In some iterations, Gina gets nowhere in her attempt to pierce Dennis’s dark armor. In others, through a combination of empathy and tough love, she begins to reach him.

It’s hard to pay attention either way, because so many of the vignettes end in varieties of violence. The many peripheral themes intelligently raised — racism, alienation, the futility of creativity — are wiped out as the narrative reshuffles itself and restarts. It doesn’t help that Gina behaves in provocative ways that make sense only if you are a playwright trying to vary the texture of what otherwise amounts to a desperate monologue.

Under the circumstances, Sue Jean Kim, who plays Gina, does a credible job of keeping an incredible character in play. Her emotional legibility goes a long way toward making some scenes bearable, despite the story’s obliterating pressure. And though Mr. Lee is hardly the runty, pockmarked character Ms. Cho describes in the script, he is all too believable as someone so full of self-loathing that he cannot bear to see himself in other people’s eyes.

The production, staged with swift sang-froid by Neel Keller, does what it can to modulate the mood. Where it is possible to admit shards of bitter comedy into a scene, as when Gina imitates her disapproving mother as a way of suggesting a commonality with Dennis, the direction makes the most of it. And I’m glad that Mr. Keller has toned down the most terrifying of Ms. Cho’s devices for involving the audience in the gun culture she’s exploring.

Even toned down, though, the play doesn’t lack for terror. Technically, the production is extremely skillful — you might even say cunning — at producing that response. In Takeshi Kata’s set design, the banal office slides forward out of the dark like a monster emerging from a swamp. And Bray Poor’s sound design, both in its subtleties and outbursts, could hardly be more effective.

But the question remains: effective to what end?

I do not doubt that Ms. Cho intended “Office Hour” to be something more than a thriller. Her previous plays, including “The Language Archive” and “Aubergine,” are quiet, charming, almost whimsical riffs on themes of assimilation and loss of identity.