Three perfect curls bounce over Huldey’s (Birgit Huppuch) right ear, four curls bounce over her left. This asymmetry mirrors some of the issues with Jen Silverman’s new play

The Moors, directed by Jackson Gay, at the Yale Repertory Theater, which I attended in previews last Fri., Jan. 29. The anachronistic plot, mapping women with American accents and 21st century concerns onto a setting lifted out of Wuthering Heights, privileges quirkiness over emotional honesty. While most of the acting in The Moors was admirable, the production strains itself in an unremitting quest for laughs, making for a night of improbably boring theater. The preview suffered from some technical sloppiness, which I am optimistic will improve during the show’s run. But I’m ultimately unsure whether the play itself lives up to the Gothic literature that it riffs on.

The Moors follows four (five, if you use your imagination) women—the stern middle-aged spinster Agatha (Kelly McAndrew), her trapped younger sister Huldey, the earthy maids Mallory and Marjorie (both played by Hannah Cabell), and the fresh-faced governess Emilie (Miriam Silverman)—as they contemplate murder and meaning in the bleak moors of England. The play opens with Agatha, under her brother’s name, inviting Emilie to come to the house to work as a governess for a child that never appears. When a romance between two of the women (and a bizarre one between two anthropomorphic animals) and a murder plot derail the household, things spin out of control.

Wistful for the England of the Brontë sisters (while making parallel commentary about the treatment of women by 19th century social convention), the script dips in and out of English character conventions. Agatha, for example, longs for fame and a world beyond her ancestral mansion. She wishes for attention as a famous author. But she also, late in the play, leaps ahead to the 20th century when she sings an absurd “power ballad,” abruptly tearing us from the carefully constructed setting. It’s a cheap gag: the anachronism tries too hard to make us laugh. In working so hard to be fun, the actors become campy. The script sucks out much that is central to the characters in the Brontë sisters’ novels earnestness, atmosphere, and a clear struggle within their oppressive cultural context—and replaces it with empty conceits.

Hopefully some of the production’s problems will be ironed out as the run continues, since the actors felt shaky during the preview I saw. Maybe as they master the timings of the near-constant stream of scripted jokes, the show will gain heart. In the meantime, I suggest spending your evening either watching a comedy or reading a gothic novel, rather than attending a production that attempts to be both but comes up short.