It begins with a frustrated, love-struck professional fighter, Paulie (James Kautz), punching holes in a wall (and then spackling them up) and ends with a meticulously choreographed brawl. This Coney Island soap opera — complete with mob heavies, ragingly flirtatious women and a lothario mailman, Joey (a hilarious Matthew Pilieci) — has a knockabout physicality that grabs your attention. But what holds it is the working-class poetry of Derek Ahonen’s script, with the “broken down dreams” and a “gutter full of empty stomachs” of a hard-boiled era of soulful stiffs and dreamers going nowhere. It’s the speeded-up sound of a return trip to Palookaville.

Every few years, a scrappy, artistically ambitious company bursts onto the scene with a skewed but surprisingly coherent new aesthetic that displays a kind of chemistry hardly ever seen uptown. The Amoralists made a splash last year with “The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side,” also by Mr. Ahonen, and this adrenaline-fused new work, which tries to do too many things at once but somehow gets away with it, cements its reputation as the most promising, crowd-pleasing ensemble to emerge downtown since the Civilians.

Supporting a mess of a plot is a sturdy framework of a story about the aging fighter Paulie, who loves his wife, Mary (Sarah Lemp, a dynamo reminiscent of Cher in “Moonstruck”), but can’t bring himself to sleep with her, driving her to distraction. They are having a welcome-back party for her ex-husband, Petie (William Apps), a veteran returning from the war in Afghanistan who wants her back.

The guests include Penny (Rochelle Mikulich), Paulie’s gee-whiz sweet sister and aspiring country-music star, and her stern German girlfriend, Olga (Selene Beretta); two broke fight promoters (Mark Riccadonna and Morton Matthews); and a beefcake mob heavy (Patrick McDaniel).

Despite the prodigious hamming onstage, these performances have a lived-in quality that keeps everyone, if not always on the same page, then in the same world. Mr. Ahonen, who also directs, controls the chaos and brings the populist instincts of a born entertainer. As in a performance by the vintage Brando, the tough-guy swagger of his production masks an achingly sentimental heart. He might be a contender yet.

Lupita (Samantha Dagnino) is the sweet young heroine, about to become the first member of her Mexican-American family to graduate from college. According to publicity materials, Lupita’s relatives are upset because, instead of taking a local job, she will be “moving away with her boyfriend.”

Actually, they seem a lot more upset about the boyfriend himself. They’re an open-minded bunch, prepared if their beloved girl should bring home a gringo. But Stanley (Daniel Isaac), the polite, attractive beau, turns out to be Japanese. “Japanese-American,” Lupita repeatedly corrects them. Basically, “Kiss Bessemer Goodbye,” set in Bessemer, Colo., is about national identity and racism. Unfortunately, it’s less than articulate.

As usual at this theater, there is a talented multinational cast. (The six actors are from six countries.) Nicely directed by Jerry Ruíz, they create a warm, funny, realistic circle of characters that it’s a pleasure to spend time with. But Tencha Ávila’s script lets them down.

The dialogue is sometimes heavy on obvious exposition. At least that was true of the English translation (provided via headset). The performance is mostly in Spanish, but the characters switch casually into English and back again.

Some of their conversations lack subtlety, to say the least. “You know what’s wrong with them?” Tía Chelo (Rosie Berrido) says of Asians. “You don’t know what they’re thinking.” Maybe the prejudice is supposed to be funny, Archie Bunker-style, but it often just seems naïve.

Chuy (Ernesto de Villa-Bejjani), the successful liquor-store-owning uncle who paid for Lupita’s education, demands that they get Stanley out of the house. But Lupita’s mother, Pancha (Teresa Yenque), is accepting (or resigned). We can’t tell what her other uncle, Tío Joe (Frank Robles), thinks, because he’s sinking into a serious depression. The happy ending for everyone is welcome, but it’s oh so simplistically achieved.

But the space where the Signature has ended up instead — in the base of a residential high rise now being built on West 42nd Street — has retained some of the key elements of the original project: three theaters of varying sizes; an open lobby with a cafe and a bookstore; and the prominent Mr. Gehry as designer.

Perhaps most important, the project is budgeted at a mere $60 million and is actually under construction, in contrast to the planned arts center at the World Trade Center site, which increasingly seems like a pipe dream. The bones of the new Signature are already visible on three low floors of the tower, which was designed by the Miami firm Arquitectonica and is being constructed by Related Companies.

The “fit-out” of the interiors is scheduled to begin in August, and the Signature plans to start its first season in the new space in January 2012. The theater company says it has raised $41 million of the project’s cost. (That includes $25 million from the city.)

“We had hoped to contribute to the development down there and bring that part of the city back,” said James Houghton, the company’s artistic director, referring to ground zero in a recent interview at the building site. “But this site is much more sympathetic to what we were going after. We’re in the theater district.”

In addition, the space allows the Signature to have three contiguous theaters (the more confined ground zero site would have required that they be stacked) and to remain in its neighborhood of the last 13 years. It has been at 555 West 42nd Street in Clinton, in the block west of the new site, which is at 440 West 42nd Street, between Dyer and 10th Avenues.

One character in “Good Ol’ Girls,” now stomping and whooping away at the Steinberg Center for Theater on West 46th Street in Manhattan, insists that when she was growing up, “Morningstar” was one of her favorite books, along with “Little Women” and “Gone With the Wind.” That choice hints at some complexity (and cultural awareness) on the part of this mini-musical’s down-home characters, but the subject is never explored.

“Good Ol’ Girls” — starring five talented, attractive women with Southern accents — professes some affection for its subject, the kind of Southern woman who speaks her mind but has a kind heart underneath. But many of its songs and anecdotes define these women’s lives purely in terms of men. Abusive men, shiftless men, cheating men, unavailable men. Even when the scene turns to what may be an old-age home or a psychiatric hospital, all the women can do is call out for their dead husbands.

The show’s pedigree is good. Paul Ferguson adapted the book from stories by the novelists Lee Smith and Jill McCorkle. The dozen or so songs are by Matraca Berg and Marshall Chapman, Nashville songwriters who have worked with A-list country artists. But these people may not have done Southern women any favors with this determinedly lively but unconvincing production. The best of the songs are laments, like “Lying to the Moon” and “Appalachian Rain.” Others, like “Bad Debt” and “Back in the Saddle,” can feel a little creepy in their forced emotions.