Watching M Ensemble's new production of Stephen Jeffreys' I Just Stopped By to See the Man is both stirring and frustrating.

Whenever Paul Bodie as a presumed-dead music legend and Christina Alexander as his on-the-run daughter are onstage, the play sings with the depth of feeling Bodie's character brings to the blues. That's the stirring part, and happily, it dominates the production of a play that was done by Chicago's edgy Steppenwolf Theatre in 2002.

What's frustrating is that the third cast member, Herman Carabali II, isn't credible as a Mick Jagger-style British rock star, which undermines a key plot point. He's also in numerous scenes in the three-character play, and he just doesn't rise to his cast mates' level.

Written in 2000 by Jeffreys, a British writer whose play The Libertine became a 2004 movie starring Johnny Depp, I Just Stopped By to See the Man incorporates elements of the story of singer Robert Johnson as well as the obsession of some British Invasion rockers with black American blues greats. Jeffreys also mixes radical black activism into his mid-'70s story, so the script becomes richly layered.

Director John Pryor, Bodie, Alexander and the playwright himself easily hook the audience with the first scene.

Jesse (Bodie), a spirited elderly man who was once a famous blues singer, welcomes his weary daughter Della (Alexander) home from another day in her dead-end waitress job. As the two banter about how various customers insulted, annoyed or degraded her, it becomes clear that Della is a brilliant woman doing mind-numbing work. Her motivation is one of the play's slowly revealed mysteries.

Another involves why Jesse has chosen to hide out in a shotgun shack in the Mississippi Delta for the past 14 years -- years in which the world thought he was dead. The rock star, Karl (Carabali), and his group have had a huge hit with one of Jesse's old songs. And since a tour has brought them to the region, Karl has made a pilgrimage to the place Jesse described in song, only to find the man himself.

Shocked and thrilled, Karl works hard to seduce Jesse from his faux retirement back into the music biz. Della, knowing of the dangers to herself, her father and the emotional bonds the two have recently forged, tries just as hard to keep Jesse from succumbing to the pull of music, audiences, that blues man's life.

Whether Jesse will once again make a deal with the devil -- swapping happiness for musical greatness -- is at the core of the play.

Bodie gives a beautifully detailed performance as a man who finds that forsaking his passion hasn't killed it in the least. As the lights dim, as he closes his eyes and begins to sing, he transports all who listen to a sorrowful but deeply felt place.

Alexander makes Della fierce and fearful, a firebrand who doesn't fully realize how much her father has come to mean to her until she faces losing him. Though she too often fails to maintain eye contact with fellow actors, Alexander has no trouble making the observant Della into a commanding presence.

Besides being miscast, Carabali has to fight to keep the least interesting role -- vapid rich rocker looking for his next career move -- in balance with two better-written characters. Doesn't happen. Nor does Karl's accent, a bizarre mishmash of British and bluesman, sound like anything anyone has ever heard, despite the playwright's attempt to explain it in the text.

The play's sound design and its execution are rough, but Douglas Grinn's shotgun shack set and Ann Payne-Nimmons' costumes (which make Alexander look like Pam Grier in Foxy Brown) are the real deal. And so, stirringly, are Bodie and Alexander.

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