Neil LaBute gets more abuse than he deserves. I don’t mean as a writer: Aside from his earliest works for stage and screen, “bash” and “In the Company of Men,” respectively, his writing has left me cold. I mean as a moral critic. Selfishness, cruelty, bigotry, envy: They’re all prominent in his stories, without much in the way of sunny endings or salvation. For this, Mr. LaBute’s name has become synonymous with savagery and misogyny. He is tagged the Prince of Darkness.

Yet aside from a grotesque flourish here and there (the baby toss in “The Distance from Here,” for instance), is anything in Mr. LaBute’s world all that fantastical, or even original? Observers say he has a gruesome imagination, but this ignores the fact that in the real world, bad things happen to good folks, and vice versa, all the time. We like to pretend that people don’t have shadows.

“This Is How It Goes,” the latest offering from the very busy Mr. LaBute (it’s his second play of the season, his third in a year), shows the reach of his moral concerns, and a shortcoming of his dramatic skill. Beautiful Belinda (Amanda Peet) has married her high school sweetheart, the track star Cody (Jeffrey Wright). She is white, he is black, they are rich. Into their small-town arrangement bursts an acquaintance from school. We never hear his name. He could be anyone, or, more to the point, everyone. Mr. LaBute and director George C. Wolfe cast this role just right.

“Okay. This is how it goes. I mean, went. This is the way it all played out. Or, is going to. . . right now,” the Narrator begins, fumbling and doubling back on himself. Coming from Ben Stiller, beloved comic everyman, we expect this sort of amiable ne’er-do-well shtick, and welcome it. “Geez, I think I might end up being an unreliable narrator,” he says at the end of his speech, drawing a laugh.

As the story plays out, “unreliable” only begins to describe it. There are little secrets and surprises all throughout this play, so suffice it to say that Mr. Stiller’s character has a very plastic sense of reality. He will tell us later, “You shouldn’t totally trust me,” which draws another laugh. He’s a good guy.

The Narrator chats us up, sets each scene. He meets Belinda outside a Sears in a small American town. She has a pink sweater looped over her shoulders and a mound of Neiman Marcus bags at her feet: the very picture of suburban prosperity. The two of them catch up. Maybe they flirt a little. (The Narrator had the hots for her, and still does.) She and her husband are not rich, Belinda will say later: “Comfortable. That’s what we are.” Mr. LaBute’s ear tuned to catch the hollowness of that phrase – in fact, to capture all the dirty dealing in places where every strip mall has a name like Oakbrook Commons, as this one does.

When the Narrator moves into the apartment above Cody and Belinda’s garage, we learn little about him, but plenty about them. Cody runs a chain of stores, and has done very well for himself, as his father did. Though he was the only black kid in town, Cody enjoyed some advantages that the Narrator did not, being the son of a working-class mechanic. Mr. LaBute wants to emphasize the universal. The Narrator was “just average” when he worked as a lawyer. Cody and Belinda’s marriage is “pretty regular.” She says her husband is “just a normal guy, which means kind of shitty, actually. Completely average and a little bit shitty.”

All of this normalizing sets the table for Mr. LaBute’s real subject, race – how we talk about it, how we think about it, and the yawning gap between the two. You could be ungenerous to Mr. LaBute and say that he makes it easy for himself: Pick the most personable actor in Hollywood, fill your script with the kinds of words no one should ever say, and of course you will stoke controversy. But Mr. LaBute captures the hatred, resentment, and envy on both sides. The key relationship, we come to see, is the way the Narrator and Cody treat one another. And the power dynamic isn’t at all what it seems.

Mr. Wolfe has directed with compressed power, drawing strong work from all three actors. If he hadn’t before, Mr. Stiller proves here he’s an actor of range and serious ability, in film and in theater. Ms. Peet is affecting as Belinda; she has the right instincts, but exceeds her limits once or twice, as in her big speech about why she fell for Cody. Mr. Wright, who has dazzled as Marc Antony, Lincoln in “Topdog/Underdog,” and the vivid Belize in “Angels in America,” must stoop to play a domesticated suburbanite here, and the strain shows. It’s a commanding and mostly effective performance, of course, but at times he seems fidgety, not centered. Mr. Wright deserves a theater full of classics, a steady diet of outsized roles to suit his outsized talent.

Still, with material this potent, the play should be more devastating than Mr. LaBute permits it to be: He dilutes his own message. The Narrator doesn’t know the whole story, Mr. Stiller admits with a smile, even as he shows us only what he wants us to see. To the extent that this technique wins our sympathy for the Narrator, or keeps us guessing about his motives, it’s effective. But Mr. LaBute wants us to ponder the unknowability of people and events, a kind of Heisenberg/”Rashomon” pose. I can imagine how a more straightforward handling of this material would have a much greater impact.

You can feel it – or, more to the point, not feel it – at the end. Mr. LaBute wants to attack the racism that simmers beneath liberal pieties, a message that should go over big at the Public Theater. Dramaturgically speaking, he bends over backward to implicate us in the action. The Narrator ignores the fourth wall, addressing us directly, watching scenes from the aisle, at one point even asking our advice. By the end of the night, you feel that the play has described a social phenomenon, but not that your own worst qualities have been torn from your chest and waved in your face. With Mr. LaBute, this is how it goes.

Until April 10 (425 Lafayette Street, at Astor Place, 212-539-8500).