Language can be a tool of survival or a tipoff to fatal consequences in David Mamet's plays. One of his earliest is The Water Engine, an hourlong fable that originally was written as a radio play and generally is staged using that conceit.

The result, as shown in a production by Gremlin Theatre that opened last weekend at St. Paul's Loading Dock Theater, is a fairly static stage performance that requires the audience to adopt a listening mode and visualize events in the mind. If you can't accept that, it's a long hour.

Not that there aren't visual elements. The time is the 1934 Chicago World's Fair, which contrasts self-congratulatory hokum about "The Century of Progress" against the brutal reality of the Great Depression. All the action takes place in the studios of WDGY Radio, where a large cast of savvy, seasoned actors is broadcasting a drama about the fate of a naive mechanic who somehow invents an engine that is fueled by water.

"There are no more factories," declares Charles Lang, as he dreams of a technology that will end the drudgery of the assembly line while simultaneously providing the means for him to move into a bucolic country home with his seemingly addled sister, Rita.

Of course, the people who run the assembly lines aren't going to let that happen.

The language used by the good, decent people like Charles Lang - straight and even a bit starry-eyed - marks them as victims. The lawyers encountered by Lang (if they really are lawyers) speak a language of falsity and hidden meaning, often laced with menace. Lang is outmatched, for they are indefatigable.

The radio format brings all this into a kind of high melodrama - after all, that's the nature of radio. The performance, however, is an engaging swirl of a broadcasting event, mixing the main radio play with period advertisements, music, grandiloquent speeches from the guide at the fair's Hall of Science and socialist bellowing from sidewalk cranks at Chicago's once-famous Bughouse Square.

Gremlin Theatre's production, staged by Sarah Gioia, includes an always-entertaining radio sound-effects engineer (Katharine Horowitz), who adds footsteps, slamming doors, ringing doorbells and other audio colorations to the performance.

The actors, who carry dummy scripts and toss pages on the studio floor as the performance progresses, are led by Matt Rein, who immediately is marked as doomed when he "walks" into a lawyer's office in search of a patent on his new invention.

Rein's inventor is fumbling, suspicious and naive - a trait that playwright Mamet typically gives to characters of elemental purity. So is the inventor's sister, played as a dreamy sort of nitwit by Heather Stone. The lawyers, portrayed by Ryan Parker Knox and Sam L. Landman, are slick-tongued and dangerous, particularly Landman, who comes close to adopting a Nazi accent.

All of the actors in the eight-member ensemble take on multiple roles - from Bob Malos, who alternates between a socialist soapbox speaker and a kindly store owner in the style of Mr. Peepers, to Sid Solomon, Amanda Whisner and Ian Miller, who walk in and out of secondary characters with aplomb.

It's a handsome little production - Tamatha Miller's radio studio set is wonderfully grungy - though it's more tepid drama than radio suspense thriller. In the end, when we learn some horrifying details, the impact is more morality lesson than shock. The yarn has been told, and it's time to turn off the illuminated radio dial and get ready for bed.

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