" You want a theater that’s dead and gone, " snaps a Hollywood producer at the aging-playwright protagonist of Arthur Laurents’s 2 Lives. Laurents, who has been writing for the stage for almost 60 years, would seem to want a theater that’s old-fashioned and well-structured but that honestly addresses the life he’s lived. He is an 84-year-old playwright who has been in a significant relationship with another man for 45 years. The play’s Matt Singer is a 70-something playwright who has been in a significant relationship with another man for 35 years. So 2 Lives isn’t strictly autobiographical, but it’s close. And if Laurents had written it in the 1950s, he probably would have felt obliged to make Matt and his long-time love, Howard Thompson, heterosexual. So progress gets made — indeed, Laurents won a Tony 20 years ago for directing Broadway’s first openly gay hit musical, La Cage aux Folles. But 2 Lives, which imagines how love might continue after a partner’s death, is not a plausible play.

In his candid 2000 memoir, Original Story By, Laurents speaks of the spiritual feelings he has in the 12-acre park in Quogue, New York, created by his partner, Tom Hatcher. 2 Lives is set in that park, and it does indeed seem idyllic — though in the play’s world premiere, a co-production of the Lyric Stage and the Huntington Theatre Company, the ground seems blanketed not in grass but in thick shag carpet. Hatcher must have some green thumb.

The play begins with Matt reading scenes from his play-in-progress to Howard. Other characters take the air, including Howard’s Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother, Eloyse, who communicates mostly in little ditties; a young local couple, Scooter and Meryanne; and the Hollywood mogul Leo Kondracki, who’s set to produce Matt’s new play. Eventually our couple’s old and very dramatic friend Willi Thurman turns up for the weekend with her latest conquest, famous London actress Nerissa Gray. At the end of the first act, just as a lovely picnic is starting, Howard figures out what Willi is up to, becomes irate, and crumples to the ground. Act two begins like act one, except that now Matt reads to a ghost.

It is difficult to talk about what ails 2 Lives without revealing that much. Urbane yet also maudlin, the play is a show-biz-betrayal story, a valentine, and a melodrama. It’s not boring, and some of it is moving and original, particularly the delicate relationship between Howard and his tune-tootling mother, each of whom has felt unloved by the other. But the second act is hard to buy — in part because Laurents sticks to the Aristotelian unities. It’s just days since Howard’s unexpected demise from an aneurysm, yet people are expecting Matt, for whom Howard is still present, to snap right out of it. Moreover, it falls to the visiting English actress, whom he barely knows, to have the big, tearful confrontation with the grieving writer. (By contrast, a scene between Matt and Willi, with Willi unable to see or hear her dead friend but combatively paranoid as to what he’s saying about her, has a nice Blithe Spirit ring.)

Laurents wants to make the point that an artist’s creative center is a complex intersection of love and work, and he wants to demonstrate that older people feel passion. He has created a feisty, if sentimental, sufferer in Matt (not to mention a sort of agnostic philistine in Phil). But the play is practically buried in personal nostalgia. Howard, dead and alive, is too good to be true. And the hard reality is that you can talk to the dead but (though the device has been used from To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday to Providence) they don’t chat back.

It’s not surprising that, for all his fame, Laurents had to wait five years and go out of town to get 2 Lives produced. Still, there are hopes for its journey Manhattan-ward. The nicely turned-out, well-acted production at the Lyric is mostly imported. Nicholas Martin directs with sensitivity, creating a sense of ease among the characters. And the performances, particularly by Susan Kellermann as closeted socialite Willi and Cigdem Onat as predatory star Nerissa, blend summery casualness with old-time stage grandeur. Jeremiah Kissel brings a blunt charm to Hawaiian-shirted Phil. As Eloyse, Elizabeth Wilson, though she’d hardly pass for 90, radiates an almost beatific vacancy. James Sutorius seems young for Howard, but lanky 40-year Broadway vet Tom Aldredge is a convincingly elderly yet sharp-as-a-tack Matt, as much roused as sunk by grief. Laurents’s creations are an engaging, well-crafted lot. They just need a better play to park in.