Watching the Transport Group’s production of “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs,” you can feel how much the director Jack Cummings III wants to uncover the life in William Inge’s musty 1957 melodrama. But throughout the nearly three hours of well-intentioned, decently-acted domestic scenes, the characters can’t wriggle free of Inge’s predilection for histrionics. The play’s Big Emotional Moments loom as large as the staircase that dominates the set, rising dramatically to a second story where the titular darkness lurks.

Such pat, played-out metaphors dog this tale of the traveling harness salesman Rubin Flood (Patrick Boll) and his uptight, well-meaning wife Cora (Donna Lynne Champlin). As the play opens, Rubin and Cora are fighting (yet again) over Rubin’s cowboy yearning for life on the open road, a choice that leaves Cora alone in town to raise their two maladjusted children — shy, teenaged Reenie (Colby Minifie) and disagreeable little Sonny (Jack Tartaglia), a mama’s boy with a quick temper.

There is little fresh, though, in Rubin and Cora’s recriminations and attacks, or even in Rubin’s threat to leave. The image of their two children, lingering in the background of the fight behind a translucent scrim, is a striking one, but neither Inge’s script nor Mr. Cummings’s direction pulls us into the children’s pain. These are rather unrealistic, stagey children, who might have seemed fresh 50 years ago, but modern film and television have trained us to expect acutely lifelike children. The production’s dated feeling, however, comes not from the setting — a small town in Oklahoma in the 1920s — but from the stilted, stylized dialogue. This is the sort of play where, at any moment, a character may burst out with some melodramatic declaration about the nature of life. Part of the difficulty is that the characters seem uniformly prone to overstatement. Laconic Rubin offers as many pronouncements as high-strung Cora.

Arriving in the second act, Cora’s sassy sister, Lottie (Michele Pawk), and her dry husband, Morris (Jay Potter), introduce a welcome note of humor — a lighter tone to counter the moaning and hand-wringing of Cora’s high-pitched household. Even lively Lottie and tell-it-like-it-is Morris, however, are soon converted into figures of quotidian tragedy: Inge saddles them with a marriage as precarious as Cora’s and Rubin’s. Most awkward of all is a subplot involving a fancy-dress party and Reenie’s date, an out-of-town recruit named Sammy Goldenbaum (Matt Yeager). A long digression into Sammy’s life feels odd, and becomes even more perplexing when lighthearted Sammy, too, is turned into a tragic hero.

The predictability and sentimentality of “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs” would sink this production straight away, were it not for the strength of some of the performances and directorial choices. Mr. Cummings wisely stages the play in sleek, modern fashion, on a stage devoid of tchotchkes or doilies — and even, for the most part, of furniture. Establishing the action in a kind of landscape of memory is wise, but Mr. Cummings’s use of recorded voiceovers to suggest a kind of haunted echo of the past seems excessive. Excess, however, is what “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs” is all about — too many tragedies, too many words, too many characters, too many disclosures, too much angst. Inge pummels us with sad stories, yet the feeling the onslaught provokes is not empathy — but agitating, unremitting frustration at a set of characters that rush to melodrama at every turn. Much as Mr. Cummings clearly wishes it, this is not the production that will force a reconsideration of Inge’s diminished reputation.

Until April 21 (220 E. 4th St., between avenues A and B, 212-352-3101).