In his Off Broadway debut at Lincoln Center Theater’s Claire Tow venue, State Department employee-turned-playwright Phillip Howze has created an ambitious and challenging show that draws on many classic references to tell a story with lots of modern meta elements (including the hint of audience participation as ushers hand out yellow wristbands to select theatergoers as they enter). Six Characters, which opened Monday, obviously leans heavily on Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, that groundbreaking 1921 play whose farcical absurdity rested on the then-novel notion that characters could rebel against the formal traditions of theater and seek autonomy from their supposed “creators.” But it also references Shakespeare, Aristotle, and even includes a long speech (in Italian!) from the 20th-century Italian fascist Benito Mussolini — whom Pirandello cosied up to before his death in 1936.

Howze streamlines Pirandello by introducing a cast of just six, starting with an aspiring young director (Julian Robertson) who enters the stage with a ghostlight in the middle and the detritus of past productions strewn about. Before long, he’s surrounded by a cast of hangers-on instead of his hired actors: The aptly named Sassy (Claudia) is the first to arrive, a blunt-talking working class woman in bright yellow sneakers who immediately challenges his position (“That’s a nice scam you got going… Getting paid, you know, for not doing nothing”). Soon, she’s joined by a quiet older woman pushing a mop (Seret Scott), a cop/security guard (Will Cobbs), a hoodie-wearing young man immediately attracted to Sassy (CG), and a newly escape slave (Seven F.B. Duncombe) who’s wandered in from the 19th century in an oversize quilted hoop skirt (costumes by Montana Levi Blanco).

Almost immediately, the unnamed director fails in his efforts to corral them into a rehearsal — to exert himself as a leader of the space at all. His fluent Italian, his knowledge of Aristotle and the grant-writing process hold no sway over his hard-working crew of regular folks, who work as many as three and a half jobs to make ends meet. Before long, they are schooling him in the inherent racism of Artistotle and even the slavery origins of the Italian sign-off ciao. And they’re questioning whether institutional theater — Lincoln Center gets a meta name-check — can be a place of freedom and progress. Why are they here? Is theater even worth doing, especially for nonwhite folks historically shut out of the process?

Despite his commitment to making work about “real people,” the director emerges as just another striving careerist divorced from the everyday concerns of his intended audience — and he soon finds himself overwhelmed (and physically bound) by his cast. And they morph into a Greek-style chorus ripping the traditionalists (“Fuck Shakespeare”) as well as decrying the impulse for Black creatives to make “accessible” works that “include a white proxy” to be more appealing.

There’s a lot to digest here, and Howze embraces the contradictions of wanting to create bold new work that overthrows the so-called classics while still name-checking the familiar old white guys and operating within Pirandello’s century-old meta-framework. The show’s director, Dustin Wills, seems to struggle to corral the play’s contradictory elements of physical humor and verbal gymnastics. The show runs just over two hours, with an intermission, but at times it feels longer. That’s particularly true of the second act, which briefly dispenses with some of the meta-theatrics for a more grounded realism. In one engaging scene set in the lobby of the LCT3 itself (nicely designed by Dustin Wills), Sassy and the cop shed their onstage personas to reveal a backstory of their failed past romance that feels genuine and lived-in. (Logan and Cobbs are particularly strong shifting into a more naturalized performance mode.) But before long, we’re mired in more hyper-theatricality and abstractions.

One of the things that stood out about Pirandello’s original six characters was that each was embedded in a personal melodrama for which they demanded some resolution, even as they individually rebuffed the theater pros’ tendency to default to artificiality and cliché. They had stories to tell, within a play that explored the futility of deciding who gets to tell (or finish) those narratives. Not so with Howze. Aside from that brief scene with Sassy and the cop, his players seem more like archetypes or mouthpieces for various points of view. They gain our appreciation as abstruse figures of an intellectual argument, but they stubbornly resist our embrace.