Diosa means "goddess" in Spanish, and Edwin Sánchez’s new play is about the molding of one in 1930s Hollywood, by many men with dirty fingers. In its world premiere at Hartford Stage, the theater piece aims to expose the belittling clichés and hard realities that came with ethnicity in a dream factory run by Caucasians. Loosely inspired by the story of Rita Hayworth, née Margarita Carmen Cansino, the daughter of a Spanish dancer and a showgirl who became the 1940s movie sexpot of Gilda, the play uses a subtext of Latin dancing to both sensuous and ironic effect. Unfortunately, that subtext is more eloquent than the text itself, which is skeletal and soap-operatic, albeit artfully turned out in Hartford, in a production that’s more original than the story.

Josefa, the Hayworth figure, is a sweet-tempered Latina teen who’s conscripted by her macho dad to replace her mother in the couple’s Spanish ballroom act (in which they are billed as "the lovebirds of dance"), as well as, it is strongly implied, in bed. Soon, with father Miguel’s blessing, Josefa has sexually brokered screen tests for the two of them, as mother Amber retreats into ironing and drink. To get out from under Miguel’s thumb and leave the field to beleaguered mom, Josefa, still jailbait, marries a movie-industry underling who proves more pimp than spouse. When she angers a chilly studio head who wants to change her name, though, she finds herself unable to leap from casting couch to bit part until she takes her sexploitation into her own hands. The last scene finds a newly named and glamorized Josefa, her hair dyed Hayward red, playing the diva as dad does extra duty as a nameless Mexican under an umbrella-sized sombrero.

Certainly there’s nothing exclusively Latin about sleeping one’s way to stardom amid the studio tyranny of Hollywood’s so-called Golden Age. But the Yale-trained Sánchez is able to pit the male muscle of the film industry against that of the patriarchal Latin household and to illustrate, with bitter tongue-in-cheek, that for every Dolores del Rio there were dozens of Hispanic supernumeraries plugged into playing anything swarthy. In their first job after being put under contract, Josefa and Miguel find themselves hoofing in something called "Jitterbugging Comanches on the War Path."

That Diosa is a surface treatment of an oft-told tale seems almost deliberate. In other words, the telling of the characters’ deeper and more ruthless interactions through dance is part of the concept, the movement equivalent of a picture’s being worth a thousand words. And choreographer Willie Rosario’s sequences, which expand from Latin-ballroom to a brassier American idiom, add an element that’s at once sexy and offputting. That’s particularly true of the incestuous terpsichorean exchanges between Miguel and Josefa, beginning with the heretofore disapproving dad’s slow brush of a hand down the throat and breast of his "niña estúpida." But a later number, in which Josefa’s bed crawl through the film industry takes the form of her shimmying among a series of men’s shirts hanging on chairs, each strategically placed by her broke and increasingly desperate hustler husband, is chilling as well.

The Hartford production is directed by Obie winner Melia Bensussen, who is the producing director of Boston’s Emerson Stage. It boasts a striking sound-stage-based design by American Repertory Theatre veteran Christine Jones: a large white-tiled box hung with stage lights and populated by freestanding door frames and a long, white, revolving rectangular platform off which the characters can plunge into dreamlike dance. Period songs and the buzz of an old projector waft through David Van Tieghem’s sound design. And Catherine Zuber, also an ART regular, supplies some gorgeous, form-fitting costumes, particularly for Karina Michaels’s Josefa, who seems to blossom, in both her dancing and her look, from shy teen to femme fatale before our eyes.

Robert Montano, as Miguel, captures the toe-clicking, tight-buttocked conciseness of the gaucho-costumed male dancer. He also manages, though the character’s a bit of a smoldering cliché, a balance between sinister seducer and self-impressed buffoon. Edmond Genest is more suavely villainous as the studio head taken with Josefa. But the most compelling performance is by Josie deGuzman, who was Tony-nominated for her turn as Sarah Brown in the Tony-winning 1992 revival of Guys and Dolls. She imbues Amber, the willowy but aging submissive wife who nurtures Miguel’s delusions of star power, with a touching dignity. In a thin show lent flavor by dance, she turns even a drunken stagger into a thing of tattered grace.