If in 2017 the play seems to be stacking the deck, offering so many kinds of sickness needing so much care, there is a perfectly good 1991 reason for it: AIDS. Mr. McPherson did not have the disease when he wrote “Marvin’s Room”; it was based more on memories of Florida relatives in fact named Marvin, Bessie and Ruth. Still, AIDS was all around him. His companion, Daniel Sotomayor, died of it in early 1992, during the play’s original New York run; Mr. McPherson himself died nine months later. Both men were 33.

These losses, and the auguries of them haunting the play, could not have been separable from the reception it received. The New York theater world was likewise surrounded and beleaguered by AIDS at the time. Challenged, too: While some people and institutions were running, like Lee, from their duty to care for those in need, many others stepped up. “Marvin’s Room,” with its all-too-familiar procedures and pills and bedside hoverings, reflected that reality, leavening it with what lightweight humor it dared. And its lesson — for there is one — in some ways thanked the survivors who kept the faith.

Without that heightened and emotional context some of the play’s flaws are more evident now. They seem to have been evident to Mr. McPherson even then. The 1996 movie version, for which he wrote the screenplay just before his death, excises a lot of the whimsy and more carefully delineates the process by which Lee (Meryl Streep) comes to understand the value of the sacrifice that Bessie (Diane Keaton) has made. In the play, this change seems to come out of nowhere, at least partly because Ms. Garofalo is such a brilliant underplayer that I could hardly tell the difference between Lee’s awfulness and her kindness.

It’s unfair, of course, to hold anyone up to Ms. Streep, but if the movie’s cast (which also includes Leonardo DiCaprio as Hank and Robert De Niro as Dr. Wally) acts up a storm, the play’s cast acts up a calm. Ms. Taylor is lovely as Bessie but is almost too honest, abjuring any theatrics that might spark a fire in the 726-seat American Airlines Theater. (The old Playwrights Horizons space, where the New York production originated, seated 146.) Only Ms. Weston, in a part that could not survive too much naturalism, achieves the right balance of silly and moving; she’s divine.

Even so, this production of “Marvin’s Room” languishes in the gap between the powerful, absurdist comedy Mr. Rich saw and the histrionic (but effective) excess of the three-hanky film. Perhaps Ms. Kauffman, the terrific director of new plays like “Marjorie Prime” and “A Life,” felt there was no avoiding that pitfall with this material and so determined to make the best of it. Her production is smart and refined, with an elegant set design by Laura Jellinek that is dominated by a cloverleaf breeze-block wall suggesting both separation and permeability. (And Florida!) Everything, really, is perfect.

But unlike some other dramas arising from the same milieu — “Angels in America,” “The Baltimore Waltz,” “The Normal Heart,” to name three — “Marvin’s Room” may suffer from such perfection. Its wound, shockingly deep though it was, seems to have healed over itself. It would take a great deal more guts, in the production and in us, to risk reopening it now.