The first thing we see in Jez Butterworth’s quietly enveloping “Parlour Song” is a series of imploding buildings. This video footage,
projected on the rear wall of the stage, is a sort of highlights reel that the demolitions expert Ned (Chris Bauer) is sharing with Dale
(Jonathan Cake), his genial next-door neighbor and the play’s narrator. Dale, who owns a handful of car washes, voices intense jealousy
of Ned’s job: “Do you have a big plunger? You do, don’t you? … You do. I knew it. I wash cars. Cars, Ned.” But then Dale, who has lots of hair, even more muscles, and still more confidence, can afford to compliment Ned, who has none of the above.

Dale’s banter, with its jovial insinuations of virility, carries with it a faint but unmistakable tinge of competition. All the same, “Parlour Song” represents a newly sedate and ultimately deflating approach both for the author, previously one of England’s edgier young exports, and for his frequent New York collaborator, the director Neil Pepe. Mr. Butterworth made a (literally) splashy bow in 1995 with his Tarantino-goes-rockabilly slaughterfest “Mojo,” in which a character with a pointblank gunshot wound to the head asks, “How much blood do you have to lose before you die?” (He quickly finds out.)

Since then, though, Mr. Butterworth has gradually scaled back on the gore: 2003’s “The Night Heron” yoked its dark tale to an undercurrent of poetic longing, and now the playwright has shifted his attention almost entirely to the stealthier, more insidious evils that men and women do. Like Ned’s smoldering piles of rubble, these characters collapse inward.

Ned, an inveterate pack rat, has become preoccupied with the disappearance of random objects from his home: gold cuff links, a cricket bat, a stuffed badger. As the size and significance of the missing objects escalate, Ned begins to suspect his wife, the vaguely dissatisfied Joy (Emily Mortimer), of pinching them. Between scenes in which he battles with this specific doubt as well as a more nebulous malaise, fending off sleep until he’s “jumpier than a crow on roadkill,” his pal Dale gradually peels back the layers of deception and longing that have crept over this quiet suburban town.

The local shopping center is slated to be torn down and, we are told, an earlier demolition resulted in the subsequent building of 78 identical homes. One of Dustin O’Neill’s video projections (the only one in all of “Parlour Song” that is more engrossing than distracting) is an animated ocean of similarly interchangeable residences. Ned and Dale live in mirror-image duplicates of the same home, which are the same as those other 76, and viewers may feel a similar sense of déjà vu as the connections between these characters tighten to the breaking point.

The setting bears a strong resemblance to such stateside blighted-suburbia titles as “Little Children” and “American Beauty,” while Mr. Butterworth’s trio, with its roiling sexual jealousy and its potentially unreliable narrator, could have popped directly out of Neil LaBute’s poisoned inkwell. (As with so many of Mr. LaBute’s works, “Parlour Song” settles into its rhythms most comfortably when there’s no female in sight.) And without giving too much away, a vague Harold Pinter vibe from both earlier works has blossomed into full-blown homage, with one particular mid-career Pinter play getting special attention.

But then the tone shifts, paving the way for a resolution that is both more and less mysterious than the buildup had promised. As Ned tries desperately not to think the worst about Joy, his efforts speak with a forlorn eloquence about what we allow ourselves to believe about those we love — and how those efforts can encourage or even create the very things we fear most. While Mr. Cake’s garrulous narrator draws the viewer into this newly volatile circle of friends, it is Mr. Bauer (also a veteran of “Mojo” and “The Night Heron”) who provides its emotional fulcrum, as his Ned balls himself into a sweaty bundle of self-loathing, hostility, and poignant tenderness.

His efforts to regain Joy’s attention include a new exercise regimen, and Mr. Pepe uses his workout sessions with Dale both as comic relief from the increasingly oppressive atmosphere and as a telling illustration of Ned’s beta-male status. (“Parlour Song” also sets a record among recent New York productions by holding out for an entire hour before stripping the chiseled Mr. Cake down to his skivvies.) And one nifty staging gambit near the end draws upon Robert Brill’s deceptively spare set and Kenneth Posner’s midnight-hour lighting to illustrate Ned’s cluttered state of mind.

But this compelling visual doesn’t offset Messrs. Butterworth and Pepe’s rushed ending, their lazy use of interlaced monologues at the play’s conclusion, or the tedious devices (portentous chapter titles visible on the back wall, those fairly generic video projections) that make up much of “Parlour Song.” Nor can it make up for their muddled conception of Joy: It’s not until a late dialogue with Mr. Cake that Ms. Mortimer is offered much to do beyond striking incongruously noirish femme fatale poses.

In theory, Mr. Butterworth’s maturation from a blood-and-banter genre artist to an empathic chronicler of fragile modern-day relationships is to be applauded. But with his plot complications piling up before abruptly falling away, leaving unanswered questions and unresolved anxieties, his mojo has left him in more ways than one.

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