YOUNGSTOWN — There’s a lot going on under the hood of “Becky’s New Car.”

It’s a broad, manic farce, but Stephen Dietz’s play, which opened Friday for a two-weekend run at Hopewell Theatre, also has a lot of elements that make it seem like it’s trying to be something more.

The Becky of the title, fearlessly played by Rosalyn Blystone, spends almost as much time talking to the audience as she does the other characters. She makes the audience feel the stress and dissatisfaction caused by too many hours spent at a thankless job as the office manager of a car dealership and too little help with everything that has to be done at home, where she lives with her roofer husband, Joe (Nick Mulichak), and her adult son, Chris (Dominick Spiesak), a grad student studying psychology.

She even makes the audience complicit in her life, assigning assorted household duties and office tasks to those in the front row.

The son is quick to psychoanalyze everyone’s behavior except his own, but all the talk of self-actualization and the like seems designed to make the play appear more thoughtful than it is.

It’s often very funny, but the characters get more and more tightly wound as the story builds toward a payoff the script never quite delivers. And that makes the direct address to the audience or having Becky talk to the lighting crew to relight the office half of the set because she forgot something over there feel like nothing more than stage gimmicks.

The one purpose of those gimmicks is that Blystone uses them to endear Becky to the audience, something that comes in handy when the character’s behavior gets less endearing.

Becky gets a chance to escape that life when a wealthy billboard advertising company owner, Walter Flood (Brian Suchora), stumbles into the dealership looking for gifts for his employees. The still-grieving widower believes Becky’s spouse is deceased as well, and let’s just say she’s not very assertive in correcting him. He invites her to dinner at his palatial island estate, and she doesn’t say no.

Becky’s dual life soon becomes far more stressful than her married life ever was.

Each of the supporting performances is fine on its own. Timothy Stanley is hilarious as a car salesman who’s turned his grief about his wife’s death into a bludgeon that he uses to guilt those around him.

Suchora brings a mix of high-strung anxiety and energy to Walter. Spiesak as Becky’s son and Jennifer Milligan as Walter’s daughter also play their characters at an elevated pitch.

Taken together, though, the second act verges on exhausting with everyone operating at the same manic level, especially when things start to spiral out of control for Becky.

That exaggeration is the norm in a farce, but it starts to feel like slightly different shades of the same color. Director Christopher Fidram might have been better off taking a different approach with some of the characters, but I think the problem is more in the play than the presentation.

The craziness around him makes Mulichak the quiet, moral center of the story as Joe. Mulichak gets as many laughs as anyone, but he keeps the character grounded in a way no one else on stage is, with the exception of Blystone, most of the time. When he does show a flash of anger or pain, those moments hit with that much more intensity as a result.

Dawn Rogers also takes a more understated approach in a smaller role as a once-wealthy woman looking for a sugar daddy after losing her fortune.

The set design, also by Fidram, makes clever use of the performance space. And Fidram always makes interesting, insightful music choices for his plays, and this one is no exception.

The lighting design, which has to continually shift the focal point among three distinctive locations, would call attention to itself even if Becky didn’t talk to the booth.

If you go …

WHAT: “Becky’s New Car”

WHEN: 2 p.m. today and April 30 and 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday

WHERE: Hopewell Theatre, 702 Mahoning Ave., Youngstown

HOW MUCH: $15 for adults and $12 for students and senior citizens. Tickets are available online at hopewell

theatre.org and by calling 330-746-5455.