Adapting a novel for the stage or screen usually means cutting out extraneous characters and scenes to bring out the central narrative. Adapting a nonfiction book that has no central narrative – as with James Gleick’s book “Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything,” which traces our culture’s obsession with speed and efficiency in everything from the shrinking of television ads and political sound bites to the way we lunge at the “Door Close” button as soon as we’re inside an elevator – requires a bit more ingenuity.

In “Faster,” an endearingly energetic but ultimately unfulfilling ensemble piece, the London-based Filter Theatre company attempts to weave Mr. Gleick’s observations into a story about three urban 20-somethings named Victoria, Will, and Ben, who are played, on an almost empty stage, by Victoria Moseley, Will Adamsdale, and Ferdy Roberts. A year ago, Vic quit her job at a law firm and took off traveling, after having a panic attack in the fiction section at Borders when she realized that she would never read “Paradise Lost.” Returning to London, she goes to see her best friend and former roommate Will, who now lives with Ben, his co-worker at an ad agency.

Ben, an instant-coffee-guzzling copywriter, does everything at turbo speed. He can deliver a catchy slogan in seconds, and he takes about that long, after she walks in the door, to make a play for Vic. Will is also in love with Vic, but he has never told her. An artist and congenital procrastinator, his hobby is baking casseroles; he enjoys the hours of waiting for the flavors to deepen. But patience, while helpful in making casseroles, is apparently not so in urban romance. By the end of the evening, Ben and Vic are together.

Short scenes punctuated by sound effects from two musicians and occasionally a song follow these three through their routines of work and play and incorporate many of Mr. Gleick’s cultural riffs. Will and Ben are assigned to come up with a five-second ad for pension plans. Vic, finding that she needs money to fund her social life – the urban single’s timeless plight – goes to work at a call center, where Mr. Gleick’s research about the pressure for efficiency in such centers become an Orwellian exchange between Vic and her supervisor.

This being a play about the conundrum of modern life, the ending offers no solution: Vic decides that she misses the professional scramble and takes a job at a law firm in New York. When Ben falters in their pensions presentation, Will steps in and gives a bravura performance. Supposedly this is the result of his slow, patient thought process, but in the end he’s promoted, becomes a busy executive, and misses seeing Vic off at the airport.

Are we disappointed for Will and Vic? A little, but not as much as we are for the actors. All three are earnest and engaging performers, but their physical antics are not virtuosic enough to distract from the play’s cursory narrative and mostly banal treatment of its theme. The play added some of its own insights to Mr. Gleick’s, but what it really needs is a stronger commitment to old-fashioned storytelling.

At one point Vic reflects on her experience “getting stuck” in the Australian outback, where she was transfixed by the Aborigines’ relationship to history and the landscape. In their worldview, the past isn’t really past, because it is embodied in the land and always accessible through ritual journeys. A play, too, can take its audience on a journey, and through the power of its story seem to make time stop.

Until June 26 (59 E. 59th Street, between Madison and Park Avenues, 212-279-4200).