You know you’re in for something meta when you see a character billed in the program as Audience Member. And roughly a half hour into Abe Koogler’s one-act comedy Staff Meal, the show is interrupted by a heckling audience member (Stephanie Berry) who audibly voices her frustration at the scenes we’ve already seen unfolding on stage — a couple (Susannah Flood and Greg Keller) who meet-cute in a cafe and then have a dinner date at a fussy restaurant with a Twilight Zone-like subterranean wine cellar and a chef (Erin Markey) who puts more love into the nightly staff meal than anything on the menu for paying customers. Markey is credited in the program as Vagrant, a guise in which they also appear.

Berry’s unexpected monologue jolts to life a play that may be a deliberate parody of pretentious modern theater pieces, rooted in interesting but familiar ideas but weighed down by (possibly deliberately) generic dialogue that drags on. Sitting in the upstairs Peter Jay Sharp Theater at Playwrights Horizons, where Staff Meal opened Sunday, you are liable to sympathize with Berry’s fury. “We given this gift to you of our evening – one of our precious few nights on this earth – and you’re showing us THIS?????” she shouts. “We have so many emerging writers, and so many declining writers, and I’m all….where are the ones in the middle? Shouldn’t there be a bunch in the middle, who have emerged, fully emerged, and are writing I’m sorry, but…good plays?”

This is a sharp observation, delivered with energy and wit, and you might hope that the rest of the show will carry on in a similar vein. After all, there is a connection between theater and restaurants — both shuttered by the recent pandemic and both with artists who seem torn between serving the masses and delivering capital-A Art intended to impress a smaller in-the-know elite. But Koogler never really explores those themes in a clear, compelling, or audience-friendly way. All too soon after Berry’s interruption, we are heading back to the restaurant, to the dungeonlike wine cellar, and to painfully drawn-out sketches that play like college assignments for a class in Theater of the Absurd. Or one of those SNL sketches that has the germ of an idea, and occasional laugh lines, but stretches on for far too long to appreciate the original inspiration.

Morgan Green directs with lethargic indifference.