After overseeing the mounting of three new plays, not to mention the dismantling of his “Three Days of Rain” on Broadway, is there anything Richard Greenberg hasn’t tried this year?

Yes. Ever since Tom Stoppard poked around the underbelly of “Hamlet” via poor Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, playwrights have enjoyed turning classics upside-down and seeing what falls out. With “The House in Town,” his fourth new work in the last 12 months, the gifted but exasperatingly uneven Mr. Greenberg has yoked his trademark curlicues of poetic, hyperarticulate verbiage to the growing trend of fictional revisionism, with mixed results.

Despite Mr. Greenberg’s usual sublime nuggets of dialogue and a commanding central performance by Jessica Hecht,his latest work feels ensnared by its gilded setting in 1929 New York. Mr. Greenberg has explored Jazz Age heartbreak before, in “The Dazzle” and “The Violet Hour,” but his own idiosyncrasies have generally shone through. “The House in Town” represents a more dutiful attempt to adhere to the conventions of the period and of his fictional forebears, but the results never quite shed the smell of mothballs.

Like “Wicked” and the upcoming “Grendel” (which subject “The Wizard of Oz” and “Beowulf,” respectively, to similar inversions), “House” takes a well-known story and conjures up a new narrative from behind the scenes. Mr. Greenberg’s source material? Not Willa Cather’s “My Mortal Enemy,” the novel that reportedly got the project started, but the rags-to-riches tales from Horatio Alger’s dime novels.

These stories – in many ways, a single story told dozens of times – tell how an intrepid young orphan rises up from nothing through, as Alger titled one of his books, “Luck and Pluck.” This usually involves earning the favor of a wealthy older gentleman who paves the way for our hero’s ascension.It has since come to light that Alger’s pre-writing days included being dismissed from a job in the clergy after having sexual relations with teenage boys, and modernday commentators have raised an eyebrow at the mentor-ward relationships depicted in his books.

But what’s going on with that nice, solicitous older man? Why doesn’t he have kids of his own? Why this particular boy? And what does the man’s wife make of all this? These are among the questions that Mr. Greenberg addresses in “The House in Town.” But it’s almost as if Mr. Greenberg and director Doug Hughes had their heads turned by the aforementioned wife, played by Ms. Hecht, and got caught between the story they set out to tell and the story they discovered along the way.

As it happens, young Christopher Valence (Dan Bittner) hardly seems destined for greatness. Rarely does a day go by at the Hammer & Son department store without his breaking some thing, and his ambitions are virtually nonexistent. (“I know I’m pitiful, but I kinda hate being reminded of it all the time,” he whines.)

But his mother was a longtime employee of the store, and the proprietor, a hearty Jewish merchant named Sam Hammer (Mark Harelik), has vowed to not let him flounder. Sam’s efforts to make the boy confront his grief, however, arouse the suspicions of both the other characters and the audience: Are these attentions selfless or sadistic or predatory or all of the above?

Mr. Greenberg is frequently drawn to this era, perhaps because his baroque language sounds less jarring coming from folks in period costumes. (Speaking of costumes, Catherine Zuber’s elegant gowns are every bit the equal of John Lee Beatty’s well-appointed interiors.) Among the six precepts of success that Sam offers young Christopher is this: “Speak as little as possible. Give off an aura of having words in reserve.”

Anyone who’s seen “Three Days of Rain” or “Take Me Out” or any other Greenberg play knows how little credence he gives to that bit of advice. And “The House in Town” revels every bit as much in its refulgent, psychologically revealing arias of description, particularly the ones that come from Amy (Ms. Hecht), Sam’s tremulous wife. Here she is on the appeal of snow:

“The outlines of the buildings disappear and the steel and stone and concrete go all gentle, and you can make brand new shapes in it, even with my little hands.”

Making anything of her own has been an ongoing source of frustration for Amy, who has adopted a vague, slightly romantic fear of marauding anarchists. Amy starts out as a bit of a flibbertigibbet (albeit a very articulate flibbertigibbet, this being a Richard Greenberg play). Much of the later plot developments hinge on her re-evaluating her lot in life after a series of crushing disappointments. Her marriage to Sam, their courtship, the increasing unlikelihood of having a child, and ultimately her own body – Amy’s entire world threatens to constrict to the vanishing point.

In fact, a heavy fog of foreboding hangs over “The House in Town.” The sounds of machinery churn in the background, and a gauche and view-obscuring apartment building is sprouting up across the street. A larger shadow looms as well, courtesy of the early 1929 setting : Those riches will switch back into rags in a few months when the stock market crashes, an eventuality that Messrs. Greenberg and Hughes foreshadow with admirable subtlety.

Mr. Hughes’s success with his actors is less consistent. Mr. Harelik skillfully hints at the ruthlessness Sam would have required to succeed in the anti-Semitic upper strata of the era, as well as the toll such efforts had taken over the years. And despite the jarringly anachronistic feel to Becky Ann Baker’s brassy take on Jean Eliot, Amy’s tell-it-like-it-is best friend, Ms. Baker’s boisterous good humor provides a welcome countermelody to some of Mr. Greenberg’s darker notes. However, Mr. Bittner is a bland cipher as Christopher, and Armand Schultz makes little impact as Jean’s husband.

But “The House in Town” belongs to Amy, a role that Ms. Hecht enlivens with her unique blend of cagey intelligence, fragile physicality, and steely inner strength. From the New Year’s party that begins the play (during which Amy memorably likens the voices in the Italian markets to “fog with splinters in it”) to a blistering final confrontation that draws more directly from Cather’s “My Mortal Enemy,” Ms. Hecht’s breathy inflections and slightly scandalous laugh provide a crucial emotional anchor to the occasionally stage-managed proceedings.

Both the Hammers’ house in town and “The House in Town” could stand to be aired out a bit. Ms. Hecht’s bristling, unfailingly wise portrayal offers just such a relief, like a bracing blast of snow that renders the outlines of Mr. Greenberg’s intriguing but lopsided experiment more, not less, distinct.

Until July 30 (150 W. 65th Street, 212-239-6200)