Cotter Smith and Joely Richardson in 'Side Effects.'

The unhappy couple, as Tolstoy didn’t comment but probably should have, can be awfully entertaining. It’s the fount from which innumerable memorable theatrical pairs have sprung: Romeo and Juliet, George and Martha, Next to Normal’s Dan and Diana, to name just a few.

In the new two-character drama Side Effects, which opened at the Lucille Lortel Theatre Sunday night in an MCC Theater production, the playwright and screenwriter Michael Weller attempts to add another duo—Hugh and Melinda Metz, a local burgher and his frustrated wife, living in an unnamed, undistinguished Middle American city—to that list. He doesn’t succeed.

Unless, that is, Mr. Weller was attempting some avant-garde theatro-nuptial commentary on failed marriage as failed art. On that level, things might make sense, even if they don’t quite entertain: Side Effects starts out with promise, soon turns tedious and eventually becomes unbearable. The good news is that audience members are bound to it not ’til death do them part, but for only about 90 minutes.

The play takes place in five sequential scenes, all staged in the living room of a comfortable upper-middle-class home. In the first, we find Melinda, known as Lindy (and played by Joely Richardson), sitting alone in the dark, smoking a cigarette. Hugh (Cotter Smith) comes home, irritated but composed—he’s the sort who is always composed—angry with Lindy for having left an important dinner party “in the middle of the main course, not a word to anyone.” We quickly learn that Hugh is the button-down scion of a locally important family; that he has political ambitions, which are being cultivated by a local power broker, the paterfamilias of a locally even more important family; that Lindy is the free-wheeling, creative sort, a liberal in a conservative town, and is apparently bipolar and, as such, on (or sometimes willfully not on) a variety of psychotropic meds. (There is more than a small echo of Next to Normal here, though without the Pulitzer-winning musical’s intensity or deep emotion.)

The dialogue in this opening section is sharp and spiky, well-crafted and insightful, and the relationship between the two characters is both convincing and intriguing in its exasperation: how did these two end up together, what’s going on beneath the surface, and, most compelling, how must the pressures of public life amplify the usual discontents and fissures in a relationship?

The actors are well-matched. Ms. Richardson, of the stage-and-screen Redgrave-Richardsons, is lately well-known for her TV and film work; here she is Waspishly sexy, and dry and droll. You can see how the all-American son of a Midwestern industrialist would fall for her. As directed by David Auburn (best known as the playwright who wrote Proof), Lindy’s playful and prickly personality rubs up appealingly against Hugh, who retains a spark of a humor and awareness beneath his dutiful, Republican exterior. (Mr. Smith treads this territory skillfully: Hugh is a close relation to his similar recent parts in Next Fall and Kin.)

But as the play moves forward, all the promise of that first scene dissipates. One problem is Ms. Richardson, who, at the preview I attended, repeatedly if slightly fumbled her lines. (Oh, screen actors.) She is also—and this may be Mr. Auburn’s fault as much as her own—unable to effectively differentiate between wry, snarky Lindy and manic, out-of-control Lindy. It’s disconcerting to suddenly realize, well into a scene, that the side of a character you’d taken for the clear-eyed truth-teller is in fact the unbalanced ranter.

But the larger problem is the development of Mr. Weller’s script, which rather than exploring the questions raised by the first scene instead uses a series of increasingly convenient revelations to move his story forward with neither credibility nor insight.

The first of these revelations arrives at the end of that first season, when Lindy surreptitiously returns a phone call from a long-lost boyfriend who has only lately reappeared in her life. (“How is it you always stumble into my life when I’m wide open?” she asks his voice mail.) Then we learn that aides to the power broker trailed Lindy and are preparing dossiers on her. There is the son sent off to school without mom’s input; a manic rampage that destroys the living room but is seemingly unmotivated by the story; affairs and counteraffairs; and the blindsiding announcement, almost Giulianilike, of a divorce. And there is, with thudding inevitability, a phone call from a hospital while Hugh and Lindy are in the middle of a fight, with the news that the sons, on their way home from school for a perfect-family dinner (of which photographers have been notified) have had a car accident.

As you roll your eyes, you remember: there are a lot of unhappy couples in soap operas, too.

