The question of happiness in upper-crust America has been one we’ve dealt with in this country for years. With money, wealth and power, what more could a person want, and why do so many of us feel dissatisfied?

Wanda Menzel’s new play, “Happy in America,” which opened this weekend at the Herberger Theater Center, deals with this question. The show takes a look at a regular high-income family living in California to explore the trials they face.

The first half of the play set up the characters and outlined their plight. Peter Goodman, played by Robert Menton, faces marital troubles with his wife, Annie, played by Alissa Cooper. Their son, Harold, played by Henry Grimes, is struggling with his classes at Stanford and has come home for the weekend for his parents’ support — only to find himself thrown into a tumultuous home rife with arguments.

Cooper gave the standout performance of the first half of the play, illustrating Annie’s character with nuanced action and excellent body language. As a mother, we see her demeanor change and soften; as a wife, she stands rigid, asserting her needs.

As the play progressed, however, the plot took a sudden twist, leaving many thematic elements unaddressed and loose ends untied. The entire performance, too, took a 180-degree turn — it simply wasn’t convincing.

During the second act, as Annie is sitting down with Harold to discuss whether a new car might help improve his grades and is preparing to tell him about her impending divorce from Peter, the stage began to shake. While the scale of the effect was impressive, it failed to seem realistic.

As stage left began to crumble away, rapidly advancing toward Annie and Harold, I found myself questioning the purpose and efficacy of this move. In the middle of a performance filled with subtleties, why now take on such grand and theatrical effects?

I felt as though I had been transported into a cheesy B-level horror film. The shaking seemed choppy and overwrought, and the floor breaking into pieces and descending into a vast hole of nothingness just took everything one step too far. For a theater company to accurately illustrate disaster, they should do so with taste and simplicity, or it will begin to feel too over-staged and unrealistic. That’s what happened with “Happy in America.”

Cooper and Grimes also demonstrated a lack of preparedness for the scene. Their responses to the crumbling metaphorical and physical worlds around Annie and Harold were slow and ill-timed. Perhaps the most grating part of the whole show was the distinct change in Cooper’s performance: The scream she gave as Annie responding to the floor beneath her feet crumbling away into an endless, empty void was clearly fake and actually pulled me out of the scene. I found myself wondering how long this would last before we could get back to the compelling issues of how Annie and Peter would divide their joint belongings after the divorce.

After such a gripping and believable performance from Cooper and Grimes, their acting in this scene was simply inexcusable. Their actions were thin and fake, failing to convey the emotional complexity of the characters of the Goodman family. As the floor falls beneath her, for example, Annie reaches for Harold in a panic, but instead of using this moment to demonstrate a moment of tenderness between mother and son, Grimes brusquely grabbed Cooper’s arm and yanked her, almost violently, back onto the stage.

The two started to run from the yawning hole of absolute darkness but fell in. The audience could hear their screams for at least half a minute after they had fallen — far too long to allow the moment, which should be traumatizing, to develop any sort of emotional response at all.

You’d think that would be melodramatic, unrealistic and exaggerated enough, but the floor only continued to crumble. Theater seats on either side of the stage collapsed into the pitch-black, bottomless pit. They even recruited extras to appear as usual theatergoers, who were sucked from their chairs into the infinite darkness.

Finally — after far too long, in my opinion — the shaking stopped. And with that, so ended the play, which was utterly disappointing. The more I think about it, the more disgusted I am. In an act of complete arrogance, the actors also failed to enter for curtain call, leaving the audience with too many questions and a sense of business forever left unfinished.

When I turned around to see if anyone knew what was happening, I realized I was alone in the theater. I can therefore attest to the horrifying failure of this play by the fact that of all the audience members for the opening-night show, I was the only one with the fortitude to stick around for the final scene.

“Happy in America” will be playing at the Herberger Theater Center through Nov. 16. Tickets range from $35-$65.