In The Aliens, the last original play of Annie Baker’s to run in New York, the playwright employed what I refer to as the “gotcha moment.” At one point, a character breaks from the measured, elliptical style with which he, like all the others, have been speaking, slowly clueing the audience in to who they are and why they are the way they are, with a blunt confessional statement that turns everything on its head. It is not a stunt, because all that has preceded it and all that follows has been earned. Used once, it packs a visceral wallop. But used several additional times in The Flick, Baker’s latest play which just opened at Playwrights Horizons, this device has now become one of the writer’s hallmark effects, and its overuse, among other choices employed in this play – a well-intentioned misfire that is equal parts promising and frustrating – suggest that Flick has not yet arrived at the final cut stage.

With just three original plays under her belt – Body Awareness, Circle Mirror Transformation, and Aliens – Baker catapulted from promising voice to important talent in an instant. Her singular gifts lie in her observations, usually set somewhere in the small-town New England where she grew up, of socially stunted and broken people. In addition to that gotcha moment, she also employs devices like the awkward pause, hesitations, and repetitions to reflect the tentative and quirky links formed among strangers and the inherent but subtle power structures built within such relationships. Her plays, staged by the ubiquitous and similarly intuitive director Sam Gold (they also teamed up on last summer’s adaptation of Uncle Vanya at Soho Rep), have hit the sensitive bull’s-eye on the intersection between the humor and heartbreak of human folly.

Baker introduces characters similar to the ones we’ve met before in her world in Flick, whose title comes from a run-down movie theater in Worcester County, Massachusetts. There’s Sam (downtown stalwart Matthew Maher), the 35-year-old nebbish who resents that 24-year-old Rose (Louisa Krause) gets the privilege of running the projection booth at the same time he quietly pines for her, and Avery (Aaron Clifton Moten), the 20-year-old cineaste who has taken up work at the Flick while on a sabbatical from Clark University, where his father is a professor. He’s a purist who has been drawn to the local theater because it is one of the remaining few houses to use a 35-millimeter projector, as he hates the trend of digital moviemaking. (The marvelous set designer David Zinn has fashioned the theater in all its dilapidated glory.)

Baker has buried plenty of golden nuggets here among the threesome’s quotidian chores as theatrical custodians and concessionaires. As Sam and Avery bicker over which films from the last decade matter (the former declares Avatar a masterpiece; a horrified Avery avers that there has been no such thing such Pulp Fiction), their subtle verbal and non-verbal tics shade in volumes about what draws each of these outcasts to the Flick. And as the grungy Rose overshares details of her own life to Avery, we learn she isn’t even aware of him after a while; she just craves an outlet.

Flick is a departure from Baker’s earlier catalog in ways big and small. It’s certainly epic in length, if not in ambition, as we’re alerted from the get-go by a musical interlude that runs several minutes in length. And Baker’s rhythmic sensibilities are bar none. But Baker seems to think she has accomplished more than meets the audience’s eye. The fundamental flaw in Flick – and despite the play’s attendant nuance and riches, this is, sadly, both a flawed play and a flawed production in its current form – is that none of the relationships between the three main characters is strong enough to support the themes of loyalty, betrayal and connection for which Baker strives for by play’s end. (Alex Hanna also appears as a couple of minor characters). Several of the play’s most noteworthy, illuminative moments – a one-sided telephone conversation, an impromptu hip-hop dance, several revelatory monologues – stand out as solo sequences rather than reflect any real sense of bonding.

In other ways, Baker seems to distrust her own narrative abilities, and Flick, which runs three hours and fifteen minutes (including just one hurried intermission), suffers from this lack of economy. A first act sequence in which Sam reacts to Rose’s surprising invitation of Avery to a film screening that’s a de facto date is priceless, benefiting from a perfect tableau on Gold’s part, and providing all the shorthand an audience needs about how each character feels; a subsequent scene in which Sam tries to explain his feelings to an unreceptive Rose feels, labored, amateurish and melodramatic. It’s unnecessary and slows down this overlong show. So, too, do late scenes involving the Flick’s transition to a modern, digital cineplex. Simply seeing characters in an ugly new corporate uniform (the busy Zinn’s costume design is appropriately unflattering for all characters involved) implicitly informs the audience what Baker’s characters go on to belabor. This is unfair. You don’t have to cater to the lowest common theatergoing denominator, but if you plan to tax audience patience, the rewards should pay off in dividends.

Flick is also physically clumsy. Gold obscures too much interaction in the upstage projection booth. And while Baker has peppered the play with myriad film-title-dropping, it’s hard to be sure whether they are random references thrown in or if they are carefully chosen films meant to elucidate her characters. What, for example, does Pulp Fiction specifically mean to Avery? We never learn. Why, too, does he whistle “Le Tourbillon” from Jules and Jim? It takes more than scribing two girls and a guy to earn comparison to that masterwork. In Amy Herzog’s The Great God Pan and Samuel D. Hunter’s The Whale, two earlier Playwrights Horizons shows that stand out as highlights of the current theatrical season, entwined literary references to mythology and Moby Dick, respectively, in a far more essential manner.

