A fine cast acts their hearts out in Grace, Craig Wright’s drama now receiving its Broadway premiere. While this play about the collision between an Evangelical Christian couple and a pair of non-believers seems to have a great deal on its mind, its melodramatic plotting and artificial-sounding dialogue ultimately have little resonance.

Previously seen in productions in Washington, D.C. and Chicago, it’s set in a tacky Florida rental complex in which Steve (Paul Rudd) and his wife Sara (Kate Arrington) live next door to reclusive neighbor Sam (the white-hot Michael Shannon of Boardwalk Empire, here making his Broadway debut). Wearing a half-mask to conceal his horribly disfigured face as a result of a recent car accident that killed his wife, Sam is seen in an early, extraneous scene loudly arguing with a telephone customer service agent over the mysterious loss of his photographs from his digital camera.

Steve and Sara have recently moved from St. Paul, Minnesota, in the hopes of starting a chain of “gospel hotels” whose funding is apparently tenuous. So when Sam finally agrees to a casual social get-together, he finds himself both in a heated debate over the existence of God with the proselytizing Steven and on the receiving end of a fevered pitch to invest in his fledgling business.

Making a pair of brief but memorable appearances is Karl (television veteran Ed Asner), an elderly German exterminator who has little use for the couple’s religiosity. Derisively addressing Steve as “Jesus freak,” he explains his atheism with a harrowing account of a tragic childhood encounter with the Nazis in his hometown of Hamburg.

The play begins with a nightmarish scene in which Steve fatally shoots both Sam and his wife, with the rest told as an explanatory flashback. As the play develops, we become witness to the series of calamities—personal, business and even physical, with Steven developing a debilitating rash over most of his body—that caused him to snap.

The play includes plenty of arguments about the nature of faith, including a surprising last-minute conversion by the truculent Karl, but they seem like mere padding to the ultimately simplistic tale. It’s hard to imagine that it would have received a high-profile Broadway production without the enlistment of the starry ensemble.

That said, the actors do very well by the thin material. The always riveting Shannon brings complex shadings to his role even while wearing his Phantom of the Opera-style concealment; Rudd is convincing both in his character’s messianic zeal and his eventual derangement; Arrington is highly appealing as the wife who finds herself irresistibly drawn to her physically and emotionally scarred neighbor; and Asner makes the most of his brief but highly colorful role, adding much needed comic relief to the often stilted proceedings.

Cort Theatre, 138 W. 48th St. 212-239-6200. www.telecharge.com. Through Jan. 6, 2013.