There’s something potent about Melissa James Gibson’s haunting new play This at Playwrights Horizons, something that draws you into the story even as you find yourself intermittently annoyed by the prospect of more floundering yuppies coming to terms with their mortality. A great deal of it is sheer virtuoso writing; Gibson hasn’t written a comedy so much as a melanchomedy. But director David Aukin and his cast of five have honed their performances to a gleaming point.

Foremost among them is Julianne Nicholson, replacing the previously announced Parker Posey as Jane, a poet who has been walking through life in a trance for a year after the death of her husband. Suffering from the affliction that conflates nostalgia for continued friendship, she has stubbornly clung to her three college friends, Alan (Glenn Fitzgerald) and couple Marrell (Eisa Davis) and Tom (Darren Pettie), even as they all selfishly hug their own hurts and slights close and very occasionally bother to think how someone else feels. As contrast, Gibson includes a sexy French doctor (Louis Cancelmi) who both points up the unbearable self-absorption of everyone else and endears them all the more to us for their lack of smugness.

At its core, This is a funny and moving play about betrayals. Though the biggest betrayal may be the one-night stand that Tom and Jane have—he out of desperation as the walls of family life close in, she out of sheer emotional exhaustion—it’s not the most damaging. All of the characters have betrayed someone; whether it’s the gay Alan increasingly relying on alcohol and causticity to stave off the realization that he’s let his life pass him by or Jane sleepwalking through life and neglecting her daughter, everyone has been let down in Gibson’s world—which somehow makes her plot seem arbitrary.

Gibson clearly has talent, but the premise she’s created for her play feels like any number of television series’ arcs crammed into two hours. Watching well-to-do Manhattanites wondering where they went wrong in their lives as middle-age stares them in the face is usually the quickest way to annoy me, but Gibson and company pull it off. Particularly Nicholson and Fitzgerald, two cerebral actors who do wonders with their witticism-laced anomie. Nicholson gets the benefit of the play’s most likeable character (in a character-defining moment, Marrell pretentiously insists on calling a water filter the Bree-tah), a woman who finds it easier to step into her yellow coat than have the zipper repaired. Jane is also the only character who seems to genuinely feel affection for all the rest. Constantly apologizing, she’s like a walking wound absorbing all of the pain around her. And Fitzgerald is hilariously glum as Alan, who makes a living out of his uncanny ability to recall every dull conversation he’s ever been a part of, a talent that is almost Greecian in its whimsical cruelty. And the point of This is that, like Alan, we all have to live with our actions, things no amount of wine or word play can eradicate.

This

Through Dec. 13. Playwrights Horizons, 416 W 42nd St. (betw. 9th & 10th Aves.), 212-279-4200; times vary, $65.