“Do I know you?” “Do you see me?” These are crucial questions posed in this ninety-minute (without intermission) comedy of ideas, and if they resonate with you, then you will find Bottom of the World, an exploration of love and loss, a fascinating theatrical and intellectual puzzle.

Lucy Thurber, author of eight plays, who teaches writing at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence, has constructed a story within a story that is so angled and complex that most viewers at the preview I attended spent a great deal of time trying to figure out who was who and what, precisely, were the relationships between these characters. We struggled.

If this were a short story or a novel, it would be easier to sort things out and get to the heart of the author’s message. So why, one wonders, has Thurber created two stories and two families, a play within a play (one urban and contemporary dealing with sisters, one rural and set in the past dealing with brothers), in which heterosexual and homosexual love flares and, for different reasons, dies? If the point is to broaden and deepen her tale of love and loss, then it doesn’t work. Instead, we get two tales that mirror each other in odd ways, and characters we do not know deeply enough to care about. This structural complexity gets in the way of the production’s considerable strengths, in particular, the stage set by Walt Spangler and the live music that frames and links the play’s scenes.

Spangler has constructed a dramatic tree-like sculpture of long wooden planks that arch across the stage at various angles. They function as a scaffold for three levels of action and bring to mind the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s rooftop art piece, Big Bambú. It’s a stunning piece of work.

Equally unusual for an Off-Broadway play is the presence of two musicians Alexander Sovronsky (Violin) and Bennett Sullivan (Banjo/Mandolin) playing bluegrass-inspired country music. It creates a warm and somewhat sorrowful mood for the action below. Their presence is an inspired touch. The play, unfortunately, does not rise to similar heights of inspiration.

Abigail (Crystal A. Dickinson) is mourning the loss of her sister, Kate, while surrounded by Kate’s possessions, including the novel Kate published just before her death. Abby stubbornly refuses the consolations of her best friend, Susan (Aubrey Dollar), and instead immerses herself in her sister’s novel. The deceased Kate, perched on a ledge in the tree, tells Abby what she’s up to in her novel. Kate (Jessica Love) is white and Abby is black, which is totally confusing and never really explored thematically.

Wouldn’t it be fascinating, says Kate, to turn us, two girls, into fictional boys? The play then moves from Abby’s real world to Kate’s fictional world, and continues to move back and forth, in short scenes, between these narratives until, at the very end, the two stories merge to deliver the playwright’s final message and meaning.

Perhaps the most believable and well acted characters are the two farm boys, Josh (Brendan Griffin) who is white and Ely (Brandon J. Dirden) who is black, though their racial difference has nothing to do with the theme or plot. Each courts a neighborhood girl: Josh marries, Ely fails at romance, drifts away and eventually dies in a mine accident much as Kate dies prematurely in a fire.

Abby tries to reconnect to life through an affair with a woman she meets at a club but, just as she pushes away her best friend, she remains too attached to her dead sister to start a new love relationship.

Detracting from the play’s serious look at life and death is the playwright’s misguided effort to provide comic relief. There is Susan’s mother’s mid-life affair with a younger Frenchman, matched only in ridiculousness by her husband’s constant crying and inept efforts to get her back. None of this rings true. Just as the giggles that overtake various characters as they are on the verge of making love do not ring true. And in Kate’s novel, there is generational friction between Josh’s young bride and her mother-in-law. Give us a break. These are cartoon characters, and seem to arrive out of nowhere, as if from another play.

What does ring true are the author’s less melodramatic insights. Whether you are straight or gay, married or single, live on a farm or in a city, you can see someone everyday and not really see who they are; you can be best friends and not have a clue as to the real person who lies within. You can want to be known or, for a variety of reasons, not want to be known; you can struggle through the pain of loss and come through, on the other side of grieving, wanting to live. There are, as the play suggests, different kinds of death and different ways of handling loss.

I’m not sure why Thurber felt she had to soften the blow of these hard truths with sit-com caricatures and set pieces. The play, which runs through October 3, would be better off without them.

Bottom of the World by Lucy Thurber
Atlantic Theater Company, Stage 2
330 West 16th Street, Chelsea
212-279-4200, ticketcentral.com

Photos,by Ari Mintz,  from top:
1. (left to right) Brendan Griffin, Aubrey Dollar, Peter Maloney, Kristin Griffith, and Brandon J. Dirden.
2. Crystal A. Dickinson
3. Jessica Love
4. K.K. Moggie and Crystal A. Dickinson
5. Aubrey Dollar and K.K. Moggie
6. Kristin Griffith and Peter Maloney