Stage REview

GRAND CONCOURSE

Play by Heidi Schreck. Directed by Bridget Kathleen O’Leary. Presented by SpeakEasy Stage Company. At Roberts Studio Theatre, Calderwood Pavilion, Boston Center for the Arts, through April 1. Tickets $25-$62.

617-933-8600, www.SpeakEasyStage.com

Faith rests on something of a paradox: Though obviously an inward journey, it’s often shaped to a significant extent by external factors, by our experience of the world and what life brings our way.

Playwright Heidi Schreck seems to be attempting to wrestle that paradox into dramatic form in her humane and heartfelt but ultimately disappointing “Grand Concourse,’’ now receiving its New England premiere in a SpeakEasy Stage Company production directed by Bridget Kathleen O’Leary.

Schreck’s play, which was first produced three years ago at New York’s Playwrights Horizons, revolves around Shelley, a Catholic nun who runs a soup kitchen in a Bronx church and is portrayed at SpeakEasy by Melinda Lopez. Shelley is undergoing a crisis of faith that is both religious and personal; her work has begun to feel “pointless,’’ and her fitful attempts at prayer, which she times with a microwave oven, keep petering out.

Then 19-year-old Emma (Ally Dawson) arrives on the scene, eager to volunteer and apparently bursting with idealism and purpose. But Emma, who has recently been kicked out of college, ultimately proves to be a deceitful, disruptive, and troubled figure. Is she, at bottom, a lost soul in need of saving, in a temporal if not religious sense? If so, is Shelley up to that task, and might that help restore the nun’s faith?

Such questions percolate through, and are eventually answered in, “Grand Concourse,’’ but the play never really delivers the emotional payoff toward which it seems to be building. Instead, “Grand Concourse’’ tends to drift, its insights seldom cohering into a compelling whole.

Lopez is a singular talent who has sustained a career as one of Boston’s leading playwrights and a busy actress. Her autobiographical solo play, “Mala,’’ written and performed by her at ArtsEmerson, was one of the high points of 2016. In “Grand Concourse,’’ Lopez gives it her all, endowing Shelley with a blend of weariness and dogged decency that makes you root for the character.

But playwright Schreck has not defined Shelley sharply enough. The character remains slightly blurry around the edges. Although Shelley’s spiritual struggle ultimately leads to a kind of resolution, we don’t feel fully invested in the outcome.

In part, the problem resides in the fact that Shelley’s dilemmas are obscured by the stage time given over to the play’s other two characters, both of them engaging extroverts: Oscar (Alejandro Simoes), a good-hearted security guard, originally from the Dominican Republic, now working his way through City College, who becomes a prime target of Emma’s manipulations; and Frog (Thomas Derrah), an erudite but unstable homeless man who is a regular at the soup kitchen and the author of inscrutable joke books.

Constructed as a series of brief scenes punctuated by blackouts, “Grand Concourse’’ unfolds in an industrial kitchen, comprehensively designed by Jenna McFarland Lord, that includes a large refrigerator, a stove, a sink, and that aforementioned microwave oven. High above the stage are several stained-glass windows.

Dawson, a graduate of Boston University who is the only member of the cast making her SpeakEasy debut, holds her own with the veterans. The actress conveys Emma’s enjoyment in the machinations she sets in motion but also a sense of the youthful confusion and self-defeating impulses that suggest Emma is not as in control as she would like to believe.

For an actor like Derrah, who’s done some of the best recent work of his long and remarkable career at SpeakEasy (“Casa Valentina,’’ “Red,’’ “The Drowsy Chaperone,’’ “Clybourne Park,’’ “Necessary Monsters’’), the role of Frog is an opportunity for vivid small-scale portraiture. Derrah takes that opportunity, turning in a carefully imagined, precisely realized performance that steers clear of caricature and does not scant Frog’s humanity.

Simoes, who has built a varied stage resume since his memorable 2012 portrayal of the flamboyantly fierce Julio at SpeakEasy in “The [Expletive] With the Hat’’ (where Lopez was one of his costars), often commands the stage with his energetic presence as Oscar. The actor captures Oscar’s blend of freewheeling confidence on the surface and the barely hidden insecurity beneath that surface that makes him vulnerable to Emma’s manipulations.

As it turns out, Oscar’s not the only one.

GRAND CONCOURSE

Play by Heidi Schreck. Directed by Bridget Kathleen O’Leary. Presented by SpeakEasy Stage Company. At Roberts Studio Theatre, Calderwood Pavilion, Boston Center for the Arts, through April 1. Tickets $25-$62. 617-933-8600, www.SpeakEasyStage.com

Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com.