'Bobbie Clearly': crime, punishment and then what?

As the play tracks his life for eight years, from his incarceration in a mental institution to his attempted return to the community, his motive remains obscure and his nature indecipherable.

That’s both a strength and a weakness of “Bobbie Clearly,” which opened Tuesday at the Roundabout Underground’s Black Box Theater. How clearly, despite Bobbie’s surname, can we ever expect to understand the workings of a mind so profoundly troubled? And yet that understanding may be crucial when a play takes on such a difficult subject.

Actually, “Bobbie Clearly” takes on many difficult subjects, in several styles. The playwright, Alex Lubischer, a student at the Yale School of Drama, seems to have packed his first professional New York production with a sampler of his skills, as if it were a résumé. “Bobbie Clearly” is thus not only a “problem” play about the possibility of rehabilitation but also a family drama about grief and its aftermath and a social satire about a farming community called Milton, not unlike the real one Lubischer grew up in.

In format, though, “Bobbie Clearly” is a mockumentary in which the locals spend a lot of time answering questions about Casey and Bobbie from an unseen, unheard PBS reporter. Among those interviewed are Casey’s earnest mother, taciturn father and gay brother, Eddie; two of Eddie’s doofus classmates; Casey’s friends Megan and Meghan, who think they are just alike but aren’t; and Derek, an enthusiastic glad hand who was, at the time of the murder, Bobbie’s Big Brother.

The interview framework — a tired shortcut for the hard job of developing character through action — has the paradoxical effect of distorting character instead. When people rehearse facts they have no other reason to mention, and perform versions of themselves for unseen interlocutors, they come to seem thick and often foolish.

The playwright’s comic opportunism doesn’t help. When Derek, speaking of the documentary, wonders whether it might get “nominated for an Oscar like ‘Lord of the Rings’,” he is plainly being painted as an idiot. And when the survivors band together to produce a series of “Milton’s Got Talent” fundraising shows that we are roundly invited to mock, the play’s more serious concerns are contaminated with a farcical off-taste.

These are standard freshman problems, the kind the Underground program, now in its 11th season, is intended to help playwrights learn to solve in the most efficient way possible: in front of a sophisticated audience. Even so, I wish the production, directed by Will Davis, achieved better control of its tone, which seems to wander wherever it wants instead of heading beelike toward its goal.

On the other hand, Davis makes the most of the small Black Box space, configured by the set designer Arnulfo Maldonado as an encompassing corn crib. Davis also does right by the play’s moments of highest tension and emotion, neither pushing them toward unwarranted resolution nor batting them away. He thus keeps us engaged in the unanswerable questions it is a dramatist’s job to pose. Why does grief work so differently in different lives? Why is life so impossible for some people?

Questions are not enough, of course. Plays are also about characters, and most of the ones in “Bobbie Clearly” are too contradictory for the cast to act convincingly. That it survives the problem is largely thanks to Constance Shulman, recently seen to hilarious effect in “Barbecue” at the Public Theater and as Yoga Jones on “Orange Is the New Black.” Here she shines as Darla London, Milton’s only police officer and, it appears, only sensible citizen. Though she maintains the flat procedural affect of a just-the-facts public servant, her every utterance is dignified by the struggle to pin down morality in an amoral world.

Even if Lubischer’s rendition of that world too often seems fraudulent, the struggle seems genuine; he keeps pulling the rabbit of real feeling from the hat of artifice. I don’t believe, for instance, that the Bobbie we are shown would act as bizarrely as he does at one of the “Milton’s Got Talent” events, but his doing so forces encounters with Casey’s family that are hugely heightened and riveting as a result.

Such moments justify the Roundabout’s faith in Lubischer and also this big bite of a play. It takes talent indeed to put a line like “That was our mistake, compassion,” into a character’s mouth — but have it stick in our craws.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.