Playwright Andrew Case's intriguing résumé includes eight years of work at a New York City agency that probes police misconduct.

At first, he was an investigator, crossing paths with both police officers and citizens. Then he became the agency's spokesman, bringing him into frequent contact with the media. Both that experience and his skills as a dramatist pay off in The Rant, his new play getting its world premiere at New Theatre in Coral Gables.

As with almost all first productions, New Theatre's The Rant has strengths and flaws. Thanks to the National New Play Network, an organization of theaters that has pioneered the concept of the ''rolling'' world premiere, Case already has subsequent productions of the play lined up at Philadelphia's InterAct Theatre and the New Jersey Repertory Company. But New Theatre and director Ricky J. Martinez get the revealing first crack at the script.

At the start of the play, we learn that an unarmed teenager has been shot and killed by a police officer. That is an incontrovertible fact, one of the few uncontested truths in the case. The playwright is out to demonstrate how truth has shades of gray, that perspective and memory can make ''facts'' malleable.

Case tells his story from the differing, evolving points of view of four characters: Denise Reeves (Patrice DeGraff-Arenas), mother of the dead boy; Charles Simmons (Reiss Gaspard), the younger of the two cops involved in the shooting; Alexander Stern (Ricky Waugh), a hotshot reporter; and Lila Mahnaz (Pilar Uribe), an investigator of Iranian descent.

As each adds new information, our perspectives keep shifting. Was the boy an innocent kid or someone who would be perceived as a threat by officers responding to a 911 call? Was the older cop a bully, or did he care about the boy? Is the investigator dedicated to righting wrongs, or does she have an attitude toward cops because of bullying embedded in her memory?

Case wants to make us wonder, wants us to assemble the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle without a proscribed final form. Mahnaz, as written by Case and played by Uribe, is weak, biased, fearful and ethically questionable. Strengthening her character and her motivations would help balance the play as a whole. But the others -- the coolly manipulative Waugh, the defensive Gaspard, the fierce DeGraff-Arenas -- deliver riveting performances as complicated people whose ways of looking at the same tragedy all somehow make sense.

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