Considering D.C. is a city with both a vibrant theater scene and lots of museums, art galleries, murals, and working artists, it is not surprising that there is overlap in the audience for both theater and visual arts. Of course, art is not always about aesthetics and appreciation; it’s an industry: Works are not just bought, sold, and donated, but are sometimes produced for specific customers, clients, and markets. While many pieces are kept for the beauty and meaning they hold, others are treated as investments to be stashed away and resold when the market is just right. And, as with every industry, there is always a corrupt underside, or as Scott Bertram (played by JC Payne) observes in Elizabeth DeSchryver’s new play, An Unbuilt Life, currently making its world premiere at Washington Stage Guild, “Art and diamonds: the currency of the underworld.”

It’s 2005 when the play opens in the living room of Agatha Ganner (Susan Holliday), whose art dealer husband, David, died just five months earlier. Scott is a recently hired staff member at the Ganners’ successful gallery, a job he’s juggling while working on his dissertation in art history. He is working through the documentation on David’s collection before the first lot goes to auction. Agatha finds something among the modernist works in David’s workshop that might interest Scott, who specializes in the 17th-century Dutch masters: A painting of a mother checking her child’s scalp for lice. Scott recognizes the subject as a common genre of the time and place. He also recognizes that the signature of Pieter de Hooch is a forgery. The painting is from the right era but some unscrupulous seller added De Hooch’s name to the anonymous work in order to fetch a higher price.

Here, it’s worth interrupting the synopsis to note that the promotional materials for the show are at once thematically on point and also a misdirection. The poster, the playbill, and the website prominently feature a real Dutch painting: “Girl with a Flute.” For centuries many attributed the work to Johannes Vermeer, as the subject seems to be the same young woman seen in “Girl with the Red Hat.” But during the COVID-19 lockdown, researchers at the National Gallery of Art, which has both paintings in their collection, used new imaging technology to examine the work. Their studies confirmed suspicions that “Girl with a Flute” was painted by an anonymous artist who worked in Vermeer’s studio, and was familiar with his style. But centuries of belief that it was a Vermeer was sufficient to make it valued.

Scott’s boss, Paul Carmichael (David Bryan Jackson), David’s business associate of 20 years, initially suggests investigating the fake De Hooch would be a waste of Scott’s time—especially since it is not part of the lot being sold in the upcoming auction.

But as Scott begins to track the historical record of the painting’s ownership, he finds evidence that while David purchased it from the family of an American officer who fought in World War II, a painting of the same description had also been sold in German-occupied Paris to a Nazi officer. It may have been a looted work of art, possibly looted twice-over.

David, a childhood survivor of the Holocaust, took over the art business established by Agatha’s German Jewish grandfather who fled to Switzerland after the Nazis “Aryanized” his previous business. Because Agatha knows this history, her instinct is to identify the family of the prewar owner and return the stolen property. Paul, however, worries about where the investigation is going. What if it uncovers evidence that David had knowingly bought looted property? What if the fake De Hooch is not the only looted property that David had bought or sold? Why was the painting found in the workshop David had behind the house, separate from his gallery? How far back does this go? Only Paul seems aware of the potential storm of legal actions and moral condemnations.

It’s remarkable that in a play about art, there is so little that catches the eye beyond the colorful patterns of Agatha’s jackets (by costume designer Sigrid Johannesdottir) and the small reproduction of Marc Chagall’s “Time Is a River without Banks.” Most of the art decorating the stage wall are black-and-white modernist prints too small to appreciate from the audience. I’m reluctant to blame scenic designer Joseph B. Musumeci Jr. because he’s ultimately working within limitations placed on him by DeSchryver’s script, which sets the play in a conventional upper-class living room with tasteful antique furniture and vintage bottles on the liquor cabinet. At least Musumeci has devised a clever method for quickly making scene changes to Paul’s office, by placing one of Agatha’s walls on a turntable. But the question stands for the playwright: Why not place the action in David’s workshop where he kept his notebooks, did restoration work, and possibly falsified documentation? Or even in the gallery itself?

The subject matter is fascinating, but DeSchryver takes far too long to not fully explore the situation. The possibility that the fake De Hooch is a looted object is not considered until a third of the way through the play and the manner in which it’s done is so polite that it cannot even be called a slow burn. Jackson avails himself well of the material he is given—warning Agatha and Scott that their desire to get at the truth and return the art to its rightful owners can lead to tragedy—the script gives too little for Holliday and Payne to work with. We learn more about what drives Agatha from Paul talking to Scott than we do from the scenes she is in. Ultimately, she and Scott are only slightly less naive at the end of the play than they were in the beginning. In the end, An Unbuilt Life feels like it needed a second or third draft to discover the drama that it could have been.

Washington Stage Guild presents the world premiere of An Unbuilt Life, written by Elizabeth DeSchryver and directed by Steven Carpenter, through May 5. stageguild.org. $50–$60.