Lucy Thurber's last three plays at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater (Killers and Other Family, Where We're Born and Stay) have depicted the torn allegiances of intelligent women who have fled abusive, traumatically poor rural childhoods to reach the relative safety of college. In her Atlantic Theater Company debut, Scarcity, the playwright takes another rear-view-mirror look at western Massachusetts, this time turning the clock back to a time when her usual protagonist is still a preternaturally articulate 11-year-old girl-here named Rachel (Meredith Brandt)-biding her time in family hell until her brains can pave a road out. (She enjoys Jane Austen's Persuasion, she explains with typical precocity, "because it's about waiting and being rewarded for waiting.")

Sharing Rachel's shabby home are her father, Herb (Michael T. Weiss), the town drunk; her mother, Martha (Johnston), an emotional mess; and her volatile older brother, Billy (the talented but miscast Eisenberg, jumpy in a role that calls for sensual animalism). All three use the best weapon in their impoverished arsenals, sex appeal, to get what they need: Martha squeezes groceries from her cousin Louie (Todd Weeks); Billy curries academic favor with his repressed, lustful teacher (Maggie Kiley). There is plenty of provocative material here, but under Jackson Gay's stiff direction, the family's trashy interactions lack the justifying virtue of realness; most of the cast seems to be straining for its squalor. (Only Miriam Shor, as Louie's neglected wife, is wholly convincing.) To those who have admired Thurber's work in the past, Scarcity seems like not just a glance but a small stumble backward for the playwright.

-Adam Feldman