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There's only one problem with this carefully marketed plan: Race, Mr. Mamet's sure-to-be-great new play, isn't great at all. It's not even very good.

The curtain comes up at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, where Race opened Sunday night, on a stylized Santo Loquasto set of a looming book-filled law-firm library, plopped like a diorama—this is an educational lesson, after all—in the center of an otherwise bare all-black and starkly lit stage. Four actors—two middle-aged white men, one middle-aged black man and a younger black woman—are in that conference room, awkwardly already in mid-conversation. (Mr. Mamet directs his play, yielding pacing and placement often as stilted and abrupt as his famous dialogue.)

The well-known and powerful billionaire Charles Strickland (misplayed by Richard Thomas, who never seems either powerfully angry or powerfully dismissive) is in the lawyers' office, attempting to hire them. He has been accused of raping a young black woman in a hotel room, which he denies. Jack Lawson (an excellent James Spader, who it could be argued has been training his whole career for this role) is the cynical and brilliant litigator he wants to represent him, and Henry Brown (David Alan Grier) is Lawson's black law partner, which makes this firm a good choice for Strickland, considering the accusation. Susan (Kerry Washington) is a young black associate at the firm, the novice to whom Lawson can pontificate—and to whom Mr. Mamet can make his arguments. It is she who, as the wobbly third leg of the firm, will be the center of Mr. Mamet's usual swirl of possible treachery and double-crossing.

The first act has Lawson and Brown discussing whether they want to take Strickland's case, and, with Susan, whether they think he's innocent or guilty. (Don't lawyers specifically not do that?) This provides Mr. Mamet the opportunity to put in his characters' mouths—especially Lawson's—his theories about guilt and innocence, truth and perception, back and white. All black people hate all white people, all white people are guilty; everyone feels all sorts of guilt and shame, truth is flexible and a smart lawyer's skill is to manipulate all that.

It's all rendered with Mr. Mamet's expected verbal pyrotechnics, but the inherent pleasure of virtuosity aside, the fireworks fall flat. The play is reveling in its subversive political incorrectness, but political incorrectness hasn't seemed flamboyantly subversive at any point in this new century.

In the second act (the roughly 90-minute play includes what the Playbill notes is a 12-minute intermission), things make less sense. When it turns out Strickland's accuser is a prostitute, Lawson announces he won't reveal that fact to the jury. (Huh?) When it appears that associate Susan has sold out the defense's strategy to prosecutors, Lawson's partner, Brown, reminds us that he never liked her, pulling her college thesis from his desk drawer (conveniently handy!) and announcing its title, "Structural Survivals of Racism in Supposedly Bias-free Transactions" (conveniently suspicious!).

When word comes that the hotel maid has amended her testimony to police, undermining Lawson's planned defense, we're to understand that it's a false statement, proof that the prosecution is onto his strategy. But when word comes that the responding police officer has found a lost page of his report, also undermining the defense, this revelation is presented as an honestly lost-and-found document (confusing!).

Race is an intriguing play, and far better than Mr. Mamet's last Broadway effort, the mediocre sitcom November. (It's also much better than "Keep Your Pantheon," the main piece of The Two Unrelated Plays By David Mamet, which played at the Atlantic earlier this season.) Ultimately, this is not thought-provoking Mamet so much as a parody of it.

IN THE LAST CARGO CULT, MIKE DAISEY'S most recent monologue, which opened Monday night at the Public, Mr. Daisey talks about traveling to the small, primitive South Pacific island of Tanna to visit a culture almost entirely different from our own, one of communal living, with no private property and—more important—no money. He's going there to witness John Frum Day, an annual religious celebration of the island's John Frum's cargo cult, a religion based on Tanna's brief exposure to American servicemen during World War II. On John Frum Day, the people of Tanna celebrate by recounting U.S. history—or at least their version of it—in song, dance and theater.

Mr. Daisey is a funny, insightful, magnetic storyteller, and his travelogue—tales of flying to Tanna on a ramshackle plane, eating local delicacies, sleeping with a baby pig—are hilarious. They're also not really the point. Mr. Daisey is concerned with money, how Tanna survives without it and how much we rely on it. He's angry about the financial crisis; he's angry at the bankers who created it; and he's particularly angry to realize that the financial system has us all interconnected, that he can't revel in the bankers' misfortune because what's bad for them is bad for him, too.

