At some point playwright Rolin Jones must have wondered, “What happens if I cross a Lifetime movie of the week with “Small Wonder,” the sitcom about a 10-year-old robot?” His answer was “The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow,” a play now wearing its quirk on its sleeve down at the Atlantic. In it, Mr. Jones combines obsessive-compulsive agoraphobia with a hunt for a biological mother, a Mormon pen pal with straight talk about porn. It’s witty and clever, and the current production practically works itself into a lather to amuse us. But still, it’s a play with a pitch instead of a heart.

Written in his Yale days, Mr. Jones’s play feels very much like the sort of whimsy that comes out of graduate school – the strengths tend to be in the secondary characters, and the tone can be glib. But actually, glibness may be Mr. Jones’s forte. Last year, his “The Jammer,” which zoomed inside the cutthroat world of Roller Derby, killed at the Fringe Festival. From start to finish, the show was a snarky lark – and so “The Jammer” succeeded. “Jenny Chow” bogs down, however, in its mawkish family dynamic – or, basically, every time Remy Auberjonois leaves the stage.

Twenty-year genius Jennifer Marcus (Julienne Hanzelka Kim) is brilliant, but lives her life online. Her neurosis might heal if she would just get outside – she could find the Chinese mother who gave her up or date the sweet pizza-delivery guy she’s been friends with all her life. Instead, via the magic of email, she creates a network of bounty hunters, Russian professors, Mormon missionaries, and U.S. colonels (all played by Mr. Auberjonois) to help her ignore her dissolving adopted family. While her frazzled, bossy mother (Linda Gehringer) browbeats her for laziness, Jennifer uses her computer to conduct research, re-engineer missiles for the Army, and deploy her Mormon IM-buddy in search of her biological mother.

But still, Jennifer stalls at the front door. How can she meet a woman in China if she can’t take the trash to the curb? What she really needs is an avatar, so she builds Jenny Chow (Eunice Wong), a robot version of herself. Madcap adventures ensue, from a montage of Jenny flying (including out over the audience), to yoga lessons with pom-poms. But Jennifer has Lessons to Learn, so after sending android-Jenny on her mission to China, she loses touch with her creation. Jennifer also proves to be a touchy, volatile “mother,” and just like her adoptive mom, risks driving her “lovely girl” away.

Director Jackson Gay has plenty of ideas when things are at their zaniest – in fact, the larger the task, the better his solution. But he’s much more at a loss with the smaller gestures, and he leaves Ms. Kim stranded in hysteria for much of the show. Jennifer, though we hear she has stopped eating and has to do complicated rituals just to get to the living room, comes across as shrill rather than damaged, self-absorbed rather than neurotic.

But if Jennifer only plays one note, Mr. Auberjonois is inventing totally new sounds on made-up instruments. Mr. Jones seems to hoard his best material for this guy – from rants against the Thai restaurants in New Haven to an almost incandescent rage at high school science fairs. As the conflicted Mormon missionary, he beams innocently while begging for topless photos, and he tries to eat his own fist when playing the Russian professor. He, not Jenny, is the unguided missile.

For a set, Takeshi Kata designs another series of hollow boxes surrounded by a horizon. The look is familiar from his “BFE” at Playwrights Horizons (and from “The Pavilion” at Rattlestick) but then it works as well here. Mr. Jones should copy Mr. Kata in this: Find his strength and continue to play to it.

Until October 16 (336 W. 20th Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, 212-645-1242).