Neil LaBute’s plays have come to rely so heavily on the Twist that watching them has become akin to trying a series of keys in a lock. With each seemingly banal bit of exposition, one’s mind begins gauging how easily these tidbits could be slipped into a climactic shocker that completely changes one’s perception of a major character (usually a male, and invariably for the worse).

With “In a Dark Dark House,” his new low-wattage domestic dustup, Mr. LaBute opts instead for three or four Twistlets. These switchbacks, while continuing the author’s dutiful dissection of male villainy, arise a bit more naturally from the text than some of his recent Twists, perhaps because the shock value is amortized more or less evenly among the batch. But this comfort may also stem from the fact that, with one notable exception, they aren’t as interesting. Mr. LaBute adds little to the well-traveled plot device of the slipperiness of recovered memories, and the need to plow through each Twistlet prevents Mr. LaBute and director Carolyn Cantor from developing the central relationship between two damaged brothers into becoming much more than the sum of their secrets.

“In a Dark Dark House” — presented by MCC Theatre, Mr. LaBute’s most frequent presenter — is bookended by two tense exchanges between Terry (Frederick Weller) and Drew (Ron Livingston), who can barely stand the sight of each other. Terry, a security guard and a veteran of the first Gulf War, has been summoned to the psychiatric hospital where his little brother, a former lawyer, is drying out after wrecking his Porsche. (Drew made millions through shady law deals before being disbarred.) He asks Terry to help him flesh out some details of an episode of sexual abuse from his childhood: “I can’t prove it or anything. It’s just true.” Terry, who was friends with the predator in question, is visibly shaken upon hearing of the episode, which coincides with a fateful summer in his own life.

The ramifications of this information come to pass in the third and final scene: Beowulf Boritt’s pastoral set, previously the grounds of the hospital, has become the yard to Drew’s $1.8 million home, where the brothers grapple with the disclosure of diabolical acts both old and new. Drew may be sober, but cleanliness is a long way off, and Terry’s blend of protectiveness and resentment has manifested itself with a vengeance. Between these confrontations is something altogether different, a seemingly incongruous flirtation between Terry and a nubile 16-year-old named Jennifer (Louisa Krause, the only one of the three actors who seems totally comfortable with Mr. LaBute’s self-consciously lowfalutin’ dialogue) at the miniature golf course where she works.

The restless Jennifer has just enough confidence to get herself in over her head as the sexual stakes rise, and Mr. LaBute and Ms. Cantor take their time letting the import of their meeting sink in. This middle sequence is designed to carry a sense of shimmering, Joyce Carol Oates-style menace, but only once or twice do the requisite goose pimples surface. In general, if a character must mime swinging a golf club at another character’s head in order to convey the appropriate air of danger, the author probably has yet to flesh out the scene’s subtext sufficiently.

That golf club bit brings to mind Jason Patric signaling his villain credentials in the early LaBute film “Our Friends and Neighbors” by savagely drop-kicking a lifelike baby doll. (His character, it bears mentioning, was a gynecologist.) Mr. Patric, in fact, was originally cast in the role of Terry, but Mr. Weller does everything within his power to mold the role to his own, more tightly coiled style. Barely able to look his brother in the face, jamming his hands into his sweatshirt pockets to keep them under control, Mr. Weller’s Terry convincingly carries decades of life-clouding bitterness within his reedy frame. Drew’s persona, by comparison, changes drastically in his two scenes, and Mr. Livingston strains to locate the mixture of desperation and duplicity that would reconcile these shifts in behavior.

“Nothing is simple. ‘Simple’s’ not even simple anymore.” That’s how Terry dismisses Drew’s jargon-heavy desire to simplify his life by cleaning himself up. Drew talks the talk of achieving catharsis through emotional honesty, but expedience frequently trumps that impulse. Does the same hold true for Mr. LaBute? Might he one day put away his Twists and let his men and women (particularly his men) grapple with life as it comes, not as it is parceled out by a clever playwright with an eye for a big finish?

He took a few steps in that direction in 2004, when both “The Distance From Here” and “Fat Pig” opened in New York, but subsequent works like “Some Girl(s),” “Wrecks,” and now “In a Dark Dark House” display a disheartening return to slavishly stage-managed bombshells. The alternative is a lot trickier to pull off, though, as Mr. LaBute’s unhappy brothers contort themselves to demonstrate, it can be kept at bay if you try hard enough.

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