In Shot!, students again portray an ensemble of interview subjects: teens, grandmothers, doctors, cops, community organizers. Kyle Melton's set reflects the barrenness of the streets: three stoops, a few telephone poles, wire strung with a pair of sneakers, and a broken, dead tree trunk.

From a Temple Hospital emergency-room physician we learn the area is so dangerous the military sends people to observe their procedures - an excellent simulation of what medics find on the battlefield. From a young woman who skipped a parole hearing to attend her cousin's funeral we learn it's tragic not that he died, but rather that he killed himself. "When you think of Teron," she says proudly, "you would think someone else would take him out."

North Philly's neighborhood voices are confused, conflicted, and no one - from Rodeph Shalom rabbi Michael Holzman to 77-year-old Eleanor Jordan - can articulate a reason for staying other than that they've already been there for a long time. Though the student cast members aren't as uniformly convincing as were their In Conflict counterparts, there's no denying the complexity and weight of their dialogue.

That's why it's so odd to hear the mantra "Hope is bulletproof" repeated throughout the play. It's as though director Douglas C. Wager refused to believe the evidence before him, that hope on those shattered blocks has indeed been hit by a few and has the scars to prove it.

Further diluting the neighborhood's unpleasant but truthful message are Temple professor Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon's spoken-word interludes. Studded with academic jargon (paradigms? really?) and cliched lines such as "babies with babies" (female residents overcome this cliche by discussing what they would have done with their lives if they'd never given birth), Williams-Witherspoon's poetic intrusions are ineffective at best, and a betrayal at worst.

There are also some easily repaired holes in Shot!'s "docudrama" scenes. Though the Village of Arts and Humanities' program director, El Sawyer, is a moving subject, I still don't know what programs his organization actually runs. And while Teron's story is clearly of central importance to the show, it's given little context. Why don't we meet him until he's about to kill himself? Is he reciting his own suicide note or a Williams-Witherspoon abstraction? Was he interviewed?

With less interpretation and more presentation of the residents' own stories, Shot! might at least contribute a stitch or two to North Philly's persistent wounds.