There are surface pleasures to be found in Let’s Call Her Patty, Zarina Shea’s dramedy that opened Monday at Lincoln Center Theater’s Claire Tow venue. They start with the chopping board on the faux-marble counter-top in the Upper West Side apartment kitchen (sets by Kristen Robinson), where Patty (Rhea Perlman) spends a lot of time with an actual knife but unseen vegetables, preparing meals for her unseen husband, her pampered dog and her grown niece, Sammy (Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer, impressive in a rare nonmusical role), a kind of surrogate second daughter who narrates most of the action.

Shea’s script has an appealing rhythm, a genially jokey description of the life of certain mostly-progressive Jewish people of a certain age who seldom stray far from their neighborhood haunts (except maybe to attend theater productions like this one, conveniently located just a few subway stops away).

And it’s a pleasure to see Perlman commanding the stage. At 75, the Cheers alum retains the sharp wit and easy relatability that goes a long way to disguising a character whose myopic vision becomes increasingly hard to ignore.

You see, Patty is the sort of woman who blames other people for the shortcomings of their children — but who is blinkered when her own twentysomething daughter (Arielle Goldman) develops a serious cocaine addiction. Sadly, we barely meet Cecile — who is treated more as an object than a fully fleshed character in her own right. She pops up occasionally as a waiflike young artist who’s barely able to complete a sentence, and that’s even before a rehab meeting with mom where she can’t get a word in edgewise (this time through no fault of her own).

Under Margot Bordelon’s crisp direction, the show runs a fleet 70 minutes. And there’s a no-nonsense quality to Shea’s writing, with Patty’s audible knife chops punctuating jump-cuts in Sammy’s narration, and breaks of the fourth wall that feel assured. But all of these technical flourishes service a story that’s way too familiar, like the Barney Greengrass whitefish you’ve ordered so many times that it’s lost the capacity to surprise.