The young playwright Jenny Schwartz clearly wants to engage our emotions with “God’s Ear,” her new play about a couple whose son drowns in a swimming lake. But her methods — gratingly repetitive language, cold spotlights, absurdist flourishes — prove so distancing that we never connect with the forlorn parents.

The moment that the boy’s mother Mel (Christina Kirk) and father Ted (Gibson Frazier) appear onstage, the play’s droning meter is launched: long, monotonous sentences, repeated with slight variation. Often, the lines progress by trading one shopworn cliché for another in a sometimes-effective attempt to provoke awkward laughter.

In conversation, the droning comes in snippets. In monologue form, it saws the air, back and forth, like a vacuum cleaner. This is difficult language to pull off, but it’s hard to imagine any actor doing more to try to make it work than Ms. Kirk does here. Still, despite her best efforts, the effect of all this sawing is deadening. It makes you think of what might have happened if Gertrude Stein had attended a hip master of fine arts program.

The talking takes place on a dark, unadorned stage made up of panels, which open from time to time to allow characters (real and fanciful) to pop up and down. Characters are lit by spotlight; the atmosphere is cold and blue. It’s meant, I think, to be a landscape of grief, and to some extent, “God’s Ear” suggests grief’s lethargy, relieved only by annoying frictions and troubling fantasies. (In one recurring plotline, Mel imagines that Ted, who travels for business, is having an affair.) But this grief is so mannered that it feels hollow — like a two-dimensional drawing of a heart, etched in blue.

A host of other characters phase in and out — Lanie (played by the adult Monique Vukovic), Mel and Ted’s surviving child; the dumpy Tooth Fairy (Judith Greentree), who drifts aimlessly around the stage; GI Joe (Matthew Montelongo), a life-size action figure who butts into Mel’s thoughts on occasion. In a bar, Ted meets a sports-loving redneck (Raymond McAnally) who offers to trade wives with him. On the road, he meets a good-looking, needy redhead (Rebecca Wisocky) who jumps him.

The problem is that the lengthy, down-the-rabbit-hole digressions don’t add up. The director, Anne Kauffman, does her best to make an aesthetic from these disparate elements, but they still have a flyaway, distracting quality. Their main function, it seems, is to keep Ted and Mel apart, so that by the time they reunite, 90 minutes in, we crave contact between them.

Contact, however, is something Ms. Schwartz declines to provide. Her characters are doomed to slide past each other; their denatured language only further alienates them from each other. Alas, a steady diet of artifice and caricature also alienates the audience. “God’s Ear” seems to take a sort of perverse pride in keeping its audience at arm’s length. Watching it is like watching a play from behind a sheet of plate glass.

Until May 18 (108 E. 15th St., between Fourth Avenue and Irving Place, 212-353-0303).