Mark Williams, the character Matthew Broderick plays in the theatrical drudgery entitled “The Starry Messenger,” has a problem: He is boring. The students of the two classes in astronomy he teaches at the Hayden Planetarium tell him this to his face, his colleague Arnold talks about his “placid exterior,” he has boring conversations with his wife about visits from her mother or the dry cleaning, his 15-year-old son pities him for “a life that hasn’t worked out the way you wanted it to.”

Then a young woman comes into that life, the mother of a young boy whom she wants to enroll in an astronomy class. They start having an affair. They discuss the difference between the provable and the unknowable, between science and religion. We see her at work as a nurse. We see him at work in his classroom, and his interaction with his students. Tragedy strikes. And thus, the boring person makes his way in the universe, starting to consider himself, if not exciting, certainly as significant as anybody else in the cosmos. “I like the opera, or some opera anyway,” Mark tells his class in a very long speech near the end, “because the opera treats every human life as a tremendous event, a gigantic drama, something of monumental importance, which is why opera is ridiculous, and why it’s true.”

This, I hope, is a fair summary of “The Starry Messenger,” and it probably took you two minutes to read. The play itself, which has opened on Theater Row, runs three hours. If there is much to admire in it, from some fine acting to a number of witty exchanges, “The Starry Messenger” as a whole seemed less than the sum of its parts, promising me a far more rewarding experience than it delivered.

The play is written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan, who is returning to his roots in the New Group theater company, which staged his well-received 1996 play This is Our Youth, which one reviewer described as being about “the proud pointlessness of post-adolescent lives in the Reagan age.” Lonergan also wrote and directed one of my favorite films, You Can Count on Me, starring Laura Linney as a numbed-out but well-meaning single mother and Mark Ruffalo as her unreliable but much-loved brother who comes back to their hometown for a visit. Broderick, who is Lonergan’s childhood friend, has a role in that movie too, as Linney’s officious boss, with whom she starts having an affair. That movie also features J. Smith Cameron (Lonergan’s wife) who plays Broderick’s wife in the new play, and Rory Culkin, brother of Macauley, as Linney’s son. The son in “The Starry Messenger” (played for some reason only as a voice behind a door) is performed by another Culkin sibling, Kieran Culkin, who also has a more visible role as one of the students. (Lonergan seems to like to create a family: Another actor in “The Starry Messenger,” Missy Yager, was one of the leads in “This Is Our Youth.”) “You Can Count On Me” and “The Starry Messenger” seem to share a life-as-it’s-lived, anomie-ridden rhythm. There, however, the similarities end for me. Maybe a character with a dull life is different from a dull character; perhaps mundane dialogue works better when the camera can keep you interested in the visual; or it could be that the characters in the play are older, and middle-aged aimlessness is less attractive than it is in young adults.

The cast of “The Starry Messenger” is more than competent; it includes a couple of performers whom I would go out of my way to see, not just Matthew Broderick but also Catalina Sandino Moreno, who is making her theatrical debut as the mistress. She gave just about the most heartbreaking performance I have ever seen in her Oscar-nominated role in the movie “Maria Full of Grace” as a “mule” who transports drugs into the United States. She is not asked to do very much in “The Starry Messenger.” The one scene in which she could have shined, involving the tragedy, seems deliberately truncated.

There is even an appeal to the set, which sparkles like a planetarium at the beginning and the end of the play and during scene changes. I am sure there is a really cosmic significance to these stellar references — the title was also a treatise by Galileo, the play takes place in 1995 right before the old Hayden Planetarium building is razed to make way for the new Rose Center for Earth and Space — but I couldn’t figure it out. Maybe it’s that there is endless material out there, some of it hot, some of it not so hot, but it is a rare occurrence when any of this material reaches perfect convergence to create a world with life on it. The rest just floats out there in nebulas, nebulous.

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The Starry Messenger
Written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan
The Acorn Theater at Theater Row, 410 West 42nd Street, through December 10.
Set design by Derek McLane, costume design by Mattie Ullrich, lighting design by Jason Lyons.
Cast:
Matthew Broderick as Mark
Stephanie Cannon as Mrs. Pysner
Kieran Culkin as Ian/Adam
Merwin Goldsmith as Norman
Catalina Sandino Moreno as Angela
Grant Shaud as Arnold
J. Smith-Cameron as Anne
Missy Yager as Doris
Running time: three hours including one intermission.
Ticket price: $61.25

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