Because of the short scenes, we never really got that deep, with only small insights into the characters.

But some of those insights were real nice, and because a sizable percentage of the little scenes were devoted to Julie (Jenny Peirsol) and her daughter, Jill (Santina Umbach) -- one of the relationships in the play that I felt I could feel with -- the nuance and depth of that relationship radiated. This play, seriously, has some serious self-reflection, and where many solo performances that deal with similar content fall short, Dear Jane stands out. The choreography, effectively done by Wendy Seyb, contributed to this as well, with some nice emotive moments amidst so many expositive details.

With all that reflection, though, there’s got to be some resolution. We know that Julie lived a life, and is dealing with that life, but we really don't feel the repercussions of that life. I guess her family ends up on vacation together. I guess her sister, who really plays a very small role in the work as a force the spectators can grasp onto, was there with her. It doesn't go far enough.