Raine's ‘Rabbit' Unevenly Cooked

"Rabbit" arrives at 59E59's "Brits Off-Broadway" series with an intriguing pedigree: It's the celebrated first play of the young British playwright Nina Raine. The play caused a stir last year in London, where it won Ms. Raine some awards for "Most Promising New Playwright," which feels just right: "Rabbit" is a promising play, not a complete one.

Ms. Raine, who trained as a director at the estimable Royal Court, stages her own play in its American debut, and her direction amplifies both the strengths and weaknesses of her writing. In its predominant comic mode — in which four young people gather in a bar to celebrate their friend Bella's 29th birthday — it crackles with lively observations. In its awkward dramatic interludes, which concern Bella's dying father, it fizzles.

Yet Ms. Raine's deft handling of her 20-something characters is good theater. Watching these two men and three women bicker, flirt, and confess is compelling stuff.

Bella (Charlotte Randle), who plays both hostess and guest of honor at her own birthday, is so controlling she hasn't even let her friends meet each other until tonight. Pretty but hard-edged, she attracts men, but can't stay with one; she says she'll never marry.

That's bad news for Richard (Adam James), the barrister and would-be writer who dated Bella for five years and still harbors sharp feelings for her. When he turns up at her birthday party and meets the mild-mannered, amiable Tom (Alan Westaway, in a quietly superb performance), another of Bella's exes, he realizes Tom was the "other man" for whom Bella left him. Richard's jealousy — rendered vividly by the writing and by Mr. James's aggressive performance — drives much of the evening's conversation, as he lashes out inappropriately at the other guests in an effort to work off some of his unbearable rage.

Richard's drunken rants — largely about the baseness of women — move the ostensible party into ugly, discomfiting territory. Bella's abrasive friend Sandy (Susannah Wise) doesn't help matters; she delights in stirring the pot. Meanwhile Bella's childhood friend Emily (the touching Ruth Everett) tries to pull the evening back to pleasant sociability, with stories about her work as a doctor in a hospital. The expert way in which "Rabbit" teases out these group dynamics is its greatest strength; we feel both the hilarity and the acute discomfort of being at the bar with a group of acquaintances who've had a few too many.

The naturalism that is so successful in Ms. Raine's writing and staging of the bar scenes is shockingly absent from her treatment of her subplot, in which a wheedling Bella tries unsuccessfully to get her ailing dad to have surgery to stop the advance of a brain tumor. The best thing that can be said about these clichéd and unaffecting scenes is that they are brief.

Likewise, Ms. Raine's attempts at poetic imagery — a candelabra that spins clockwise and counterclockwise, an ill-advised and overextended metaphor about tuning forks — undermine her real gift, which is creating satisfyingly authentic characters and dialogue.

As director of "Rabbit," Ms. Raine shows a knack for eliciting fine ensemble performances from her talented actors. But her staging — which alternates the rather static party scenes with predictably shadowy, peripheral flashbacks — feels a bit hokey.

Nonetheless, putting its clunky trappings aside (and it is remarkably easy to sweep them out of frame), the main action of "Rabbit" shows a playwright with a knack for creating robust characters and an impressive ear for dialogue. Ms. Raine's debut work is a slight one, but it suggests the kind of talent that is cause for excitement.

Until July 1 (59 E. 59th St., between Park and Madison avenues, 212-279-4200).