Photo by Joan Marcus.

Murder Ballad, now playing at Manhattan Theatre Club’s City Center space at Studio II, formerly home to the Pearl Theater Company, isn’t just a whodunit – it’s a whodunwhat. For this slim rock opera, conceived by Julia Jordan and scored by Julianna Nash, keeps its audience in suspense as to not just which character is the culprit, but also which character is the victim.

The answer does come, right on time at show’s end, but suspense never does. What ensues is ultimately a loud tale of cheating hearts, dragged out over eighty minutes. No wonder choreographer Doug Varone has his cast walking around Mark Wendland’s set in circles for the duration of the show – this is the musical equivalent of treading water.

Director Trip Cullman has staged this seen-it-before story around a bar, which is where Tom (Will Swenson) owns a bar and his bohemian girlfriend, Sara (Karen Olivo) hangs out. Eventually, their torrid relationship comes to an end and Sara takes up with the far more stable Michael (John Ellison Conlee), a poetry PhD. Candidate at NYU. Nash’s actual lyrics – “Don’t make me a promise / People take those away / Don’t want anyone to love me / But I do want you to stay” – sound like poetry to Michael coming from Sara, and the two become an unlikely, if not downright unbelievable, couple. He sells out and becomes a successful businessman; they wed and have a child. Then Tom and Sara run into each other again. He’s moved up a few notches in the bar world, owning a trendy Lower East Side club. This is exotic to Sara, now used to a quotidian Upper West Side life of comfort. And right on time, an affair begins.

Murder aims to be a specifically New York story, and narrator Rebecca Naomi Jones adopts a downtown vibe that hearkens back to the New Wave era, when CBGB was more than just an acronym. And Nash, who cribs several songs from her ‘90s alt-rock band Talking to Animals, represents a time when frequenting seedy bars lent itself to a more dangerous Gotham lifestyle than it does now. But most of the show, despite great rock music singing on the behalf of its four stars (especially Conlee), lacks fuel. Jordan has her characters spend an inordinate amount of time lamenting the mundane details of their lives and relationships, particularly the child-rearing portion of Sara and Tom’s life together. And so the show doesn’t build in intensity at all as much as it merely lumbers along.

There are bright spots to be found, of course, starting with Ben Stanton’s intimate concert-style lighting design, and Justin Levine’s strong vocal arrangements. And Nash makes some subtle musical choices, if you can discern them amid all the belting (earplugs might be necessary for some). For instance, I caught Swenson’s Tom infiltrating the folky delivery associated with Michael to lure Sara back when they meet up again. And Cullman’s foursome certainly commits to their threadbare roles. But the few plot points – including the titular event, which does eventually arrive – don’t add up to drama itself. And that’s a crime.

Murder Ballad

At City Center Studio at Stage II, 131 West 55th Street. www.nycitycenter.org Through Dec. 16.

We Live Here, despite its two-hour running time, is a flimsy excuse for a play. Set over the course of one day (and a very long night), Kazan’s story is about family. Specifically, an upper-middle class white family with pretentions of scholarship and musical talent. Write what you know has never resulted in so painful an offering.

Back from Juilliard for her sister’s wedding, Dinah (Betty Gilpin, unconvincing as a 19-year-old) brings in tow her new boyfriend David (Oscar Isaac), who teaches at the school. Except she knows David from before they met at school, back when he was her now-deceased older sister’s high school boyfriend. This does not seem to strike Dinah—or Kazan—as creepy. Instead, it’s the catalyst for a melodramatic climax that finds Dinah’s soon-to-be-married sister Althea (Jessica Collins) screaming confessions into the night.

There’s a whole lot of screaming in We Live Here, which looks and feels like a Nancy Myers movie, if Myers took a sledgehammer to her carefully constructed stories and blithely wealthy characters. Althea screams at her fiancé Sandy (Jeremy Shamos, the one saving grace of the play) and her mother (Amy Irving, already screamed hoarse prior to opening night), while engaging in an icy détente with David. Should you not realize why she’s so unhappy to see David, then my apologies that you have never before read a book, watched a movie or seen a play. If, like most of the audience, you spotted the various second-act reveals in the play’s opening moments, settle in for a long, dull evening.

