Jason Southerland directs the BTW production with a light hand, and Jenna McFarland provides a white gallery setting that unfolds into the shabby/homy confines of the common room of the mental-health facility. There Dana gets quickly chummy with a nice-guy alcoholic and a blunt sociopath whose meds make him merely belligerent rather than homicidal. Dana/Darryl’s bright comeback paintings of chickens playing baseball don’t look like much, but the way in which they replace the blank, lighted spaces on the gallery walls, where in the first scene Dana’s “purple-black” period is flopping, works. And the actors, doubling as egotistical parasites of the art world and docs and patients, manage to be endearing.

Sarah Newhouse is all angles and agitation as Dana but gets at once looser and more brittle as Strawberry, whose struggle with the transition from LA pick-up game to the big business of Major League baseball mirrors the insecure artist’s own distress. And she makes the character’s accumulating fall into her fantasy seem both a little ridiculous and oddly smart. Certainly the borrowed persona allows her to lash out at the chic “gallerist” (a companionably predatory Maureen Keiller) who takes a 50 percent commission if not at the dealer’s assistant (Eve Passeltiner, amelioration padding her character’s ambition), who is both the artist’s chum and an adept rider on her coattails. Keiller also does a knowing turn as the psychiatrist who wants to sell Dana on her worth but clearly isn’t buying Strawberry. And Chris Brophy, sympathetic as the defecting boyfriend, is hilariously intense as the psycho conveniently boned up — as is Adam Soule’s sweetly recovering alcoholic — on baseball stats. Brophy’s attempted murderer also carries the play’s somewhat sour proclamation that the outer circles of success are manned by “wanna-bes” who are gunning rather than rooting for the ones in the middle.

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