If the term “magician” conjures images of a fellow in a dapper suit and top hat, or perhaps flashy Vegas attire, you may be thrown off guard by Steve Cuiffo, the theater artist and illusion designer who co-wrote and stars in “A Simulacrum.” Shuffling onstage in a black T-shirt and casual beige pants, his voice soft and his manner almost tentative, Mr. Cuiffo seems unprepossessing even by the standards of more low-key practitioners of his craft.

During the first 20 minutes or so of this one-act play, he juggles a few clever tricks with exposition on his process and sources, citing a book called “The Secrets of Conjuring and Magic” and a seminal card trickster named Dr. Jacob Daley. The results, unless you’re an aficionado of this stuff, are only slightly more interesting than watching paint dry, despite Mr. Cuiffo’s appealing capacity for dry humor.

There is a method, however, to this meh-ness. Mr. Cuiffo’s co-writer and the director of “Simulacrum” is the playwright Lucas Hnath, who has earned praise for such probing works as “Hillary and Clinton,” “The Thin Place,” “A Doll’s House, Part 2,” and “The Christians.” Mr. Hnath is also something of a co-star here: While he doesn’t appear in the production, we hear his voice throughout in dialogue with Mr. Cuiffo, via an old-fashioned cassette tape meant to recreate the show’s development in workshops held between 2021 and 2022.

“Where is Steve in all this?” we hear the director ask bluntly, after Mr. Cuiffo, who previously worked with Mr. Hnath on “The Thin Place,” wraps up one of his early anecdotes. “I sometimes wonder if amidst all of the quoting and all of the verbatim, and all of the recreation of things that we’re losing you.”

The duration of “Simulacrum” is devoted to finding Mr. Cuiffo, through discussions that can seem more like interviews or even therapy sessions than rehearsal or performance. Mr. Hnath questions his subject about creative and personal challenges and inspiration, inevitably inquiring about Mr. Cuiffo’s spouse, Eleanor, and their young son. Eleanor “hates magic and she hates magicians,” her husband insists, adding, “Every magic show I’ve taken my wife to, she is disgusted by.”

This point will be key in a list of tasks that Mr. Hnath assigns Mr. Cuiffo, who after the play’s first segment is charged with devising a set composed entirely of original material. More specifically, the director requests at least one magic trick that fulfills a personal fantasy or desire, one that involves failure — “not fake failure, like a fake ‘whoops’ moment,” Mr. Hnath warns — and one “built to actually give you a moment of real awe.”

There’s a fourth demand, directly related to Eleanor, and predictably, it provides the show’s emotional climax, as well as its funniest bit. Before that, there are a couple of other intriguing routines — “Simulacrum” is a lot heavier on conversation than actual magic — and talk of family and empathy. The play examines the extent to which Mr. Cuiffo’s identity is enmeshed in his vocation (he’s never had another job, he tells us), and the pleasure and alienation he has derived from it. We learn, too, of some rather dark history behind Mr. Hnath’s own fascination with magic.

If these character studies wouldn’t fit most definitions of exciting, they have a modest, intimate charm. Like Mr. Cuiffo himself, “A Simulacrum” compensates for a lack of obvious charisma with an easy grace that reels you in and, every so often, offers a moment of gentle wonder.