To put it ungenerously, they’re cliches: The writer who Hit It Big; the gruff, unlettered father; the rapacious Hollywood producer; the perky groupie. A playwright needs real guts to present such familiar material to the fangs and claws of Broadway.

Donald Margulies is more than gutsy; he is one of the ablest dramatists now writing. In “Brooklyn Boy,” which opened last night at the Biltmore, a novelist finally achieves the literary success he has long craved. Yet Eric Weiss, the author of the best-selling “Brooklyn Boy” – and a Brooklyn boy himself – also has an ailing father, a collapsing marriage, and, scariest of all, overtures from Hollywood.

You’ve heard it all before – listen for echoes of Herb Gardner, Arthur Miller, and, in a different key, Woody Allen – but you won’t mind. Mr. Margulies draws fresh and genuine emotion from each of Eric’s encounters. The playwright, like the novelist, and the novel’s protagonist, hails from a Jewish family in Brooklyn. In interviews, Mr. Margulies has insisted that his play isn’t autobiography, which may be the case. The play has a broad appeal in any event: Eric’s story rings true no matter where you came from, or how. “Brooklyn Boy” is expertly crafted – a modest, welcome success.

The producers at Manhattan Theatre Club have reunited Mr. Margulies with Daniel Sullivan, and who can blame them? Four years ago, Mr. Sullivan’s production of “Dinner With Friends” won the playwright a Pulitzer. Last summer, his revival of “Sight Unseen” (here at the Biltmore) made the case that it might be a major American play. “Brooklyn Boy” shows more of the special kinship between this playwright and director. Both are graceful minimalists, where satisfying the ego takes a backseat to unspooling the story.

Mr. Sullivan combines the taste of Mario Batali with the grace of a particularly accomplished ninja. His moves in these two-hander scenes are simple, elegant, unforced – better, he leaves no fingerprints. You wouldn’t know, to look at one of Mr. Sullivan’s productions, that he had directed it. But if the story compelled your attention, and the actors were uniformly strong, you’d have a pretty good idea.

Mr. Margulies’s script begins in Maimonides Hospital, where Eric (Adam Arkin) has gone to visit his dying father (Allan Miller). Crucially, the show begins a moment before the script does. Mr. Sullivan has Eric walk onstage and look up at the yellowish brick apartment building, the kind you see everywhere in Brooklyn as it unfolds towards Coney Island. Scenic designer Ralph Funicello uses sliding screens and furniture to shift the action from scene to scene, but except for when Eric is far off in Los Angeles, that facade can still be glimpsed behind the action, overhead. The former Brooklyn boy may not want to acknowledge it, but home is always at his heels.

Eric’s father Manny isn’t much of a reader, and the two aren’t especially close. He’s happy, more or less, to hear that Katie Couric interviewed his son on the “Today” show, but seems far more impressed by how he got there. “Wow. A Lincoln all to yourself? They could’ve paid your cab fare, it would’ve been cheaper. They feed you breakfast?” The first-rate Mr. Miller knows how to find Manny’s laughs without condescending.

Eric gives his father a copy of the book and warns him that he’ll recognize a lot of it. Just how much of the book is autobiography, and how much is pure invention, is a question that will recur throughout the play. In the cafeteria, Eric encounters an old friend, Ira (Arye Gross), who is delighted to see the big-shot writer and assures him he doesn’t want money for using his life in print that way.

Here again the play risks triteness. Eric did everything he could to escape Brooklyn, but Ira has stayed home – moved into his parents’ house, in fact. He has a bunch of children; Eric has none. Ira has embraced his Judaism, even as Eric has rejected his. Fortunately the superb Mr. Gross makes the play’s most threadbare device the richest thing in it. To judge by his biography, he is a newcomer to New York. There are more wonders in regional theater than are dreamed of in our provincialism.

Eric’s wife, Nina (Polly Draper), is leaving him. She is a writer, too, one nowhere near the Times bestseller list like her husband. Ms. Draper grounds Nina in an aching believability. There doesn’t seem to be much chance for her to be happy, no matter what she and Eric do. Still their relationship remains the thinnest part of Mr. Margulies’s story. Troubles are hinted at but never ful ly explored.

The action shifts to Los Angeles, which Mr. Margulies seems to regard as a carnival of temptations. First Eric invites an eager, buxom, scandalously young groupie (Ari Gaynor) from a reading back to his hotel room. The terrifically funny Ms. Gaynor benefits from one of her playwright’s greatest gifts: He always has one more trick, usually a punchline, up his sleeve. Even as the hotel-room encounter spins out of control, she thinks to ask the great man for his autograph.

Hollywood brings out the worst of Mr. Margulies’s cliche tendencies. A producer (Mimi Lieber) who wants to film his book tells Eric she loves the script but just wants a few teensy changes. Every time an episode of “The Simpsons” mocks a producer, she says the same thing, usually with the same peppy, torqued-up voice. The appearance of Tyler Shaw, the flagrantly goyish movie star who wants to play Eric’s alter ego, saves the Hollywood scene. Kevin Isola is just broad enough as a dumb movie star who, beneath the blond highlights, turns out to have a brain after all.

Mr. Arkin weathers Eric’s tribulations with a mix of bewilderment and chagrin. He can grow impassive here and there, a kind of opacity that makes deep sympathy difficult. I can imagine a more affecting Eric, but maybe not one better suited to catch the play’s tone of quiet melancholy. The Brooklyn boy changes by the end of the play – he has a kind of growth – but no radical conversion: The road back to Brooklyn isn’t the road to Damascus. Mr. Margulies may employ familiar materials, but he leaves you with a rare sense of disquiet.

Until March 27th (261 W. 47th Street, between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, 212-239-6200).