The cast, however, refuses to be weighted down by Flick’s narrative ambiguities. With perfectly understated physicality, Maher, an alum of this summer’s Vanya, telegraphs his frustration as one of those nice guys who seem invisible to most, and his humor emanates naturally from Sam’s disappointments. Krause is a perfect fit for Baker’s material, nailing every cadence of Rose’s lost, mercenary soul. And with a perfectly calibrated clipped delivery, Moten makes an incendiary New York stage debut. His Avery, still at a loss as to how to properly arm himself against a world of hurt and disregard, is heartbreaking.

And yet for all the careful emotional spelunking done by this superlative cast, Flick leaves their characters lost at sea, intuiting a tighter bond among these three merely coexisting souls than truly exists. For all the film titles thrown about, Baker has omitted the one that unfortunately, feels the most apt: Being There.

The Flick

Playwrights Horizons, 416 W. 42nd St. www.playwrightshorizons.org Thru April 7.

Photo by Joan Marcus

Mare Winningham often plays the overlooked character – the girl left behind, the weary but steadfast wife, the beleaguered mother. Though known for her film work (the least Brat Pack-y cast member of St. Elmo’s Fire, 2 Emmys for her television work), her stage career has been a constant, quieter engagement full of artfully detailed performances. Fortunately, you’re likely to notice the great care she puts into her performance as Flo in Sam Gold’s revival of William Inge’s dated Pulitzer Prize-winner, Picnic, which just opened at the American Airlines Theater. In fact, there were times when I found myself unable to take my eyes off her.

The only problem? My eyes were supposed to be watching the lithe, godlike bodies of Maggie Grace and Sebastian Stan, the show’s two de facto “stars.” Oops.

Grace, in her Broadway debut, is Madge Owens, an eighteen-year-old yearning to taste life and see the world beyond her repressive small Kansas town. And she’s not alone. All the women in her view, including neighbor Helen Potts (Ellen Burstyn) and meddlesome boarder Rosemary Sydney (Elizabeth Marvel), are stagnating, dried up from the lack of male affection. Actually, it’s attention that these women crave, more than love. And so the arrival of the virile but wayward Hal Carter (Stan, in his second Broadway at-bat but first leading role), a childhood friend of Madge’s loyal beau, Alan Seymour (a rigid Ben Rappaport), throws all the women in town into a tizzy – even Flo’s younger daughter, Millie (Madeleine Martin, at times too mercurial for her still-naïve role). And that’s the major problem with Gold’s current production. Hal’s presence hauls water onto these dried-up lives. But he should be setting their world ablaze, instead of creating a destination that’s all wet.

Despite a surfeit of perfectly detailed technical work (including David Zinn’s costumes, Tom Watson’s hair and wig design, Jill B.C. DuBoff’s sound work, and especially Jane Cox’s strategic lighting and Andrew Lieberman’s scenic design), a lot of Picnic’s emotional nuance gets ignored, making the sixty-year-old play feel even dustier than it should. The bad boy-good girl dynamic between Hal and Madge should set off fireworks in Inge’s play, set around a titular Labor Day celebration, each unlocking a hidden reserve of bruising and lust, respectively. But neither has a solid grip on Inge’s dialogue nor their characters’ simmering emotions. Grace keeps Madge on the sweet side instead of emphasizing just how out of place Madge feels, a fact which drives her to hurt Millie and blue-ball Alan, and it deprives the audience of a chance for her and Hal to connect over the conflicted feelings that forbid them to feel as though they belong somewhere. Stan, for his part, whose looks have heretofore been the actor’s stock-in-trade, parades his chiseled body with the knowing hubris of a Chippendale but forgets that it must be undercut with a dollop of regret and self-loathing. Hal isn’t sorry he’s a good-looking guy, but he is supposed to be limited by the fact that he’s never seen as anything more.

Gold’s supporting cast is a mixed bag. Burstyn makes every moment count as Helen, a peek into what Madge’s future looks like if she doesn’t branch out and Cassie Beck, Maddie Corman and Chris Perfetti all project the inner knowledge of people who know their world is flat and walled-in. Reed Birney, always outstanding, is letter-perfect as nebbish shopkeeper Howard Bevans, but he’s outmatched by Elizabeth Marvel, who devours the show-stealing part of Rosemary without fully digesting it. Yes, Rosemary is the most attention-starved of all, but by the time her portrayer launches into the show’s climactic catalytic rant, Marvel has already exploded so that there is no further stratosphere for her to hit. Her fury, paired with Grace and Stan’s lack of spark, lead Picnic to feel as stripped as Hal’s famously torn shirt.

Winningham, however, weaves a coat of many colors for poor Flo, stenciling in a life history of heartbreak, love, and filial piety. Madge and Millie long for a life away from their boring town, and Flo wants desperately for her children to have more than she did. But watching Winningham care for her two children, you see that for Flo, the two of them have also always been all she ever needed.

Picnic

American Airlines Theater, 227 West 42nd Street. www.roundabouttheatre.org. Thru Feb. 24.