Rabbit Hole. By David Lindsay-Abaire. Directed by Rachel Ditor. An Arts Club Theatre Company production. At the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage on Wednesday, March 19. Continues until April 13

The subject matter of David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole is wrenching: Becca and Howie’s four-year-old son, Danny, has been killed. Jason, the teenager who was driving the car that struck Danny when he ran into the street chasing his dog, wants to meet the parents so he can acknowledge that he might have been going two or three miles an hour above the speed limit. Twice, the mere appearance of Jason on-stage in all of his innocence made me choke back sobs.

But that’s more about the play’s premise than its execution. Lindsay-Abaire’s script won the Pulitzer Prize for drama last year, but the writing is relentlessly explicit. There is very little mystery in the characters’ interactions, and virtually no subtext. Coming home from shopping, Becca confesses that she has just slapped a woman who was ignoring her child. Becca’s sister Izzy interprets this for us: “I know. You’re saying, ‘Be with him.’ ” No kidding.

The characters don’t talk about anything other than death and grief. Becca’s mother, Nat, babbles on about the Kennedy curse. Jason writes a story about a boy who loses his father and searches for him in parallel universes, and Becca compares it to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Becca finds one of Danny’s books, The Runaway Bunny. Every detail fits. Yes, grief can be relentless, but in my experience, it has never been so tidy.

Rachel Ditor’s direction amplifies this sense of long-faced self-regard. The pace is slow. Actors are forever facing straight out to show us exactly how sad they are. If they’re really sad, they get a special lighting cue. It would be nice if the characters’ charades of happiness were a bit more successful sometimes.

David Roberts’s set design doesn’t help. He creates a beautiful space, a modernist mansion that stretches across the stage, but no matter where you sit, many of the playing areas will be too far away. And the rooms are wide open to the sky, which reduces the sense of intimacy even further.

One crucial scene aspires to mystery. Becca’s catharsis comes in an almost-cryptic exchange with Jason. But because the groundwork has been so poorly laid here, it doesn’t work.

I’m probably giving the impression that the entire evening is a failure, which it’s not. Act 1 ends with a fight between Becca (Jillian Fargey) and Howie (John Cassini) that is messily moving. But in the end, it’s Max Kashetsky’s Jason that I was most touched by. That’s not because his is the best performance. It’s because the character embodies both loss and responsibility. And Kashetsky says his lines so simply that it doesn’t feel like he’s acting.