ALTHOUGH he is ranked with contemporary playwrights of “high comedy” such as Noel Coward and Moss Hart, S. N. Behrman is less often staged. And no wonder: a melancholy cloud hangs over some of the laughter in a work like No Time for Comedy. The flippant put-downs and snappy banter common to the genre are in the context of a sober undertone that adds a certain gravitas. Maybe the title could be No Laughing Matter.

   In notes to the Princeton Summer Theater production, director Mitch Frank lists the contradictions in this “comedy with no time for itself”: it’s “a light play about heavy things, a capitalistic play that lists toward communism, a radical play with a conservative moral...” and so on. It seems at once to be pulling back and pushing forward.

   The characters live in an ivory tower of ennui, only somewhat pricked by a nagging sense of uselessness in a time of world strife. It’s the end of a depression, the eve of a major world conflict. The Spanish Civil War is its out-of-town tryout. In a way, this play is Behrman’s struggle to write himself out of a box. In the form of his protagonist Gaylord Esterbrook, he seems to be asking, What right do we have to enjoy frivolity when the world is collapsing all around us? It’s a question we might ask ourselves today.

   And so our playwright Gaylord (Aaron Strand), suffering from writer’s block, lubricates his way home at the end of the day via a well-worn path of familiar bars. His wife, Linda (Laura Hankin), an attractive actress and the main star for his light comedies, is frustrated at the lack of parts. She amuses herself with the attentions of other men, like Philo Smith (Tyler Crosby), a ramrod stiff, humorless business man (“...the most despised variety — a banker”), whose main hobby is compiling a history of trade routes up to 1700. And she dines with a vapid young Englishman, Makepeace “Pym” Lovell (Billy Hepfinger).

   If we consider Linda one of her husband’s constant muses, her competition is Philo’s wife, Amanda (Sarah-Ashley Bischoff), who has, as Philo notes, “a passion for developing latent possibilities...When they are not there she invents them. Her first husband was a mediocre but amiable man whom she utterly ruined by persuading he was first-rate.” Linda, ever the realist, thinks herself hard-put to compete with someone who will puff her husband up beyond all reason, although she considers him brilliant. Philo warns, “Then she will persuade him that he is profound.”

   If Linda wants the wit, Amanda wants the wisdom — pushing Gaylord to construct a serious play that wrestles with the issues of the Spanish conflict. It’s the ego massage that he craves just now. But can he even believe in it? Is this really who he is? Although Gaylord seems to be the apex in a ménage a trois, Amanda is almost worse than a mistress; with her, Gaylord is an artistic philanderer. Who is in control here?

   Behrman’s script is quite text-heavy with verbal jousting and soliloquies that demand clean elocution. The actors must pull it off by playing it straight while preserving a sense of their characters’ absurdity and even vulnerability. Several in this cast brightened the season’s previous play, The Glass Menagerie. But Behrman, especially at this stage of his career, is more of a reach. He’s no Williams, and the actors, talented as they all are, fall tantalizingly short of perfection. Gaylord has a self-deprecating line about the actors’ performance being more important for the effect of a play than the script. But there is some truth to it, if only to say that a wordy script like this is going to challenge its actors to get beyond the words.

   One problem is what to do about speech patterns. Do you risk trying to replicate the affected midlantic lockjaw common to this class? The players’ accents could be more consistent. The maid, Clementine (Ariel Siebert), is Irish with a stagey Irish brogue (a modern concession to contemporary sensibilities), rather than “colored,” as Behrman’s original script had her. She reads Sheridan’s School for Scandal, puzzled why all the characters only talk about their infidelities.

   Two performances that stood out are Strand and Bischoff, whose characters are most nuanced and graspable. But make no mistake, amid the seriousness there is plenty of wit, with frequent laugh lines, such as Gaylord’s exasperated gasp near the end of the play: “When I think I write this kind of small talk for a living, I want to shoot myself.”

   If you want to see a rare example of comedy by a light heavyweight who’s unjustly neglected, make time for No Time for Comedy.

No Time for Comedy continues at the Hamilton Murray Theater on the Princeton University Campus, July 30-July 31, 8 p.m., Aug. 1-2, 2, 8 p.m. Tickets cost $10-$20; 609-258-7062; www.princetonsummertheater.org