The central character in Sharr White’s drama The Other Place is suffering the disorientating effects of a condition she’s self-diagnosed as brain cancer. Her helpless confusion is likely to be shared by the audience, as the play seems intent on providing shifting perspectives that keep us constantly guessing as to what’s actually going on. The results are undeniably compelling but also frustratingly gimmicky, as if the playwright was more interested in pulling the rug out from under us than fully involving us in her character’s plight.

Laurie Metcalf, repeating her role from last year’s well-received off-Broadway production, delivers a galvanizing performance as Juliana, a former scientist who now makes her living as a pitchperson for a pharmaceutical company. Delivering a lecture at a conference in the Virgin Islands, she finds herself suddenly unable to form coherent thoughts, endlessly distracted by a young attendee clad only in a yellow bikini who she repeatedly harangues.

In subsequent confrontations with her oncologist husband (a sympathetic Daniel Stern) who she’s in the process of divorcing and a female doctor (Zoe Perry) who he’s enlisted to examine her, Juliana proves alternately vulnerable and abrasive. The former quality is markedly evident in her poignant attempt to reconcile with her estranged daughter (Perry, again) who left home years earlier to run off with an older man (John Schiappa).

Or did she? That’s one of the many tantalizing questions presented by the fractured narrative that correlates with Juliana’s confused mental state. To reveal more of the play’s secrets would be unfair, but it should be pointed out that it’s at its most effective in the climactic scene in which Juliana fully comes to grips with her circumstances via an encounter with a young woman (Perry, in her third role) who she takes to be her daughter. Devoid of narrative machination, it packs an emotional punch that much of the coldly clinical play otherwise lacks.

Still, the play is well worth seeing, thanks to both to Metcalfe’s ferociously funny, intense performance—sure to be remembered at Tony Award time--and the effectively visceral staging by director Joe Mantello. The production elements convey the main character’s mental confusion in vivid fashion, from Eugene Lee and Edward Pierce’s set composed of hundreds of empty frames to Fitz Patton’s hallucinatory sound design to William Cusick’s haunting projections.

Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, 261 W. 47th St. 212-239-6200. www.Telecharge.com. Through Feb. 24.