“If within the first act you’ve got hung a pistol on the wall, then within the following one it needs to be fired.” So Chekhov instructed playwrights, and so they’re taught in drama colleges in every single place.

However maybe there needs to be a corollary: In case you begin your motion with a bang, a gun had higher comply with.

In Alexis Scheer’s “Breaking the Story,” which opened on Tuesday at Second Stage Theater, the preliminary bang is an earsplitting doozy: an explosion that throws a warfare journalist and her videographer to the bottom. Neither is it the primary life-threatening assault that the journalist has skilled. We shortly be taught that in her 20 years on the entrance strains, Marina (Maggie Siff) has been knocked down, knocked out, lower up and resewn many instances over. A scar runs up the suitable aspect of her face like a cherry gummy worm.

Arresting and alarming although that’s, it units up an not possible comparability with the remainder of the play, which, regardless of the director Jo Bonney’s efforts, is woefully gentle on dramatic ammunition. A rom-com isn’t any match for a warfare.

That’s not simply the play’s drawback, but additionally Marina’s. The slim thread of story issues her tried retirement from battle journalism and sudden engagement to the videographer, Bear (Louis Ozawa). However on the weekend of the marriage, it seems she isn’t so positive she desires (or may even survive) the protected, home life she has spent her profession avoiding. Hazard was not merely a threat she took in selecting to be a warfare correspondent however the cause for the selection within the first place.

Thrill-seeking disguised as high-mindedness is likely to be an fascinating concept to discover, and certainly Donald Margulies’s “Time Stands Nonetheless,” a few warfare journalist likewise returning to common life, explored it movingly in 2010. However Scheer’s framing, wherein a flock of comedian and undermining kibitzers descends for the marriage on Marina’s new property in Wellesley, Mass., is just too light-weight to help a lot content material. For a lot of the play they deal with Marina’s war-lust as an endearing character trait, already factored into their love for her.

It will due to this fact be good if these characters introduced with them, like home items, some battle of their very own, however their tales are nearly completely gentle. Marina’s daughter (Gabrielle Policano) desires to take a spot yr earlier than school to additional her singing profession. Marina’s protégée (Tala Ashe) desires to dig up dust for a podcast she’s producing. (The dust, when lastly dug, is anticlimactic.) Marina’s ex (Matthew Saldívar) halfheartedly desires to win her again. Marina’s greatest good friend (Geneva Carr) desires to tug off an ideal last-minute marriage ceremony for her. Marina’s mom (Julie Halston) desires to have a great time.

An excellent time isn’t forthcoming. Over the course of the weekend, throughout which Marina will coincidentally be receiving a distinguished achievement award, she has terrifying flashbacks to the horrors she witnessed in varied unspecified conflicts. (If you’re liable to misery from loud noises and strobing flashes and pictures of wartime destruction, you might discover this materials troublesome.) That she is clearly affected by post-traumatic stress doesn’t appear to be of a lot concern to anybody; her daughter suggests she have some water.

The conflict of tones arises from the intersection of decisions that will need to have appeared apt on their very own. One of many longer scenes on this shortish play finds the marriage occasion tasting truffles by some means conjured up in a single day. The alternatives are at first strange — coconut, guava, chocolate — and a supply of sunshine comedy. However to dramatize Marina’s psychological state, Scheer switches to surrealism because the scene resets a number of instances, the truffles now bearing names like Darkish Cheney and Cherry Hezbollah. Since solely Marina notices this flip, the drama stays completely inside.

Scheer’s breakout play, “My Dear Dead Drug Lord,” produced by Second Stage in 2019, demonstrated a vivid creativeness and a present for comedy that erupts from shifting subterranean feelings. An unsuccessful detour into musical theater — she tailored Emerald Fennell’s ebook for the Broadway incarnation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Bad Cinderella” — has not completely erased these qualities. When Marina warns Bear that she’s “a Warfare Zone 10” however a “Actual World 3,” it’s a great joke that’s additionally a tipoff to her idea of self-worth. However an excessive amount of of the dialogue is both quippy or melodramatic, providing the form of emotion however not the substance.

Aside from Halston, who’s incapable of not grabbing an viewers, there’s little the forged can do to make this materials really feel full or contemporary. Even Bonney, a director with miles of wonderful productions to her credit score — together with “Mlima’s Tale” and “Cost of Living” — resorts to too many clichés. (The sound design, by Darron L West, and the projection design, by Elaine J. McCarthy, are particularly apparent.) And a Hail Mary cross towards tragedy within the final moments of the play looks like an incomplete.

However simply earlier than that, Scheer does open an intriguing line of inquiry, as Marina, accepting her award, questions the values behind a mannequin of journalism that valorizes hazard to journalists. Her wounds, she tells us, have introduced extra consideration to the struggling of the folks she covers than they may ever obtain on their very own. That’s a perverse reward construction for everybody — together with playwrights. Is tragedy, the story of struggling, price it? Chekhov had no maxim for that; he known as his performs comedies.

Breaking the Story
By means of June 23 at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater, Manhattan; 2st.com. Working time: 1 hour 20 minutes.