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Sarah Nealis as Eliza and Rod Gnapp as Ben in a scene from &quot;What We're Up Against,&quot; a new play by Theresa Rebeck, receiving its world premiere at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco.

Theresa Rebeck is a master craftsman. The Pulitzer nominee is known for building plays with tight structures and clean lines. From the social satire "The Scene" to the stamp caper "Mauritius," Rebeck's precisely plotted plays usually have great bones.

It's ironic then that "What We're Up Against," which is actually set in the world of architecture, feels like a quick and dirty sketch in its world premiere at San Francisco's Magic Theatre. While the piece bristles with Rebeck's symphonic command of the vernacular at hand, in this case the language of design and engineering, the plot never quite hangs together, and the characters feel more like thumbnail sketches than real people.

Perhaps as the play continues to develop, Rebeck can make the text live up to the fire and passion of the themes at its core. Certainly there's no denying the candor and bite of her criticisms of the American workplace today, a universe in which mediocrity and insincerity often trumps merit, and sexism hides behind the competitive spirit.

Welcome to a firm fueled by equal parts machismo and scotch. It's like "Mad Men," only with cherry wood furniture and stainless steel accents (swank set by Skip Mercier) and the fresh-faced Eliza (Sarah Nealis) instantly is marginalized for her work ethic. She wastes all her time slaving away instead of schmoozing her peers and kowtowing to the senior partners. She expresses her honest opinion at a staff meeting. She even expects to be rewarded for her tirelessness and talent. Greenhorn.

Rebeck powerfully evokes the shock of leaving behind the high-mindedness and equality of college life and running smack into the pettiness, sniping and greed of the cubicle dweller. The rest of the staff can see her obvious gifts, and that's precisely what makes them eager to sabotage her at every turn.

That's why the pickled boss Stu (Warren David Keith), a despotic hack with a shot memory, saddles her with a broom closet for an office, and why the swaggering golden boy Weber (James Wagner) targets her for character assassination. No one needs some hotshot ruining the curve for everybody else.

Unfortunately, there are few surprises in these office shenanigans, from the epithet-heavy water cooler asides to the jostling for power in the boardroom. This is well-trod territory goosed with gutter-mouth dialogue that makes the tale seem more penetrating than it is.

Nealis gives Eliza a hard edge over her bright-eyed and bushy-tailed appearance. The always appealing actress knows how to charm us, but there are few clues on the page into what makes this young woman tick, what she loves about the aesthetics of architecture and what drives her to care so much about details others find tedious.

Indeed, the most vivid speeches here all belong to the men who bedevil her, from Ben's aria of a rant on the metaphorical implications of air ducts (deliciously delivered by Rod Gnapp) to Weber's essay on the nihilism celebrated by the American strip mall. Rebeck decorates the play with these lovely narrative flourishes, but she never binds them to the central theme about women, bureaucracy and power. The face-off between the two female characters, the spitfire Eliza and the compliant Janice (Pamela Gaye Walker), is also noticeably less compelling than the standoffs between the male characters.

Loretta Greco, who nailed the sly cadence of Rebeck's "Mauritius" in 2009, directs this comedy with an expert hand. She keeps the pace lively and the segues crisp as the balance of power shifts between the characters. The cast also succeeds in finding depth and texture in scenes that build to a revelation that never quite comes.

But Rebeck hasn't yet connected the dots between the gender politics and the plot, and that's where "What We're Up Against" falls down.


'What We're Up Against'

By Theresa Rebeck

Through: March 6
Where: Magic Theatre, Bldg. D, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco
Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes (one intermission)
Tickets: $20-$60; 415-441-8822,