Anniversaries tend to be gloomy occasions for the three heavy-drinking brothers at the center of “Things We Want,” the sporadically insightful but ultimately wearying play by Jonathan Marc Sherman.

Charlie, the youngest brother, has a particularly big number of unwelcome days circled on his calendar. There’s his birthday, also known as the day the boys’ father leapt out of the living-room window of their 10th-floor apartment. There’s the date of his high school graduation, which came five years after his father’s death and was punctuated by his mother jumping out of the same window. “When your second parent commits suicide,” Charlie (Paul Dano) explains to an impulsive neighbor named Stella (Zoe Kazan), “take it from me, it starts to feel like it might be your fault.”

That beckoning window looms at the center of Derek McLane’s suitably humdrum set: Charlie opens it in the play’s first moments, several household objects are tossed out it throughout Mr. Sherman’s word-crazy dissection of love and addiction, and the possibility always exists that still another family member might heed its siren cry. Fittingly, much of this angst comes in Act II, set exactly one year after Charlie and Stella become lovers at the end of Act I. And so another anniversary is created, one potentially marked with similar veins of despair and abandonment.

Charlie hits the bottle rather hard upon his arrival — he has dropped out of culinary school — but he has some catching up to do if he wants to keep pace with Sty (Peter Dinklage), the middle brother. (The name is short for Stuyvesant, but it fits his dissolute appearance perfectly, at least in the first act.) The only stable presence is big brother Teddy (Josh Hamilton), whose job working for a self-help charlatan named Dr. Miracle has imbued him with an eerie level of inner calm.

Mr. Sherman has contrived to reverse each brother’s level of sobriety for the second act; soused, sober, or in between, though, the boys do like to talk. “Things We Want” was directed by Ethan Hawke, Mr. Sherman’s longtime friend and collaborator (as are Messrs. Hamilton and Dinklage), and the actor/writer/ director’s presence is very much felt in the play’s discursive pacing and often precious syntax. These sodden solipsists never say “now” or “get” or “lie” when they can say “at this moment” or “retrieve” or “falsehood,” and, even after downing a bottle of Jack Daniels, they are incapable of sullying their language with contractions. They string together adjectives and adverbs with the tireless logorrhea of an undergrad padding out a term paper. By the time Stella suggests that she and Charlie get divorced without first getting married — “a realistic alternative in this time of rampantly unsuccessful legally binding romantic unions” — this habit has proven dangerously contagious.

The three actors playing the brothers do what they can to make their clots of verbiage sound natural. (Their complete lack of resemblance to one another doesn’t help in terms of establishing a natural rapport.) And while Mr. Dinklage creates a memorably dissolute screwup in Act I, only Mr. Hamilton delivers the deeply rooted agonies and animosities of his character throughout both his highs and his lows. (Watch the muscle memory as the newly soused Teddy instinctively assumes the posture of his former gung-ho self as he begins to persuade Stella of his worth.) “I’m not happy,” Teddy explains to his brothers. “I just have better regrets than most people.”

Mr. Sherman, a former wunderkind playwright (“Sophistry,” “Women and Wallace”) whose decade-long absence from the stage stemmed largely from a lengthy bout with alcoholism, has gained the perspective to both mock and honor the clichés of recovery. (The play’s title stems from one such sequence, a summation of Dr. Miracle’s crackpot theories.) And he shows a keen eye for the shifts and resentments inherent in three orphaned young men forced to take turns parenting one another.

But Mr. Sherman focuses so intently on his quips and aphorisms that basic human motivations get disturbingly short shrift. Having Stella drop a quick “I’m often attracted to people who treat me very badly” is not sufficient grounding for having her bounce romantically between two of the brothers, one of whom acts vile to everyone in sight. (That Ms. Kazan even comes close to making plausible Stella’s Act II conversion into sex goddess is a testament to this talented young actress.) No matter how drunk Sty was at the time, the only reason he would ask for a detailed blow-by-blow of Charlie’s failed college relationship is if an audience were present to hear the exposition. And there are subtler ways of illustrating the brothers’ emotional paralysis than keeping the mother’s wheelchair in the living room six years after her suicide.

Mr. Sherman would appear to have more regrets than many of his illustrious peers. And while only he can say whether they are better regrets, his willingness to articulate them is encouraging and occasionally even eye-opening. Once he regains his ability to chip away at his language and present his unsparing message with fewer, better words, the result should be a happy one.

Until December 15 (410 W. 42nd St., between Ninth and Tenth avenues, 212-239-6200).