As the criminal case of Sean “Diddy” Combs underscores, #MeToo movement has come late to the music industry. But the generational shift in workplace expectations is the driving force in Jessica Goldberg’s intriguing but underdeveloped new drama Babe, which opened Wednesday at Pershing Square Signature Center in a production by The New Group.

Arliss Howard plays Gus, a legendary A&R executive from a major label with an office lined with gold records and a roster that includes a Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper. He dresses in black, from his beanie to his boots, and gives off a hippie-ish vibe with his stylish glasses, gray-white beard, and multiple silver necklaces (costumes by Jeff Mahshie, hair and wig design by Matthew Armentrout). He’s also wont to launch into foul-mouthed yarns about the good ol’ days of the music industry when his position afforded him easy access to women, drugs, and booze. Despite mandated sensitivity training sessions, he seems constitutionally averse to adapting to the mores of modern corporate culture: “If I want tell you you have a nice ass– I’ll tell you, you have a nice fucking ass.”

Gus’s unreconstructed chauvinism is a major headache for his longtime deputy, Abigail, a cypher of a woman played with implausibly preternatural forbearance by Marisa Tomei (similarly outfitted in an all-black ensemble). Abigail is all too aware of how Gus’s NSFW rants and flippancy are not only out of step with the times, but could get him canceled — and jeopardize her own future just as she’s secretly battling cancer. That’s particularly true when the pair hire an uber-entitled Gen Zer, Katherine (Gracie McGraw), who grew up on the Upper East Side and was turned on to Bob Dylan by a grandfather who lived in Woodstock.

There are some interesting ideas to explore here, about how music stars who used to be discovered by A&R executives in tiny clubs (“the port-o-potty circuit,” Gus calls it) can now blow up on TikTok and other social media platforms. But if you’re expecting Katherine to educate her elders in new ways to find talent, or even the new sounds that younger listeners adore, think again. Katherine, like Goldberg, is more interested in digging up Abigail’s past, particularly her association with an iconic Liz Phair-like female artist called Kat Wonder who tapped into a chord of female rage in the 1990s but died prematurely. Abigail not only introduced Kat to Gus, who produced some of her early hits, but she also may have been her one true love.

Through a series of hallucinatory flashbacks, we see Abigail interact with Kat (also played by McGraw), and how the two share an unbridled anger at men and their shabby treatment of women. Director Scott Elliott leans into the dreamlike quality here in his staging, where no actor ever leaves the stage and McGraw shifts between roles abruptly in ways that are not always clear. But Goldberg pushes the parallels too far, even having Katherine make a romantic pass at Abigail in an exposition-heavy scene where the younger woman seems more like an agent of chaos than a heroine-worshiping protégé. (She pumps Abigail for details about Kat, asks about her love life, and unsubtly suggests that Gus has been taking advantage of her for years since he lives in a palatial brownstone and she’s in a more modest rental apartment.)

Then comes the reckoning. Gus goes too far, as we know he will, and Katherine leads a rebellion of worker bees against everyone at the label — including, bizarrely, Abigail herself. “I want to burn it down!” Katherine exclaims, blithely dismissing any consideration of the fairness of hanging her mentor and romantic crush out to dry while sparing the CEO, an old buddy of Gus’s who’s arguably even more of an old-school troglodyte. Is this payback for Abigail rejecting her advance? A knee-jerk demand for change that just hasn’t been fully thought through? We never know — and the fact that the show has just three actors and runs 90 minutes doesn’t leave much room for nuance or a clear development of the many competing narrative threads.

Howard is excellent at playing a boomer blowhard who’s blind to his shortcomings, particularly when it comes to ceding some of the limelight to Abigail. Meanwhile, Tomei projects a kind of unmanic pixie dream-girl quality, which may be the only way to explain how this very capable woman stayed with Gus for so long instead of learning the lessons of her beloved Kat Wonder and striking out on her own. But Goldberg’s plotting is both confusing and rushed, and Katherine is little more than a chaos ex machina who blows things up in ways that don’t track.

BABE
Pershing Square Signature Center, Off Broadway
Running time: 90 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through Dec. 22