Jim Leonard Jr.’s 1978 play “And They Dance Real Slow in Jackson” has been kicking around community, college and high school theater stages for years.

It’s a perfect piece for the minor leagues. High schools love to stage the drama, about a wheelchair-bound young girl coping in a fictional Indiana small town, because it’s by turns tender and dark, sweet and sharp, teasing a sexual edge and pocked with cuss words. (High schoolers love school-sanctioned cussing.) It ends on a dark note and provokes just enough surface-level thinking to fuel an extra-credit essay for English class.

So what’s “Jackson” doing at Phoenix Theatre?
Certainly professional theater companies should be allowed to raid the dustier cabinets of the Dramatists Play Service/Samuel French files to flesh out their seasons, but they do so at their peril: Sometimes, with a play like “Jackson,” it’s like watching a pro golfer play the ninth hole at the Golfland putt-putt course.

PT’s production of “Jackson,” is given an adequately artful eye by Harold Dixon and a more-than-competent performance by a cast that includes Jennifer Banda (née Southwest Shakespeare favorite Jenn Bemis) as Elizabeth, the girl whose bout with infant polio has resigned her to a wheelchair, in a claustrophobic town that squints an awkwardly curious eye toward her. But the feeling that nobody’s being challenged — not the adult audience, not the actors — haunts like a spectre over the stage.

Banda has the biggest challenge of the play, portraying a young woman whose sexuality has been denied, shunned, ignored outright, without making her Elizabeth overwrought or overbearing. The actress largely maneuvers away from the potholes of potential overacting in Leonard’s script. But nevertheless her voice can veer into shrillness, making Elizabeth a sometimes peevish thing. It’s a trade-off to get Banda’s wide, warm eyes and delicate sensitivity.

Other Valley favorites flesh out the ensemble in Elizabeth’s world, including puppet master Kamala Kruska, actor Dion Johnson and PT artist-in-residence Chris Vaglio. There’s a snooty, pinched-face edge to Vaglio that works for him in shows like Noel Coward’s “Private Lives” but undercuts moments of “Jackson,” especially when he’s asked to play a small child.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve seen several stagings of “Jackson” in community and school theaters. Those productions, featuring younger, dramatically less experienced casts, are able to imbue Leonard’s play with a certain raw honesty, a naturalness that elevates the story to something more poignant. At Phoenix Theatre, it’s a wheelchair- bound cakewalk.

‘And They Dance Real Slow in Jackson’
When: 8 p.m. Wed.-Sat., 2 and 7 p.m. Sun., 3 p.m. April 30, through May 1
Where: Phoenix Theatre, 100 E. McDowell Road, Phoenix
How much: $25-$29
Info:
Grade: C+