The upside of seeing a new play is the promise of discovering something interesting for oneself, unencumbered by previous production history or others' analysis. The downside is that it requires looking at the production from all angles and dealing with the urge to pick it up and shake it to make the ideas fall out.

So it is with Richard Tillotson's "Inside Out," directed by Eden Lee Murray for The Actors' Group.

The premise of Tillotson's comedy is straightforward enough. Academic budget cuts and shrinking federal funding mean that four grant proposals for graduate research must be reduced to one. The dilemma is in deciding which one to save. The resultant conflict examines how far the competing students will go to assure someone else is voted off the island.

Tillotson sets this up in an unmercifully long first scene, spending an hour on character history and relationships that are neither complex nor deep. The rest of the play tracks the final selection and — eight months later — its aftermath.

In this, the playwright still has some work to do. The central character and the message need to be more clearly defined and unnecessary plot fumbling needs to be eliminated.

Judging by the preponderance of dialogue and the order of the curtain call, the central character is Martin Arzinetti (Jacin Harter), one of the competing graduate students. Tillotson seems to spend more time on his character because he is the most fun and plays against the expected type.

Arzinetti is a philosophy student and chooses to act out that calling with provoking, delayed-adolescent behavior — including a disheveled appearance, binge drinking, random sex with female undergraduates and riding a skateboard through the departmental waiting room. This is generally tolerated because of an assumed — but undemonstrated — underlying genius.

A character like this is a risk in writing comedy. An audience will laugh when he annoys other characters, but if he is unlikable, all bets are suddenly off. Arzinetti becomes likeable only in the play's final scene — a long time to wait for a character who carries the show's comic burden.

The play's message also needs more clarity, starting with its enigmatic title. For this, we need to consider the theatrical convention of "the fourth wall." In dramatic terms, the fourth wall is the invisible separation between the actor and the spectator. It is not broken without careful consideration.

In "Inside Out," the fourth wall is a literal part of the set — a row of sliding glass patio doors between the department's lounge and an outside terrace. Much of the play has gone by before a character looks into that glass wall, remarking about "reflections of reflections," and setting up the premise that separates the academic world from the messy, gritty reality of life.

In various ways, each of the characters deals with that separation, but it's Arzinetti who finally pulls back the literal glass wall and steps outside. One senses that the action is a dramatic triumph toward which everything should have been pointing. Because those signposts have been indistinct, the movement seems to be tacked on to the play instead of being its inevitable conclusion. We need a clearer map toward the conclusion that the real prize is not the grant money, but getting from "inside" to "outside."