Neil Patel's set for Lee Blessing's irritating A Body of Water, now making its New York premiere at Primary Stages, is a summer-house living room overlooking a large lake surrounded by lush foliage. The Edenic view is represented by three huge and captivating Timothy Arzt paintings -- one upstage, one stage left, one stage right -- that look like something Henri Rousseau might have rendered as the 20th Century got underway. You look at it and wish you had a wall at home to accommodate at least one of the soothing works. The only trouble is they're forced to serve as backdrops to Blessing's maddeningly enigmatic 90-minute play.

It's hard to know what the dramatist was thinking as he began[...]