By BILL ANDREWS

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. – The show started with a bang. Literally. The percussionist snapped the audience to attention with a loud rap on the bass and snare drums.

“Wake up!” a man yelled, and “1, 7, 4, 5, 1, 7!” a woman replied. Other musicians, a violinist and flutist, joined the percussionist with some discordant and mellifluous music, and the man and woman began following each other, walking slowly in a circle about 15 feet in diameter.

So began “Falling Bodies,” a show about the importance of communication, which premiered at the Jewish Museum of Florida in Miami Beach on Thursday night. The show moves to New York’s Rubin Museum on Sunday for a single performance.

“Falling Bodies” is the newest production from Nine Circles Chamber Theatre, a company based in New York. It explores the nature of language by pitting Galileo Galilei and Primo Levi, two Italian scientists persecuted for their beliefs, and three musicians against one another in a friendly rivalry of opinions. Through a series of vignettes set in various locales, they ponder the meaning of everything from science to celery.

Good communication skills are fundamentally necessary. Turmoil, whether it be bickering couples or warring countries, usually results when one side can’t or won’t listen to the other.

Ironically, watching the action unfold at the show — a minimalist and darkly comic performance — was at first as disorienting as trying to follow a conversation in an unfamiliar language. In time, though, it became possible to understand what was happening, even if not in great detail.

After 10 minutes, just as the action began making sense, the show took an unexpected turn: a conversation between a man and a violin. That is, one performer spoke in English and another responded by playing the violin dramatically, in what seemed to them to be a normal conversation.

Throughout the show, the musicians maintained these dual roles, performing both as musicians setting the mood and as actors interacting with Galileo and Levi by “talking” through their instruments. Ideas became more important than specific words, and paying attention to the tone of the conversation was paramount.

There comes a moment, of course, when even the most enthusiastic tourist gives up trying to communicate with a local and wanders off in search of a translator, and “Falling Bodies” may need to work harder to keep its audience from wandering. The scenes about celery, for instance, made sense only after Jonathan Levi, the show’s writer and director, explained the significance to the audience after the show.

For the most part, though, the actors and musicians managed to convey convincingly a variety of experiences and thoughts — the fear-filled moments between bomb blasts, the serenity of a sunset, the despair of being misunderstood and the joy of peace.

And if the audience didn’t always understand everything, well, that might be part of the point. If what the violin was “saying” during a rapid conversation with Galileo was not entirely clear, it served to underscore the difficulty of communication in any form.

As it turned out, the initially incomprehensible show became not just understandable, but a lesson in understanding itself — just because the words are foreign, communication is not impossible. On the contrary, a new language allows for a greater degree of articulation, providing previously inexpressible thoughts a new vocabulary.

At least, that’s how I understood it.