As any dramatic writing teacher will tell you, all great theater is centered around conflict, and while its greatness may be up for debate, College senior Heather Harvey’s Honors projects, A Few Days of Trouble and A Broken and Contrite Heart, is no exception. Harvey’s work deals with a wide range of emotional conflicts: between faith and secularity, community and the self, those who preach and those who are preached to, those who make a living behind a pulpit and those who make a living rubbing their junk against a pole. Yet in addition to these eternal dichotomies, Trouble and Heartalso address a decidedly less metaphysical issue: Can these conflicts be condensed into one two-and-a-half hour play?

After seeing both Trouble and Heart performed in repertory at Little Theater last weekend, I am inclined to respond affirmatively. While the epicness of Harvey’s material demands an equally epic presentation (you can’t get any more epic than a four hour and fifteen-minute production in two parts), any dramatic writing teacher will also tell you that conflict is a slippery slope; too much, and writers run the risk of getting bogged down in overly wrought emotional territory. Though unfailingly entertaining, both Trouble and Heart suffer from excessive conflict, causing the play to backslide into melodrama like the overly greased-up thighs of one of Harvey’s pole dancers.

A Few Days of Trouble and A Broken and Contrite Heart focus on the plight of the Goodman family, who are members of a tight-knit Pentecostal community. Trouble, the first of the two plays, tells the story of Will Goodman (College junior Hayden Gilbert) the patriarch whose surname aptly reflects the nature of his character (a bit of wordplay to which Harvey does not hesitate to draw the audience’s attention). Over the course of the first act, Will develops an unlikely friendship with Simone (College junior Alexandria Miller), a member of his church who secretly works as an exotic dancer.

As a woman of faith with a “godless” occupation, Simone — and, by extension, the world of the play — is split between the church and the strip club where she works. A pimp-like Master of Ceremonies (College senior Mieko Gavia, dressed like a cracked-out Dr. Seuss character) served as the occasional intermediary between the two settings; however, they were largely kept separate, the action of the play often taking place in vague, undefined spaces that were not clarified by aimless blocking.

The script itself vacillated between deliciously melodramatic and insufferably didactic. While some of the dialogue — particularly the sermons during the church scenes — demonstrated a sharp ear and a solid familiarity with the world of Harvey’s characters, too often expository information was revealed through a series of gratuitous monologues and circuitous conversations. Minor characters in particular were used as mouthpieces to espouse certain views, such as Lilah (College sophomore Sam Bergman), a co-worker of Simone’s whose sole function is to demonstrate that strippers have reasonably large vocabularies (her other ostensible function was to demonstrate her character’s capacity to work in rescue services by shimmying down the pole like a horny firefighter).

With these shortcomings in mind, it is a testament to the talent of the performers that Troublemanaged to retain its emotional life. Will and Simone’s awkwardly tender relationship is particularly touching, with both leads imbuing their characters with life instead of falling back on tired fallen woman/patriarchal redeemer tropes. Gilbert in particular has nary a flawed instinct in his extensive repertoire; his Will was a nuanced variation on the bespectacled, “aw-shucks” persona of ’90s film star Rick Moranis.

What a shame, then, that one of the most compelling aspects of the play is cut abruptly short by a misunderstanding, when Will is shot by his jealous wife Jackie (played by dynamic College sophomore Karyn Todd). From Gilbert’s exit onward, the second act of the play plods forward, a series of reflective monologues and an ill-advised interrogation scene halting what is left of the action. A quiet final moment with Simone at Will’s grave, however, brings Trouble full circle; after two and a half hours of struggling with her faith, her realization that “God is at work, even in his silences” allows her — and the play itself — to find redemption.

Given the parade of traumatic events that greet Eden Goodman, the daughter of Will and Jackie and the main character in_ A Broken and Contrite Heart_, one questions whether God is at work in this play as well. This companion piece to Trouble treads on similar thematic territory, tracing Eden’s attempts to reconcile her faith with a burgeoning attraction to her roommate Desi.

Unfortunately, like Trouble, Heart suffers from a lack of subtext. We only feel the tug of forces compelling Eden (played with quiet dignity by Harvey herself) and Desi (College senior Holland Hamilton, channeling the spirit of an earth mother Betty Boop) together during the play’s simple, silent and all-too-brief moments; otherwise, there is little textual evidence to support the attraction of these two opposites. College senior Ebony Burton’s subtle costume design served to highlight the discrepancies between the two women more effectively than the dialogue did; we know that Eden is a good girl, for instance, because she wears socks with flats (essentially the sartorial equivalent of a cast-iron chastity belt).

While director Justin Emeka coaxed solid performances out of his two female leads, College junior Ralph Johnson stood out as Eden’s best friend Gabriel, the secretly sociopathic nice guy suffering from the dual ailments of self-righteousness and sexual frustration. Johnson’s performance was so convincing that even when his character attempts to justify his actions to the audience — the corrective rape of Eden as a means of “saving her” from homosexuality — it’s hard not to feel that he believes what he’s saying with all that is left of his soul.

It is the expert staging of this scene — wisely moved offstage, where it is heard and not seen by the audience — that allows Heart to deftly regain its footing. Neither prurient nor melodramatic, neither restrained nor subtle, the scene unified all the conflicts of Harvey’s work into one whole: In one brutal moment, mounting tensions — between sex and religion, faith and doubt, good and evil— all collapsed together, reaching a deafening hilt.

While conflict often serves as the driving force behind theater, it is neither the be-all nor the end-all of dramatic tension. It is true that, in attempting to juggle many different conflicts at once, Harvey took a tumble down this slope. However, in Trouble and Heart, like her characters, Harvey staggers toward little moments of redemption. Besides, any playwriting teacher or pole-dancer will tell you that reaching for the heights of drama is far more entertaining than not scaling them at all, even if you fall on your (G-stringed) butt midway.