In a week with continued coverage of Brock Turner’s six-month jail sentence for the rape of an unconscious woman on the Stanford campus, and of a guilty verdict in the retrial of Brandon Vandenburg, a former Vanderbilt University football player charged with aggravated rape and sexual battery, Kim Davies’s “Stet,” an absorbing if somewhat unfocused drama at Abingdon Theater Company, could hardly be more topical.

But the script, created in collaboration with the director Tony Speciale (“Unnatural Acts,” “The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey”) and the actress Jocelyn Kuritsky, centers on events from a few years ago. It is based — sometimes loosely, sometimes tightly — on the 2014 Rolling Stone article “A Rape on Campus,” an investigative report that centered on a college freshman’s accusations of a brutal gang rape. The magazine eventually retracted the piece, and a Columbia University School of Journalism investigation later found significant lapses in reporting, editing and fact-checking. Subsequent evidence suggested that the primary source had fabricated or exaggerated parts of her narrative.

At the beginning of the play, Erika (Ms. Kuritsky), a hard-as-titanium staff reporter at an unnamed national magazine, has to be persuaded to write about sexual violence at all. “I’m just kind of raped out,” she says. But her editor, Phil (Bruce McKenzie), sweet-talks her into it by dangling the promise of a cover. Erika knows she’ll need a riveting story, and Ashley (Lexi Lapp), a college sophomore, has one. Her tale of rape is so horrifying and so violent that it shocks and is maybe also titillating.

Erika begins her investigation, but some of her reporting is halfhearted, some of it is manipulative, and some of it is simply dishonest, as when she surreptitiously tapes conversations after her subjects have declined permission. In the course of her work, Erika hears other accounts of rape: more familiar incidents involving alcohol and sexual contact that turn nonconsensual. None have the impact of Ashley’s.