I don’t envy actress-turned-emerging-playwright Zoe Kazan; it’s hard to write a family play that steers clear of the usual tropes of long-simmering resentment and buried history. Her second work, We Live Here, arrives at Manhattan Theatre Club’s City Center space in the estimable hands of director Sam Gold, but at the end of the day, Kazan’s plays feels all too familiar, which, yes, breeds contempt.

The play’s contrived premise finds Allie Bateman (Jessica Collins) rushing into a wedding with her painter fiancé Sandy (Jeremy Shamos) a mere six months after first meeting him. (For unexplained reasons, the two have waited to consummate their union). College-age younger sister Dinah (Betty Gilpin, a bundle of jittery nerves here) returns from New York to the New England home of parents Lawrence and Maggie (Mark Blum and Amy Irving) for the wedding. It’s the first time that she will have met Sandy as well as told her parents that she is dating Daniel (Oscar Isaac), a revelation that is a bombshell not just because he is more than a decade Dinah’s senior but because he also dated Annie, Allie’s twin who died when she was a teenager and Dinah a very young girl.

We Live Here’s first act makes for an adroit, if dramatically inert setup, as we wait to see the ripple effect Daniel’s re-entry causes. Gold, who in delicate works like Circle Mirror Transformation and Kin has managed to mine harrowing material out of even the most mundane of circumstances and bring the interior to electrifying life, creates a convincing family portrait. The Bateman’s connections feel real, and even more so, John Lee Beatty’s wonderful set creates the sense of a truly lived-in home rather than a merely polished set. And Kazan has a feel for authentic, thoughtful adult dialogue (We Live Here is the first play in which I have ever seen a character use the word “sanguine” both correctly and appropriately).

But the payoff is ultimately minimal, as Kazan cheapens We Live Here’s rich potential in a second act that offers a useless flashback, turns the character of Daniel into a cliché, and, most of all, offers some condescending armchair psychology on the concept of loss. Instead of sharp observations, the plot detours into lazy convention and an unsubtle ending that even Gold cannot manage to make organic. As a result, the show manages to be both portentous and pretentious.

Collins does admirable work showing how the loss of her twin still reverberates within Allie; it doesn’t take much to provoke her in ways that cause her to lash out at her loved ones. But because she is playing a character significantly younger (and, likely, less self-aware) than herself, Gilpin’s portrayal calls too much attention to itself to feel authentic. Irving, whose hoarse voice is ill-equipped for the City Center stage, is also unable to dig beneath her two-dimensional role to find the grace notes that would humanize the paralyzed ice queen that is Maggie.

Gold gets more solid work from two of the male members of the We Live Here cast, who provide insight into their characters; inner worlds without feeling forced to project them sky high. Shamos makes the sensitive Sandy, whose father abandoned him at a young age, a nice contrast to the unstable Bateman clan. And Blum manages to transform an academic lecture into look at his own mentality. Kazan’s eagerness to turn Daniel into a cipher, however, makes Isaac at a loss to justify much of his character.

In choosing to chart family ties, it would seem that Kazan has unfortunately bound herself too tight.

----- Doug Strassler

Manhattan Theatre Club City Center, 131 W. 55th St., 212-581-1212. www.nycitycenter.org