Is it fair to blame one production for another’s critical shortcoming? Possibly not, but it’s worth wondering whether “Masked,” at the DR2 Theatre, will slow its breakneck pace after “The/King/Operetta” ends its run Saturday at the Barrow Street Theatre. Actor Arian Moayed, who plays Lyndon Johnson in “The/King/Operetta,” also plays one of three Palestinian brothers in “Masked,” a 1990 drama by Israeli playwright Ilan Hatsor that does not feel dated at all. So when “The/King/Operetta”closes, Mr. Moayed will no longer have to follow three “Masked” performances each week with a dash from Union Square to the Village, where the operetta has a 9:30 p.m. curtain.

The story of “Masked” takes place one evening in the back of a butcher shop in a West Bank village where the brothers grew up and where two of them still live. Na’im (Mr. Moayed), a higher-up in the leadership of the resistance, has returned from his mountain camp for a few hours to tend to the business of finding out whether his older brother, Daoud (Daoud Heidami), is collaborating with the Israelis, as the leadership suspects. If he’s innocent, Na’im will save him. If he’s guilty, the sentence is death.

In tan windbreaker and light brown pants, Daoud arrives at the shop after a day of washing dishes in Tel Aviv to help his little brother, Khalid (Sanjit De Silva), a new member of the resistance who’s lured him there under a false pretense. Married and mild, the father of a baby boy, Daoud seems an everyman, a mensch, plodding along as best he can in the middle of a war in which he wants no part.

The baby’s been coughing, he tells Khalid, so Daoud’s wife, Amal, has to take the child to the doctor. “Amal says it’s from the tear gas, from last week’s roundups,” Daoud says.

“I breathed some gas myself,” Khalid replies.

“You? For you it’s like perfume,” his brother jokes.

It’s the sort of casual grim humor born of living in hell, where war is simply a fact of life. So are roundups by the Israelis, raids by the resistance, and bloodshed on both sides, including, recently, an Israeli officer’s shooting of the men’s 7-year-old brother — a horror for which the older brothers, with cause, condemn each other and themselves.

Though each of the brothers has his necessary secrets and lies, it’s Daoud more than the younger men who is unmasked during the course of the play. But this is no melodrama. There is a surfeit of evil and ugliness, and of good and honorable impulses, all around. No one is clean; each is culpable.

“Believe me, Na’im,” Daoud says, “everyone smells. Your heroes, too.”

The play’s intimate glimpse of this untenable life transcends the Israeli-Palestinian conflict even as it illuminates what it’s like to exist, day to day, inside it. That’s why it’s unfortunate that only occasionally does “Masked” sear as it might, and as it should.

According to the program, the play runs an intermissionless 85 minutes, but on Friday night it clocked in at 75 minutes, maximum. At that speed, there’s no opportunity for either actors or audience to be in the moment.

Exposition of the play’s sometimes complex set of events suffers less than emotion, which doesn’t have a chance to breathe. Despite the cast’s evident skill, their reactions sometimes feel false because their characters haven’t had any time to process the information that provokes the reactions. The audience, too, can miss things: humor, for example, and nuances that are clear in the text but utterly lost as they whiz past onstage.

Pace aside, “Masked” has a great deal in its favor: a solid script, a fine trio of actors, a grim set (Wilson Chin and Ola Maslik) that is an ever-present reminder of death, and fight choreography (Christian Kelly-Sordelet) that makes every instance of physical conflict a shock to the system. To reach its potential, those extra 10 minutes might be all it needs.

Open run (103 E. 15th St., at Park Avenue South, 212-239-6200).