The defining characteristic of grief, like addiction, often seems to be its ability to assume any of a collection of different forms to bring you to your knees. In his contribution for this year's New York Musical Theatre Festival, Wearing Black, Riley Thomas envisions what happens to those left behind when a drug-addled young man named Charlie drives his car off a bridge: As might be expected, of his girlfriend, Kristin (Erin Maya); his father, Hugh (Mark Coffin); his roommate and bandmate Nate (BJ Gruber), and Nate's girlfriend Alyssa (Hayley Anna Norris); and, most intensely, his identical twin brother, Evan (Devin Ilaw), none of them takes it well, or even merely badly. Thus, what could be the musical's greatest asset becomes its chief liability.

Everyone is so devastated, so lost, so at odds with acceptance that the action becomes a Klein bottle of poor decisions that's far more ludicrous than insightful. Each new scene exists primarily as an excuse to drag someone (usually Evan) down further, whether via the repeating cycle of drugs, disastrous sexual choices, paint-peeling arguments that strip decades-long relationships to nothing, or merely a towering disregard for others' feelings. If the majority of these are understandable in isolation, taken together they render most of the characters so unlikable that you're unable to care whether they overcome their trials—and, further, they transform the lone holdout into a victim so angelic, you can't accept that, either. Making matters worse is that Charlie feels only like a cheap dramatic device to launch all this, not a real person anyone onstage could or should care about.

Wearing Black does not recover from these problems, or from some truly cringe-worthy lyrics that either overstretch for rhymes ("see 'em"/"carpe diem") or depend on hackneyed imagery, but on the occasions it hits, it does so with force. There's some gorgeous songwriting to be found here (Thomas did the quiet, tender orchestrations with musical director Ben Caplan), if less in the solos than in the multicharacter scenes that force people to confront each other when they'd rather do anything but. It is not damning with faint praise to say that an early number about cleaning out a closet is serenely touching, for example. And the final three numbers are deeply affecting because of the unadorned honesty and pain they unlock in the question of how one proceeds in the wake of any tragedy. More of the show needs to be built on such recognizable humanity.

Because it's not, communicating what's at stake is not easy for anyone. Director Jeremy Scott Lapp too often loses the battle to keep his staging from becoming static; the feeling is definitely more of a play than even a chamber musical. And the actors are all over the map. Ilaw is dreadfully huge, overplaying even his most sensitive moments, but who can blame him given Evan's confusing, circuitous journey? Maya isn't much better, especially in an explosively on-the-nose first-act finale I'm not sure even Helen Hayes could sell. Coffin is right on the edge, teetering between untenable anger and a moving depiction of loss. Gruber, on the other hand, handles Nate well, finding both a weight and a lightness in the man's fairly thin construction.

The performance of the evening is courtesy of Norris, who comes closest to showing how conflicting emotions can resolve. She lets us see how Alyssa, who's generally caring, hides her rage, insecurity, and her capacity to love beneath the surface, where they cannot be hurt. Her big number, and the show's, is "Dawn," in which Alyssa reevaluates her life choices on what will prove to be most important day of her life. By depicting her edging tentatively back from the brink, Thomas captures at once the literal sun peeking over the horizon and hope encroaching unexpectedly on despair, a fusion of the outer world and the inner world that, to that point, has eluded everyone onstage. It's vital in every sense of the word, and proof that Thomas knows what he's trying to say and why. Wearing Black will be much better when he focuses on that rather than all the too many other things that are presently obscure his simple, noble intentions.

Wearing Black
at The New York Musical Theatre Festival 2015
Tickets online, Venue and Performance Schedule: The New York Musical Theatre Festival 2015 Guide and Tickets