“I’m still a star!” booms Dianne Wiest’s character, wagging her finger in her agent’s face. “I never play frumps or virgins.” That deathless line from Woody Allen’s “Bullets Over Broadway” came rushing back to me at Playwrights Horizons the other night. In “Memory House,” Ms. Wiest plays a divorcee who’s raising her teenage daughter in a drab West Side apartment. Her portrayal of a dowdy, lonely 50-something woman here suggests her diva character in “Bullets” had it all wrong: If acted well, it can be rewarding indeed to play a frump and a virgin.

Kathleen Tolan’s two-hander takes place a few hours before midnight on New Year’s Eve. Maggie (Ms. Wiest) wants to persuade young Katia (Natalia Zvereva) to finish her college application and mail it before the deadline. But the essay asks the student about a “memory house,” the place where remembrances are kept. Katia, who was adopted by childless Maggie and her husband from an orphanage in Russia, grows agitated as she contemplates her past. Why was she taken from her homeland? Why isn’t Maggie living a richer life? What’s it all about? Katia has a tart, abusive streak; a drop of Ivan the Terrible flows in those veins.

Maggie’s response is to bake a pie. No, really. The mainspring of the dramatic action of the play is Ms. Wiest’s preparation of a blueberry pie. This is not some artfully simulated kitchen exercise. She really does mix ingredients and knead dough and do whatever it is one does with blueberry filling. (“Maggie cuts the remaining dough into strips,” runs a typically scintillating stage direction.) And unless Playwrights Horizons has invested in some very convincing smell-o-vision technology, she really does pop the pie into a working onstage oven and bake it.

The unhurried pace of the pie creation gives Maggie and Katia plenty of time to spar, over Maggie’s husband, the plight of refugees, recent American misbehavior, and other concerns of a teenaged girl who feels like stinging her mother. (Katia listens to Eminem and brandishes an orange iBook, twin signifiers of wayward youth.) Sitting out there in the dark, it also gave me plenty of time to contemplate the curious recent history of food on New York stages.

It’s hard to criticize the practice. If theater is supposed to be the temple of all the arts, we can’t exclude the culinary ones, can we? On Broadway a few seasons back, the cooking of a roast figured prominently in “Vincent in Brixton.” Then, as now, the idea seems to be that doing this sort of thing adds to the verity of a story: It’s not just realism, it’s really real realism. Then, as now, the idea backfires. It doesn’t reinforce a sense of reality, it takes us out of the story. We think about the mechanics of pie preparation – and, once that smell wafts up the aisles, about dinner. The only effective – which is to say, truly theatrical – way to deal with food onstage may have been realized in “Rose Rage”: Treat heads of cabbage as a stand-in for people’s skulls, and hit them with sticks.

The mother-daughter story from which Maggie’s baking distracts us isn’t a bad one, as they go. Ms. Tolan takes an honest, unsparing look at the love and resentment that accumulates between parents and their hotheaded kids. Katia clearly wishes the best for her mother, even as she can’t resist attacking her; Maggie tries to be the grown-up, to avoid stooping to her daughter’s pettiness, and doesn’t always succeed. But the play’s emotional payoff never arrives – the collision doesn’t resonate.

This is a play in which the phone always seems to ring just when the plot needs goosing, or a thought has been completed. The quality may be un even, but in the script’s best moments, Ms. Tolan shows a fine ability to mix the beautiful into everyday conversation. When Katia jabs at her mother for quitting her career as a dancer, Maggie makes this quiet reply: “You know, not everybody figures out how to be a big shining star. Most people find jobs and do work and have hobbies and occasionally weep at the wall because it feels sad, that’s what people do. I hope you have a bright and shiny life, but I doubt if you’ll avoid a few little failures. … “

David Esbjornson, directing here with his customary understatement, gently maneuvers Ms. Wiest to center stage for that lovely speech. Is there anyone who doubts that this is where she belongs? She spends much of the play flitting around the kitchen, baking her pie, and she does it with grace. She flashes a devilish wit when Katia says Maggie’s ex-husband, an academic, has offered to travel back to Russia with her. “He just got a chair at the university,” she says with a sweet smile. “He has to stay in town and sit on his chair.” Sometimes she is, in fact, too sweet, robbing the play of some of its sadness. But when Katia provokes her, Ms. Wiest takes total command of the stage. With a voice and a presence like hers, she should not stay away from it so long.

And introducing – Natalia Zvereva. In what is billed as her New York stage debut, this recent graduate of the La-Guardia High School for the Performing Arts shows real poise. She moves and speaks well, and has a precocious ease onstage. She doesn’t quite fulfill some moments here and there, though these tend to be spots in which Ms. Tolan’s writing would challenge even a more seasoned hand. Best of all, Ms. Zvereva has expressive eyes, a great gift that will serve her very well if she decides to make a career in the theater. She has promise; here’s hoping.

Until May 29 (416 W. 42nd Street, between Ninth and Dyre Avenues, 212-279-4200).