It can be nerve-racking how fast the van in “Give Me Liberty” hurtles through Milwaukee. Most of the time on this wild ride, the driver peers ahead as he white-knuckles it through the gray, wintry streets, past cars, houses, flashing lights. Every so often, he smokes a cigarette or grabs the radio handset, delivering another promise that he’ll break. “I’ll be there soon, ” he says to dispatch as his passengers talk, shout and sing. “I should be there in 10.” The van is racing past a familiar reality while a more freewheeling, uncharted world bursts forth inside of it .

You first meet the driver, Vic (a soulful Chris Galust), in a cramped room, where he’s listening closely to a friend smoking in bed, identified only as his Confidant (James Watson), a profoundly disabled man with doe eyes who’s communing with Vic about love and other weighty issues. The Confidant is a philosopher of the heart whose words fill the room, swirling like the smoke from the cigarette that Vic takes from his mouth, tapping the ash before returning it to its perch. There’s no immediate point to the scene; in time, though, it reads like an epigraph and a declaration of intent.

As the Confidant holds forth, the quiet, watchful Vic sits near the edge of the bed. This geometry of bodies — the meditative disabled man and his attentive able-bodied friend — is echoed by the storytelling. Vic offers the most obvious way into “Give Me Liberty” but he isn’t exactly its protagonist. Rather, over the course of the fast-spinning story, he retreats as other characters move to the fore. At times, he becomes more passenger than driver on a narrative journey that includes a gaggle of disruptive elderly mourners, a softhearted boxer (a fantastic Max Stoianov) and a woman, Tracy (a terrific Lauren Spencer, who, l ike Galust, is a nonprofessional performer).