“Stunning,” a stinging portrait of an insular Syrian Jewish community in contemporary Brooklyn, begins as stylized satire, moves quickly into urban fairy tale and finally emerges as a melodramatic tragedy. The shifts in tone and style present a high degree of difficulty, and while its virtuosic playwright, David Adjmi, nicely evokes an arrestingly skewed subculture onstage, he never makes us believe in the people who make it up.

His 16-year-old heroine, Lily (Cristin Milioti), is the kind of fragile innocent battling the restrictive strictures of society that artists seem to have been writing about forever. The play, which begins in a burst of comic energy, takes her point of view of the world, a caricature that includes a cruel, controlling husband and a clique of gum-smacking, shrill friends, pampered princesses whose highest aspirations are marrying, having babies and staying as tan as humanly possible.

Claudine (Sas Goldberg) whines that she’s fat and old, while Sheila (a wonderfully monstrous Jeanine Serralles), the Queen Bee, boasts about her fertility. “It’s nice being pregnant just to glow,” she says.

Lily knows she’s part of this world and wants to fit in but also feels trapped by it. When she hires a cerebral African-American maid, Blanche (Charlayne Woodard), an academic who peppers her small talk with references to semiotics, Lily’s horizons expand.

It’s an unlikely relationship, and its lack of credibility is the glaring hole in this play, presented at the Duke on 42nd Street as part of LCT3, Lincoln Center’s program for emerging playwrights. Ms. Woodard and Ms. Milioti deliver flamboyant performances as two eccentrics constantly toying with their personas. They are fun to watch, but their mannered, actorly turns never achieve the necessary emotional connection to each other to make the play coherent.

Anne Kauffman’s staging establishes a sleek, alienating style that emphasizes rather than integrates the play’s jarring shifts. Covering the entire back wall of David Korins’s gleaming white set is a mirror that puts the audience in the play. It’s a disorienting touch that like the coolly witty script, underlines the artifice of the production.

When Blanche, a nod to “A Streetcar Named Desire,” grabs a gun out of her bag, it almost seems like a knowing reference to Chekhov’s gun, a literary device based on his famous instruction: “One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.” Like Lily “Stunning” is sensitive, full of promise and stymied by its own self-awareness.

“Stunning” runs through Saturday at the Duke on 42nd Street, 229 West 42nd Street, Manhattan; (646) 223-3010.

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