It is the pride of any American theater company to hook up with a playwright who’s been crowned " promising. " This was the case with the Theater Offensive and Daniel Alexander Jones, whose Blood:Shock:Boogie the company had produced in 1996. But pride is not enough to ensure that a playwright will fulfill his promise, even when it’s confirmed by no less than American Theatre, which in 2000 identified Jones as one of 15 artists to keep an eye on in the new millennium. And when the company invites the playwright into residence and devotes attention to polishing his work, it becomes a theatrical alchemist of sorts (mediæval folk, after all, saw lead as brimming with possibilities), providing a laboratory and the energy to catalyze the artist’s potential. Jones, with a prized NEA/TCG grant, developed Bel Canto in residence at the Theater Offensive (and then at the Sundance Institute). The play is now receiving its world premiere, which continues to scream promise without actually announcing the playwright’s arrival.

Bel Canto, which is being produced by an unlikely alliance between the Theater Offensive, purveyors of edgy queer theater, and the Wheelock Family Theatre, is now on display in Wheelock’s auditorium, and it’s little like the family affairs that usually grace that stage. The play is a dissection of that familiar, clammy specimen: adolescence. But Jones cuts to its essence with an instrument that’s razor-sharp: opera. And because he wields his penetrating device with the deft hand of a cultural critic, whatever themes he strikes while cutting register at a sumptuous pitch. But heightened as the language of the play may be, it sits on insecure teens about as well as hip humor would on a dowager empress.

The story takes us to 1978 in Springfield, Massachusetts, to which 16-year-old Benjamin Turner (a role filled with restless gusto by Burl Moseley) and his salt-of-the-earth mom (a sassy Renita Martin) have just moved from Berkeley. As if it weren’t rough enough being the new kid in town, Benji is dealing with an absent father who dodged both the draft and his family, a mom intent on " starting over " and re-establishing her black roots, his own bi-racial identity, and his fully realized homosexuality.

The play chronicles Benji’s relationships with folks who help him come to terms with his many issues. Terence (Jimonn Cole), a gangly classmate who’s regularly browbeaten by bullies, is the target of Benji’s sexual passion, which is more sophisticated than his 16 years would seem to license. That’s because his feelings are fueled by Barbara Scarlatti, a buxom, vivacious sixtysomething diva who not only stirs him to learn to sing opera but becomes his teacher by circumstances too pat to swallow. Played by Lynda Gravatt with impudent charisma and broad comic gestures, Barbara channels her student’s soda-pop-fizz emotionalism into the grandiose canals of classical tragedies. By plunging into Puccini’s world of lush sentiment, Benji is better able to navigate his own psychological muddle.

As for Barbara, her affecting accounts of overcoming cultural barriers to forge a performance career allude to civil-rights-era fortitude, the kind exemplified by African-American contralto Marian Anderson. In a random stroke of magical realism underscored by effective, if at times extravagant, backdrop video projections, Anderson makes spectral appearances to Benji as if she were his guardian angel. Merle Perkins is a vision of modest dignity in the role, with a shimmering voice.

All this could seem hifalutin if Jones did not so tightly tie the intense passions of opera past to the fierce drive of music of the present. As Benji learns to pronounce " fuoco " (Italian for " fire " ), Jimi Hendrix riffs hiss from the guitar-strumming fingers of Terence’s blissed-out dad (a humorous turn by Martin), a blind veteran.

Director (and Emerson professor) Robbie McCauley had a formative hand in creating Ntozake Shange’s experimental works, and Shange’s pastiche style is evident here. Moreover, the enunciated physical performances McCauley elicits from the actors not only are appropriate to the operatic tone but add a bit of majesty to Jones’s poetry, which otherwise might just seem royal purple.