Investment banking is not the most welcoming of industries — especially for folks who don’t carry the privilege of being white and male. That familiar truth gets a fresh reworking in Alex Lin’s promising but muddled new dramedy Chinese Republicans, which opened Thursday at Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre. The focus is on four women with Chinese roots who meet monthly at a Chinese restaurant (designed by Wilson Chin) as part of their storied firm’s “affinity group.”

Most of our quartet of heroines have so absorbed the bank’s conservative, capitalism-first, protect-the-bosses culture that one wonders why they would agree to join an affinity group at all — a progressive endeavor that lumps them in with a bunch of other outsiders rather than enable them to advance with the white, male bosses. That becomes clear in the first scene with the arrival of a newly hired research associate named Katie (Anna Zavelson), the Chinese daughter of hedge fund managers who serves as an avatar of Gen Z naivete.

Katie finds an eager mentor in Ellen (Jennifer Ikeda), a middle-aged executive who seems to have hit her glass ceiling but nonetheless strives to advance — or to clear a path of advancement for a surrogate daughter like Katie. Rounding out the group are Phyllis (Jodi Long), a take-no-guff battle ax in her 60s who paved the way for Asian women in banking (though she never achieved partner status) and Iris (Jully Lee), a Chinese-born software engineer who’s equally blunt-talking except to superiors who might jeopardize her pursuit of a green card. Iris is quick to deride her colleagues’ attempts to use their heritage to advance by helping the bank break into Chinese markets. “Oh my God, your Mandarin is so bad,” she tells Iris. “It sounds like diarrhea in your mouth.”

Lin has studded her script with some hilarious one-liners, which Long and Lee in particular deliver with tart-tongued delight. The four wisecrack with each other in ways that reveal a genuine camaraderie as well as a respect for tradition — including the idea that one should always arrive early for any appointment. She also sketches her characters in broad, appealing strokes. Ikeda’s Ellen in particular emerges as a woman who’s sacrificed so much — drifting away from her parents, forgoing having children of her own — for a career that stubbornly refuses to reward her hard work or dedication. “I am not a boot-licker,” she insists at one point, immediately deflecting the accusation with a joke: “I would never lick a boot — unless it was Chanel.”

But Chinese Republicans stumbles when it shifts into more serious territory like the misogyny, racism, and sexual harassment in a supposedly meritocratic banking industry. (Tellingly, Ellen clumsily attempts to appease the perpetrator rather than report the incident.) The major conflicts in the play, and indeed the primary antagonists, all seem to exist offstage — which leaves us to weigh the legitimacy of these issues amid the passing of turnip cakes and all the light-hearted jokes.

It hardly seems surprising that Katie, who’s just begun learning Mandarin on Duolingo, would lose a promotion to the Beijing office to her work crush Casey, whom she tells us minored in Mandarin as an undergrad and lived in China for two years. (We never meet him to determine if he’s a good guy or was taking advantage of her for his own benefit, but on paper he seems demonstrably more qualified.) More surprising is that this dutiful daughter responds to the rejection by taking a crash course in Marx, Foucault, Žižek, and other critics of capitalism — and then decides to agitate for workers’ rights and torpedo her banking career. This late-stage awakening to the downsides of late-stage capitalism doesn’t feel authentic.

The cast is consistently strong under Chay Yew’s direction, but I kept wishing that the characters and plot had been more deeply fleshed out so that we understood the message here. There are interesting ideas here, but Lin’s script at times seems undercooked and in other moments veers into spelling out ideas that would have more impact if they had been left unsaid. ★★★☆☆

CHINESE REPUBLICANS
Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre, Off Broadway
Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes (with no intermission)
Tickets on sale through April 5 for $69 to $102