Yosemite

It's clear that in "Yosemite," the talented Daniel Talbott is writing about something that matters greatly to him. Unfortunately, his spare script is so opaque that he fails to communicate exactly what that is. Worse, he's created a high-stakes situation that's thwarted by a frustrating lack of character development and backstory, as well as a determined avoidance of dramatic action. Nothing much happens in "Yosemite" as three siblings sit and converse aimlessly deep in the snowy woods while the eldest digs a grave for their dead baby brother. Under Pedro Pascal's studied, overly deliberate direction, the show keeps its audience at such arm's length that we finally throw ours up in exasperation.

Teenage Jake; his slightly younger sister, Ruby; and just a boy Jer have been sent on their task by their mother, Julie, and told not to return until it is accomplished. What's more, the grave needs to be at least 4 feet deep, to prevent animals from digging up the corpse, which is no easy feat for Jake as he slices his shovel into the semi-frozen earth. Baby Nathan, wrapped in a plastic bag and cradled by Ruby, seems to have died in his crib, where Julie and stepdad Mike apparently regularly parked him for long stretches of neglect. Of course, we immediately wonder what kind of mother would send her brood on such an errand as the kids talk randomly about everything from school to favorite foods to getting fat to family memories to the indignities they face being on welfare. Naturally, Julie makes an appearance, arriving with a rifle in hand and soon reminiscing about the children's deceased father and her girlhood. We know that rifle has to be used, and Talbott tries to generate some tension with it, but it's really not hard to predict the firearm's ultimate purpose.

We quickly get that the siblings have been psychologically abused and are damaged and deadened, with little hope for the future. Julie is obviously depressive and unmoored. But all we are seeing is aftermath. How and why all this happened is mostly unexplored, and what we do learn we question, as none of the characters seems particularly trustworthy.

The production is undermined by a reliance upon hypernaturalistic acting more suited to the small screen, with both Kathryn Erbe, as Julie, and Libby Woodbridge, as Ruby, hard to understand as they underarticulate and somehow throw lines away in the tiny Rattlestick Playwrights Theater space. Erbe has a couple of moments, such as when Julie abruptly accuses her children of being ungrateful because they don't love her anymore, but otherwise her Julie is awfully small for a woman who has behaved in the ways she has. Woodbridge's Ruby stays too much on a single note of subdued plaintiveness. Noah Galvin can't make much out of the largely silent Jer, who has so little to do that we sometimes forget he's there at all.

Only Seth Numrich manages to penetrate the stasis, giving Jake a haunting wisp of a belief that life could change for the better and a simmering anger that boils over in surprising ways, then erupts volcanically in an argument with Julie about who is "fucking guilty." When Jake hurls himself on the mound of dirt he's dug out and starts scraping it back into the grave with his bare hands only to collapse in tears, "Yosemite" is suddenly, momentarily heartbreaking.

Raul Abrego's handsome, meticulously detailed set is the most impressive I've seen at Rattlestick, and Joel Moritz's lights and Janie Bullard's sound complete the deep-woodlands illusion admirably. Tristan Raines' perfectly judged costumes scream charity-handout clothing, as they should. But all that realism only makes Talbott's allusive script, which reaches for a kind of broken poetry, more self-conscious. And we can't help noticing that though Jake shovels a lot of dirt (Numrich can skip the gym during this gig), the grave somehow never gets deeper, which is actually a pretty good metaphor for "Yosemite" itself.

Presented by and at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, 224 Waverly Place, NYC. Jan. 26–March 3. Wed.–Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2 and 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m. (212) 279-4200 or www.ticketcentral.com. Casting by Calleri Casting.