Richard Vetere’s slice-of-life “Rockaway Boulevard,” now in revival at Theater Row, doesn’t quite know what it wants to be. For a drama about inertia and the tar pits of our pasts, it suffers from too many cliched turns. For a drama about a besieged couple, it does precious little to convince us that the relationship in trouble should be saved. And as a noir, complete with a mysterious stranger, it resolutely refuses to indulge us with a mystery. Competently evoking a neighborhood can’t be all there is to a play – but that’s all there is to “Rockaway Boulevard.”

Johnny Montinelli (Stephen Capone) and his wife, Helen (Rosie De-Sanctis), haven’t got much besides each other. Caught under Johnny’s father’s thumb, they superintend his building and run upstairs to nursemaid whenever the old man bangs on the pipes. Though they both work other jobs (and live in a free apartment), they must scrimp constantly. They can’t ever seem to get ahead, perhaps because Johnny has an unfortunate tendency to plunge their savings into fly-by-night investment deals.

Enter Eddie Paris (Joe Somma), a slick investment liaison wearing a shiny tie. Eddie is doing the rounds, promising to make everybody rich. But when he walks into the Montinellis’ apartment, Helen recognizes him as her old sweetheart from the neighborhood. Tan, wealthy, and with the whiff of freedom about him, Eddie barely has to crook a finger at her before they are kissing passionately on the roof.

Guilt trumps passion, though. Johnny has an ugly temper, cowers before his father, and has trapped Helen in a life she hates. But just like him, she keeps throwing her good money after bad, sticking to her marriage rather than taking the new, even sleazier option.

The play constantly opens doors it never bothers to close. Eddie remains a cipher, and his investments pay off in ways that stretch credulity. At the top of the play, everything aims at a sense of paranoia – phones ring with no one on the line, Eddie misses a late-night meeting in a parking lot. But even potentially explosive secrets just wilt away. All that’s left is an atmosphere of unpleasantness and vague irritation.

Mr. Capone and Ms. DeSanctis are perfectly believable as the couple you would never want to visit. They snipe and whine at each other, only showing affection when they pretend to be celebrities. Mr. Somma, however, seems to have gotten lost on his way to a “Guys and Dolls” rehearsal. Director Charles Messina isn’t the one to make him realistic – he lets Helen hang clothing on the line that’s already dry, and works on a set which doesn’t just shake when the door shuts, it flaps.

***

If Mr. Vetere’s “Rockaway” is in identity crisis, he should get a load of Paul Allman’s bizarre “Kenneth, What Is the Frequency?” now playing at the 78th Street Theatre Lab. Mr. Allman scrambles genre with a slightly shaking hand – at least, I hope it’s shaking. If he was stone-sober and serious when he wrote this, we should all check our medication.

Adapted from his Harper’s Magazine article on the same topic, Mr. Allman examines the weird 1986 beating Dan Rather suffered at the hands of two anonymous assailants. As they kicked him up and down Park Avenue, they kept repeating “Kenneth, What Is the Frequency?” Mr. Allman sees more in that simple phrase than one would have thought possible. Linking it to Donald Barthelme’s work – where else, he asks, could you find “Kenneth” and “What is the frequency?” in such proximity? – he so muddies the waters of coincidence that you almost go along with him.

Barthelme (Lawrence E. Bull) himself shows up as Mr. Rather’s opposite number – conducting a trippy cooking show on squirrel stew and obsessing over hurricanes. Where Dan Rather (an unleashed Toby Wherry) represents fact, Don is fiction. Where Dan’s success and his awesome ego seem impervious to any breeze, Don is buffeted by illness, doubt, and deep reflection.

Mr. Allman clearly has the strength of his convictions, and apparently he thinks he is on to something with his conspiracy theory. But his greatest success lies in his fictionalized portrait of Mr. Rather. Striding around in cowboy boots, snarling and searching for the perfect sign-off, Mr. Wherry’s Rather is a great comic creation. With his black eye as his badge of courage, his Dan Rather wants to be a soldier, an explorer leading us into the, ah, news. “Lead with the eye, Niffleheim!” he screams at a superior.

Director Eric Nightengale’s production maintains the slapdash savor of the Edinburgh Fringe contestant it began as, and what it lacks in budget it makes up for in madcappery. Phillip Douglas and Adam Erdossy provide staunch support in a number of roles – when they aren’t called on to be CBS execs, they murmur weather reports from the sidelines. Fellow chorus member Stephanie Dodd at one point has to embody a cyclone, which she does with a surprising calm.