Nilo Cruz, whose Pulitzer Prizewinning “Anna in the Tropics” (2003) achieved a lush if occasionally strained blend of family melodrama and poetic rhapsody, once again thrusts the two styles together in “Beauty of the Father,” this time far less harmoniously.

Federico Garcia Lorca (Oscar Isaac) roams around Mark Wendland’s appealing set as a sort of droll guardian angel, but Mr. Cruz and director Michael Greif appear to have been inspired by a more modern cultural export – the telenovelas of Mexico and Brazil, with their sweaty embraces and evenly spaced plot revelations.

After the death of her mother, the headstrong Marina (Elizabeth Rodriguez) hops a plane from America to Spain in search of Emiliano (Ritchie Coster), her artist father who abandoned his family at an early age. Emiliano is eager to make up for lost time and invites Marina to join him in the seaside villa he shares with a new woman, the tempestuous Paquita (Priscilla Lopez), and a boyish Moroccan named Karim (Pedro Pascal). As Marina learns, though, emotional and sexual boundaries prove fluid in the Granada heat.

Mr. Greif establishes a boisterous, towel-snapping mood that quickly escalates: By the beginning of Act II, just about everybody has made out with, pointed a gun at, or danced with everyone else. All this is punctuated by Lorca’s wisecracks (sometimes with the help of a puppet) and florid aphorisms (“Your past with your daughter never made it to the future, so you might encounter that unforeseen tear”).

Mr. Isaac, the recent Juilliard graduate who was so winning as the caddish Proteus in this summer’s “Two Gentlemen of Verona” in Central Park, adds an impressive Lorca imitation and a beguiling flamenco solo on guitar to his repertoire. Is there anything this young man can’t do? Well, turn Mr. Cruz’s Lorca into a plausible character, for one thing. Messrs. Cruz and Greif clearly want Lorca to serve as a symbol, an icon of doomed beauty (he was shot at the age of 38 by nationalist troops, presumably for his homosexuality and his Communist sympathies), but Mr. Isaac is asked to shoulder too much narrative weight, particularly during an ill-advised monologue devoted to Lorca’s assassination.

This insistence on brooding atmosphere over dramatic logic – Lorca, who thus far had been visible only to Emiliano, at one point strolls the beach with a white balloon meant to signify the moon – pervades and ultimately dooms “Beauty of the Father.” Marina could be standing in for Mr. Cruz when she says, “What counts is the sound of the words. The way the words sound like music.”

Careful what you wish for, Marina. Less than two minutes later, Paquita explains how she loves Emiliano both “like that light that is full of respect for life” and “the same way I admire something inside a glass case in a store,” even though “for me sex is like a summerhouse I closed up for the winter.” This is all in one speech, mind you. Mr. Cruz’s onslaught of similes, coupled with Mr. Greif’s indifferent pacing, engulfs any narrative momentum here and in at least a half-dozen other places.

Some of this energy could have been better spent illuminating the artist, father, and lover whose lusts fuel the drama. Emiliano is a cipher, a man defined solely by his desires. The silky-voiced Mr. Coster is left high and dry from the very first scene, and he is not helped by Ms. Rodriguez’s fidgety, disjointed performance as Marina.

“Anna in the Tropics” spotlighted Mr. Cruz’s gift for depicting sensuality onstage, but for all the grappling on display here, only one interlude between Ms. Rodriguez and Mr. Pascal generates any real sparks; the other pairings feel dutiful, dictated by a playwright’s machinations.

“Artists sometimes tap into the mystery of all these things,” Lorca intones during one of his many reveries. Yes, and sometimes they’re content to connect the narrative dots, embroider around the edges with pretty language, and leave the mystery untapped.

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