About midway through “Unconditional,” an agitated lowlife shares the stage with a dead confederate and the dead guy’s girlfriend. For motivations that range from intimidation to an unsubtle attempt at closure, he grabs the young woman by the scruff of her neck and shoves her face into the corpse.

The action — literally in your face — feels appropriate for Brett C. Leonard’s tantalizing but ultimately unfulfilling intensity-fest now bellowing its way through a brief run at the Public under the auspices of the LAByrinth Theater. Director Mark Wing-Davey juggles the play’s nine orbiting ne’er-do-wells and occasionally-do-wells with appealing facility, but this class- and genre-hopping dissection of New York City’s racial fault lines succumbs too often to mistaking volume and vitriol for insight.

The play’s opening scene, in which a middle-age black man calmly lynches a younger white man without uttering a word, is in some ways misleading. While numerous sequences involve at least one character making somebody else’s life unpleasant, the only other acts of violence actually depicted onstage are consensual. But with this unnerving prologue — set to Willie King’s blues song “Terrorized,” the first of several superb pieces of music used throughout “Unconditional” — Mr. Leonard makes it clear that the rules of neither morality nor history apply.

Through a series of often overlapping mini-scenes, he then flashes back to the lives of these two men — Newton (Isaiah Whitlock Jr.), a longtime airline employee, and Daniel (Trevor Long), the company’s hatchet man — and a baker’s half-dozen of other New Yorkers. They include Newton’s unfulfilled wife, Tracie (Yolonda Ross), and her brittle best friend, Jessica (Elizabeth Rodriguez); Gary (Kevin Geer), a Westchester man who courts one of these women, and Gary’s wife, Lotty (Saidah Arrika Ekulona). Lotty is first seen at a dive bar having her ear bent by a loquacious heel named Keith (John Doman, the standout in a cast that ranges from riveting to subpar); when Keith isn’t spinning baroque tales of drunken driving and the like, he’s engaging in his own naughty deeds with the help of Spike (Chris Chalk), whom we earlier saw engaging in S&M sex play with a junkie named Missy (Anna Chlumsky).

“People talk cuz they got somethin’ important ta say,” Keith counsels the impulsively chatty Spike, “or somethin’ important to avoid saying.” Mr. Leonard prefers to convey his more meaningful convergences through indirection, through the emotions that are implied or buried under reams of chatter. Many of these scenes have a moderately affecting oil-and-water kick, but the cumulative effect is numbing.

The model here is the crossing paths genre invented by Jean Renoir (“The Rules of the Game”), honed by Robert Altman (“Nashville,” “Short Cuts”), and recently aped by numerous Academy Award aspirants (“Crash,” “Syriana,” “Babel”). The above examples, it should be noted, are all movies and not plays — and “Unconditional” demonstrates how theater could potentially surmount some of the genre’s inherent limitations.

These films’ constantly collapsing degrees of separation often strain credulity, but theater is not tethered as snugly to these narrative complications. “Unconditional” is staged in the round, and set designer Mark Wendland has essentially divided the playing area into thirds: An intricate series of pegboard walls slides open and shut, shifting the audience’s attention among the three spaces. This allows Mr. Wing-Davey to draw connections among his characters without contriving as many unlikely encounters as are often required. As many as five tableaus can be seen at once, leaving it to the audience to piece together the thematic and emotional overlaps. As the nine characters bounce around the stage like so many chess pieces, though, it becomes increasingly clear that their behavior is constrained by Mr. Leonard’s dystopian vision.

“I believe all actions have consequences,” Keith says during his first barroom soliloquy — spoken like a playwright with a deterministic bent. He goes on, however. “I believe all consequences should be ignored if they’re gonna prevent us taking action in the first place.” Spoken like a character tailor-made for setting in motion a playwright’s schematic set of actions and furious reactions. If Keith is the most compelling character in “Unconditional,” perhaps it’s because he has his creator’s number.

Until March 9 (425 Lafayette St. at Astor Place, 212-967-7555).