Sometimes, memories are best left alone. Such is my experience with seeing the new revival of Simon Gray’s The Common Pursuit being presented by the Roundabout Theatre Company. This high-toned soap opera about a group of Cambridge students involved in a literary magazine is unfortunately showing its age.

I remember having loved the original 1986 production at the now-gone Promenade Theater, but then again, its cast included such future stars as Dylan Baker, Nathan Lane and Peter Friedman. This current incarnation directed by Moises Kaufman features an ensemble of relative unknowns, some of whom may very well go on to have stellar careers. But there’s no such evidence for it here.

Taking place over a period of nearly twenty years, the play tracks the shifting professional and personal lives of such friends and colleagues as Stuart (Josh Cooke), who starts the journal that gives the play its title; his supportive girlfriend and eventual wife Marigold (Kristen Bush); rich kid Martin (Jacob Fishel), who bankrolls the enterprise and becomes the magazine’s publisher; the womanizing historian Peter (Kieran Campion); gay poet and scholar Humphrey (Tim McGeever), whose impossibly high standards eventually hinder his own career; and Nick (Lucas Near-Verbrugghe), an ambitious journalist and theater critic who sells out to television.

Although it contains plenty of the witty, erudite dialogue for which the author of such works as Butley and Otherwise Engaged was justly celebrated, the play feels schematic in its plotting and characterizations. The portrait of youthful idealism lapsing into cynical compromising by now feels all too familiar, and the series of dramatic revelations about adultery, suicide, and sudden reversals of fortune seem to arrive like clockwork.

The play’s lengthy first half feels particularly attenuated with its endlessly digressive dialogue. Things get a little punchier in Act II, but by then we’ve pretty much ceased to care about the windbag characters.

The young performers mostly seem adrift, delivering performances that smack more of caricature than characterization. In terms of both acting and staging, there’s simply nothing that sparkles, making this Pursuit less than fruitful.

Laura Pels Theatre, 111 W. 46th St. 212-719-1300. www.roundabouttheatre.org. Through July 29.