Apart from being a popular cocktail and a musical wedding staple, " The Maiden’s Prayer " is a flowery term for a young woman’s desire for true love. There’s little of that in Nicky Silver’s The Maiden’s Prayer, in which two of the characters are unrequitedly in love with a third, who desperately clings to a cool fourth, while a fifth will tenaciously hook up with anyone who has Premium Cable. The point seems to be that, as love is unrequited, so life is unpredictable, but given a lemon you can make lemonade. Given also a little gin and Cointreau, you can even make a Maiden’s Prayer — but a couple of characters in Silver’s play are apt to wrestle you for it.

Silver, a witty contemporary absurdist, is the author of some plays with great names, like Fat Men in Skirts, as well as of some that succeed in melding comedy and metaphor, like Pterodactyls, which, presided over by a looming dinosaur skeleton, the Huntington Theatre Company displayed in 1994. Alas, The Maiden’s Prayer, which starts as dark comedy but then goes maudlin, is neither. But the Huntington, producing for the first time in the 99-seat black-box theater upstairs from its larger house at the Boston University Theatre, turns it out imaginatively, on a pristine set by Janie Howland that’s punctuated by glass boxes housing the detritus of memory and childhood. The production boasts the return of the excellent Dee Nelson to local stages, as well as the return of the New York–based Mark Setlock, who has for several years dined out on the large-cast one-man show Fully Committed, to single-character status.

The play opens on the periphery of the wedding of handsome Taylor and lovely, solicitous, pregnant Cynthia. Seated on an outdoor terrace, Taylor’s childhood friend Paul waxes quasi-poetic of his meeting, at age six, with the then-bright-haired groom. His reverie, all repressed longing bathed in gay comic sensibility, is interrupted by the lurching entrance of a bitched-off bridesmaid, a puffy vision in pink bearing a champagne bottle and a big, seething grudge. This is Cynthia’s sister, Libby, who met Taylor at an AA meeting, then quickly lost him to Cynthia. She has not ridden to the wedding on the wagon.

From such sit-com beginnings Silver strikes out in ambitious directions, aiming for a mix of lyricism, loss, whimsy, and redemption. But little is truly original, less is believable, and some of the dialogue gets so banal, you’d swear you were watching a soap-opera parody. Which is a shame, because the play does a few interesting things well. Cynthia, as presaged by her embittered sister, is not the radiant, saving grace the recovering Taylor perceives her to be, and Nelson, barely repressing annoyance at her worshipful spouse, mixes exterior charm and interior ice into an intriguing cocktail. Then, when her own orderly dream of suburban hearth and beautiful baby is shattered, she manages to convey both the character’s pain and her poised selfishness. Similarly, Setlock always communicates the sad attraction to Taylor that has made his own sex life a string of brief encounters while carrying the comic brunt of the play as Paul sues for compassion and discretion among characters who are having none of it.

But, really, this would be a better play if it were about Libby, whose heartbreak, combined with hooch and unemployment, brings her, by surprise, to a degradation she turns into a sort of amoral ministry. In Judith McIntyre’s hands, she remains tart and chic (if a tad overdone), even if the character is hampered by her blatant, never really justified, forlorn and obsessive fixation with Taylor. More annoying is the random Andrew (Barlow Adamson), a Bloomingdale’s salesman and later waiter who gets drawn into the play when he sleeps with Paul, then won’t leave Paul’s apartment. He keeps popping up to regale us with cheery tales of his superficial but apparently significant love affair with a handsome Swede. Bill Mootos does what he can with the slick, then sloshed, Taylor, who almost becomes the Hedda Gabler of the piece — though here Judge Brack’s view prevails.

It is heartening to see the Huntington, as it awaits the materialization of two smaller theaters next to the Boston Center for the Arts, undertake smaller-scale but well-produced work at its own digs and incorporate, in so doing, talented members of Boston’s midsize-theater community. I just can’t agree with director Scott Edmiston that The Maiden’s Prayer is one worth answering, even with a winning production.