Playwright Craig Warner lost his way somewhere between the Greek tragedies and The Sopranos while trying to combine the two genres. His new Fallen uses the mythological allusions of the former and the visual style of the latter but ends up as a contrived piece of work. Moreover, equating the orders of a mob boss with the will of Fate, or giving him a significance similar to Beckett’s Godot, is stretching credibility too far.

Warner’s plot deals with a barkeep named Jim who over the past 12 years has been making weekly collections for an unseen godfather named Alex. Jim’s only contact with Alex is Billy, who seems to be the modern-day equivalent of the messenger delivering the bad news in the ancient dramas. Pascal, the young man who works behind the bar, has a yen for Hannah, Jim’s daughter, who turns 16 on the day the play opens. The other characters are Selena, a reformed hooker and Alex’s former mistress, who like Cassandra sings prophecies that are ignored, and Georgie, Jim’s wife, who has some Delphic secrets of her own.

The action turns on a demand for retribution. Christos, Alex’s son, died at age 16 in a violent accident with a gun. Alex blames Jim and insists on having Hannah’s life on her 16th birthday; moreover, Jim must deliver her himself. You might be thinking of Agamemnon and Iphigenia, but Jim is atoning for a sin rather than asking the gods for a favor. Warner gets himself further entangled by bringing in Abraham and Isaac, not to mention Biblical quotes. Hannah’s savior is Pascal, whose act of rescue might, or might not, refer to Orpheus’s retrieving of Eurydice from the Underworld.

In its world-premiere production at Merrimack Rep, Fallen sports a first act stuffed with exposition that makes the characters sound like ventriloquist’s dummies as they spout a melange of pretentious metaphor cum metaphysical babble. When Billy brings Hannah as a birthday gift a wreath of flowers like those worn by the girls in the " old country " when they come of marriageable age, he tells her, " Women are the earth; we plant our seed in them. " The damage is compounded by the mysterious accent Bernie Sheredy affects.

There is one riveting scene near the end, when Pascal and Hannah couple graphically in the darkened bar room, a convincing, and moving, evocation of the steamy physicality of first love. Although Charles Towers can’t hold the attention of the audience with his staging of the first act, the second act explodes with this interlude. Hunky television-and-film-star-in-the-making Alexander Pascal as Pascal and Erika Thomas as Hannah are the only actors who make something of the character outlines the playwright has given them. The rest of the cast struggle with the material but sink gradually beneath the weight of the dialogue. By the end, Christopher McHale as Jim has retreated into lifeless oblivion.

According to the program notes, playwright Warner has had extensive experience in adapting the work of others, including Patricia Highsmith’s novel Strangers on a Train for the stage and Marion Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon for a TNT mini-series. He spent the rehearsal period in residence at Merrimack Rep, which leads one to wonder whether anyone suggested a second draft.