Adapting stories in book form into plays can prove tricky. How, for example, to transform interior thoughts and feelings into drama, character, dialogue and action?

Kathleen B. Jones and collaborator Sharyn C. Blumenthal have taken on this monumental challenge in adapting Grace Paley’s short stories into a series of vignettes for the stage. Jones and Blumenthal do create some well-drawn characters, seen particularly in the work of local favorites Linda Libby and Kathi Diamant. Still, Laterthanever’s world premiere of “Acts of Faith” suffers haziness in other areas: structure, conflict, plot.

The play is based on Paley’s “The Collected Stories,” which contains her three previous volumes of short stories. Paley, who died in 2007 at age 84, wrote about families, friendships, single motherhood, aging parents, lovers – specifically, everyday domestic life for working class Jewish women in New York in the second half of the 20th century. Along the way, her witty and poetic stories tackle politics and feminism, gender and generational conflicts.

Much of Paley’s lyricism transfers directly, particularly in the narration offered by the eponymous Faith (Libby): “He had a habit of making a narrow remark, and like a plumber’s snake it would work its way through the ear, down the throat, half way to my heart. He’d disappear then, leaving me choking.”

Faith, a sort of Paley alter ego who appears in some dozen stories, is at the center of the play. Yet these are also the stories of her friends, lovers, parents and children. Through a series of scenes emerges a picture of a tough dreamer and a thinker, a flawed partner and distracted mother, balancing imagination and the urge to create with familial responsibilities.

The new play is the “She Said” part of Laterthanever’s “He Said/She Said” series exploring the different ways that men and women relate to each other. And, while there seems to be great potential here to illuminate women’s lives and the challenges that women and mothers continue to face, the execution falls short.

Partly this is due to the play’s structure and the nature of adaptation. While the written stories can stand on their own, many of these individual scenes don’t give us enough substance before we are whisked off to another vignette. Some scenes drop us into the middle of a situation without offering much background, and there are issues of believability (a half-Latino son named Tonto, really?). Often, the relationships are not clearly established. Confusion ensues; motivations and the barely-there plot become something of a guessing game.

The stage is set with a series of scrims, used to obscure and silhouette the actors. Perhaps meant to suggest the layers of meaning and fluidity of Paley’s stories, jagged projections across the scrims and rolling platforms tend to add another layer of clutter to the confusion.

Still, there are some bright spots. Libby expresses the wide range of emotion found in Paley’s prose, no small feat in a character who seems simultaneously curious, compassionate, angry, anxious, stubborn and fearless, and vulnerable. Diamant plays two very different yet archetypal Jewish women with, alternately, charming grace and humor. Rhona Gold and Robert DeLillo also stand out with touching portraits of Faith’s parents. While director Blumenthal has difficulty pulling together the various strands of these collected works, she does give the play welcomed movement, including a steamy tango between Faith and her one-time husband Ricardo (Dave Rivas).

It may simply be that Paley’s sketches, with the poetic elusiveness and fluidity of a watercolor to begin with, do not lend themselves to dramatic form. Clarity is certainly an issue, and conflicts remain unresolved. At any rate, “Acts of Faith” will need some reining in and restructuring to live up to the promise of Paley’s prose.