He weaves several stories together—of the Tanna trip; of arriving at college and first being exposed to rich people; of all the "awesome stuff" in the world he wants and which require cash—to make us think about the role of money.

And you do think about it, for the time you're in the theater. Thinking about money is like thinking about air; you don't need to, because it's everywhere. More likely, what you will thinkk about Cargo Cult after you walk out of the theater is what a pleasure your last two hours have been.

TO SEE SO HELP ME GOD!, A LONG-LOST and very funny 1929 backstage comedy being presented by the Mint Theater Company at the Lucille Lortel, is to wonder why this one was forgotten while so many boring old backstage comedies—The Royal Family, currently at the Manhattan Theatre Club, for example—were remembered.

So Help Me God! is a witty and goofily screwball old-fashioned three-acter written by Maurine Dallas Watkins, who a few years earlier had written the play Chicago. (The Kander and Ebb musical arrived a half-century later.) It was set for an October 1929 opening, but the Great Depression interfered. This production, with a script adapted by Mint artistic director Jonathan Bank, who also directed, is essentially its premiere.

It's an All About Eve story, but one in which Eve is outflanked by Margo. Kristen Johnston is fantastic as Lily Darnley, the domineering diva, a 6-foot-tall force of nature in dramatic deco gowns (the costumes, I should disclose, are by my friend Clint Ramos) who casually molds people and situations and the plot of the play-within-a-play to fit her needs. My Girl star Anna Chlumsky is less strong in the Eve part, flat and insufficiently steely as she plots her rise. But the rest of the cast ably supports, especially Catherine Curtain as Belle, the blowsy broad in the company, and Jeremy Lawrence as the put-upon stage manager.

The characters are deadly serious in their backstage machinations, but, for us, it's a fun (if slight) night at the theater.

MELISSA JAMES GIBSON'S THIS, WHICH OPENED at Playwrights Horizons last week, is poorly named but impressively written, a smart, funny and affecting play about four old friends (and one sexy new addition to the group) who wrestle with changing lives as they grow up and, as people do, grow both together and apart.

Jane (Julianne Nicholson), Marrell (Eisa Davis) and Alan (Glenn Fitzgerald) were classmates at an unnamed but elite school; they've remained tight for 15 years. Tom (Darren Pettie) was a staffer at the college; he's married to Marrell and together they have a newborn son who won't sleep for more than 15 minutes at a time. Jane has a daughter, too, and a husband who died a year earlier; Alan is gay and single and wittily self-lacerating. Finally, there's a Jean-Pierre (Louis Cancelmi), a handsome French doctor-without-borders ("I always think that makes it sound like he has a messy personal life," Alan snarks), who becomes enmeshed with the group as Marrell tries to fix him up with Jane.

Marrell and Tom are drifting apart, their distance exacerbated by the stress of young parenthood. Jane is exhausted by the world's sympathy and pity, and by the idea she had an ideal marriage until her husband got sick. Alan is lonely and bored and desperate to do something useful in the world. Jane and Tom fall into a brief affair. Tom doesn't want Marrell to know because he can't deal with the repercussions; Jane doesn't want Marrell to know because she can't stand to hurt her. There are kinds of unhappiness, Marrell tells Jane at one point, "personal, marital, professional, existential or interdisciplinary." Her own, she continues, is interdisciplinary. All of their unhappiness is interdisciplinary.

The unhappiness is also honest, and real, recognizable to us all if not in specifics then at least in spirit, intelligently rendered in sharp and wise dialogue. Together with another Playwrights production, Circle Mirror Transformation—which after being twice extended in the fall returns to Playwrights' upstairs space, the Peter Jay Sharp Theater, next week—it's one of the best new dramas of the season.

THE NEW A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, which opened at the BAM Harvey Theater last week, is every bit as good as you've heard. What more is there to say? It's the classic and powerful Tennessee Williams play; Cate Blanchett gives a mesmerizing performance as the delusional faded Southern belle Blanche DuBois, and Joel Edgerton is hunky and duly animal (if, sometimes, a bit too Brando-sounding) as Stanley. The Liv Ullman-directed production, originally staged at the Sydney Theatre Company, is only here through Dec. If you can still find a ticket, go.

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