Kazan reveals no previously unseen talent for writing characters, crafting dialogue or even conjuring up a compelling plot. The highest stakes in We Live Here are the pending nuptials of Sandy and Althea, two characters about whom all we know is that he’s a sweetheart and she has a tendency to turn shrill. We are, however, treated to the unfortunate sight of Collins crawling on the floor of her parents’ living room, pretending to be a “naughty kitty” that Sandy will adopt and take home.

Director Sam Gold, who has given audiences some of the most beautifully nuanced shows of the past few seasons, is capable of much more than his work here would indicate. His direction is jittery, as if he was afraid that stillness would prompt recognition on the part of the audience that what they’re watching is as inorganic as a play about a suburban Massachusetts family who have conversations about hamartia (“fatal flaw,” for those who don’t know their Latin) can be. Oh, and Althea’s dead twin was named Andromeda. Don’t worry if you don’t get the reference; Kazan drives the point home with the subtlety of a hammer to the skull.

Even less subtle is her abrupt ending, which resolves nothing and aims for complexity but merely succeeds at trendy ambiguity. Moments after the family has aired their dirty laundry (more screaming), Althea and Dinah tearily embrace…and curtain. The suddenness of the ending would be more frustrating if we hadn’t been ready to leave these whiny, self-involved characters long ago. They may live there, but thankfully we’re only visiting.

We Live Here
Through Nov. 6, NY City Center, 131 W. 55th St. (betw. 6th & 7th Aves.), www.manhattantheatreclub.com; $80.

Goldfarb doesn’t do much with his topic other than crack wise about living a certain kind of life in New York City. Having the same two actors play all the characters gives the play an off-putting feeling, as if there’s some connection to be made that we’re missing. Should we see more of Claire and Luke in Annie and Nate? Other than Claire and Nate’s shared career as actors, there’s not much similarity between the foursome.

Mostly Goldfarb revels in what not having or what having a baby means to couples. Claire finds herself looking at the wrong wend of 40, and suddenly desperate to reneg on her previous baby agreement with Luke. Instead of being fine sans children, she now craves a baby, which leads her to online shop for baby clothes that she has no reason to actually buy. And Nate and Annie are barely present for one another, more obsessed with blaming their baby for the state of their marriage than in making an effort.

Goldfarb has created what amounts to a stage-bound sitcom: Two couples at different stages in their lives, struggling to Have It All in the Big City. If Dizzia and Keller didn’t play all four characters, you could almost hear the mechanical laugh track, roaring at the whizzing one-liners (Goldfarb does have a way with a zinger, and Dizzia and Keller know exactly what is required to put them over) and “aw”ing at the tender moments.

Luckily, director Sam Buntrock is on hand to bolster the performers’ idiosyncracies, keeping the proceedings somewhat fresh (even as Annie and Nate endlessly talk about how their newborn has deprived them of sleep). Both Dizzia and Keller craft carefully different characters, all artifice and style as Claire and Luke and schlubby, rage-filled exhaustion as Annie and Nate. That Claire and Luke’s story is more interesting than Annie and Nate’s more obvious plot isn’t their fault; who wouldn’t have more fun as the glamorously flawed couple who wake up one day to find that their life of Nobu take-out and Apartment Therapy recipes is an adolescent’s ideal of adulthood?

Dizzia, last seen in Adam Rapp’s humorless The Hallway Trilogy, is a delight here as both Claire and Annie, digging past Goldfarb’s occasionally obvious writing (an actress worried about turning 40! An exhausted woman wondering if she’s a good mother!) to find the soul of both women. And Keller is almost unrecognizable from the first act to the second, as the affected, lock-jawed Luke and then as the goofy Nate. They both make Cradle and All seem heftier than what it really is: a featherweight trifle about parenthood that stylishly paraphrases everything we’ve already heard on the topic.

Cradle and All
Through June 19, New York City Center Stage I, 131 W. 55th St. (betw. 6th & 7th Aves.), www.manhattantheatreclub.com; $80.