Playwright Mia Chung intends to raise a rich and enduring question in her play “Catch as Catch Can” currently running at Playwrights Horizons Peter Jay Sharp Theater: “What is inherent in our inheritance? What is universal?” Unfortunately, this question is not addressed nor answered in her character-driven play featuring Cindy Cheung, Jon Norman Schneider, and Rob Yang as Irish American and Italian American mothers, children, and Korean “love interests” (one real one not so much).

Although the narrative is character-driven, none of the characters are developed enough in Chung’s script to give the actors what they need to make the play work. The matriarchs in the play Roberta Lavecchia (Jon Norman Schneider) and Theresa Phelan (Rob Yang) are mere caricatures without depth or believability. Hence, the relationship with their sons and daughters (also played by Schneider and Yang) fails to drive an interesting plot.

Without strong maternal characters, the connections between parent and children and between siblings and friends also lack substance and believability. After an hour and fifty minutes, the audience remains unclear about the purpose of “Catch as Catch Can.” Is the purpose to make some definitive observations about the relationship between parent and child? Perhaps the play is meant to examine the murky underbelly of the provenance of personality development. Whatever Mia Chung’s intent was in writing “Catch as Catch Can,” director Daniel Aukin is unable to tease that intent from the cast of characters he is given.

The talented cast does its best to make sense of Chung’s script. Sadly, that effort is not enough to make this production successful. For example, one wants to know more about Tim Phelan’s (Rob Yang) illness and his relationship with his childhood friend Daniela Lavecchia (Cindy Chung) and why Tim invented a fictitious engagement with a Korean woman.

If as much time was spent on character development as is spent on hanging Christmas lights and opening potato chip bags, “Catch as Catch Can” might have revealed some of the complexities of parenting, separation and individuation, relevance of birth order, and race. These complexities are not addressed successfully, and the effort seems to dissipate across Matt Saunders’s set and under Marika Kent’s lighting.