Having the effrontery to look on the bright side of life can have a hazardous affect on your mental wellbeing, should you enter war photographer Sarah Goodwin’s orbit in Time Stands Still. She’s made a career out of documenting human atrocities, and woe unto those who insist that her pictures are only part of the story. As written by Donald Margulies, Sarah is a bitter pill, condescending to her editor’s new, younger girlfriend, and so wrapped up in global suffering that she barely has time to notice the pain of her long-time lover James (Brian D’Arcy James). But as played by Laura Linney, Sarah is almost unbearably smug, too, so sure of her moral superiority to everyone who’d rather watch the Saw films rather than confront the grim reality of 21st-century life, that ordinary human foibles are reason enough for her to unleash her sharp tongue.

Just home from overseas, where she languished in a coma for a few weeks before awakening to a face full of shrapnel (Sarah’s war wound makeup barely reads as such from the audience; it looks as if all she needs is a washcloth, some cold cream, and a good night’s sleep), Sarah wastes little time in belittling James’ plan to write a non war-related book about horror films (spoiler alert: they’re about sex) and their editor Richard (Eric Bogosian), who is dating the carefree and kind Mandy (Alicia Silverstone). Mandy is an event planner, a profession that seems carefully chosen by Margulies to allow for maximum hilarity in comparison to what James and Sarah do without calling undue attention to the fact that Mandy is intended as comedic relief.

Luckily, no one’s told Silverstone that Mandy’s naiveté is cartoonish. As she goes head-to-head with Linney, Silverstone doesn’t let Mandy come across as a ditz; she instead seems like the only rational person in the room, someone who can praise Sarah for her ability to work so proficiently (and prolifically) in the midst of death and destruction, while also daring to question the role of a war photographer who is documenting suffering rather than trying to prevent it. Yes, the question is as old as Robert Capa, but it nevertheless hangs over Margulies’ play, never satisfactorily answered either by us or the characters.

Which is one of the best things about Time Stands Still: its utter refusal to explain everything. Some critics have complained that Sarah is a cipher, that we should know what’s turned her so prickly, but that’s absurd. Sarah is who she is, and some people are just prickly without suffering a childhood trauma or even taking pictures of war zones. Margulies has enough respect for his audience to let us interpret his characters’ motives as we like. If only he had the same respect for the people who feel so powerless in the face of monumental tragedy that they would rather turn away from it.

Open run. Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, 261 W. 47th St. (betw. B’way & 8th Ave.), 212-239-6200; $57–$117.