Really, it comes down to your willingness to pay $10 to see the shark.

Look, we love Catalyst Theatre Company. We do. We recommended their bold, Brechtian shows on two subsequent October 17ths! We admire their ambition, adapting Orwell and Kafka and whatnot, and their proletarian business model: All hail the $10 ticket!

So we're crying briny tears at the prospect of having to say that Catalyst's latest offering represents a grave disturbance in the Force. The company's usually-astute taste in material takes a hit with Swimming in the Shallows, an aptly-named, vapid little nothing-much of a surreal relationships comedy by Adam Bock. Then again, if you're the type who finds wocka-wocka bumper-sticker phrases like "Marriage . . . it's kind of a commitment!" funny, this just might just be your bag, Baby.

There are a few riotous moments, mostly attributable to director Scott Fortier's buoyant staging and the rat-a-tat comic rapport among the cast, who work like dogs to bring some life to Bock's sub-sitcom-level collection of characters. But Bock's listless narrative and lack of insight into human or animal behavior left us cold.

Catalyst regular Christopher Janson plays Nick, a dude-about-town who sleeps with too many men too fast. Ellen Young is likable and convincing as Barb, bored in her marriage to the slovenly Bob (Scott Bailey, doing good work in a tough part) and ill at ease with her -- our -- materialistic lifestyle. Barb is a nurse, apparently, like her friend friend Carla Carla (Adrienne Nelson). We know this because they're dressed in scrubs, though come to think of it, they could just as well be dental hygienists. Or housepainters. Not that we need to know every character's profession, but we should know something about them other than what they announce to us.

Photos by Joe Shymanski; courtesy Catalyst Theater Company

Carla Carla, meanwhile, wants to marry Donna (September Fortier), but eeewwwwww, Donna smokes. Donna works at the Twigg, Rhode Island aquarium, by the way. Why Bock troubled himself with specificity of locale while settling for vagueness of, well, everything else, we cannot say.

Comes the day Nick develops a crush on the shark. Not a shark as in a mean-spirited or merciless person -- a shark, with fins, teeth, and a taste for meat. Patrick Bussink is the man wearing the fins, and his handsome mug and affable charm make Janson's shark-jones easy to understand. He can groove a bit, too: His loose-limbed abandon makes the Dirty Dancing parody he engages in with Janson one of the evening's highlights, even though the ticker on the wall here at DCist HQ reports that Dirty Dancing has already been parodied 6,876,984,542 times, including every single time anyone on the planet has ever watched Dirty Dancing.

Anyway, to Nick's delight, it turns out the shark is maybe kind of interested. Despite the singular focus of the aquarium-dwelling shark's internal monologue when first we meet him ("Swim. Swim. Swim. Swim. Glass!"), this is a seafaring predator of extraordinary resourcefulness: He can walk on dry land, and he used to sell Avon Skin-So-Soft. ("It's a great product," he declares on his first date with Nick.)

We're all for dadaesque hijinks, but the fact that Bock keeps changing the bylaws of his fictitious universe governing what a shark can and can't do sure bugged us. It plays like a lazy shortcut to an unearned happy ending. When Bock lets the Shark out of the tank -- that's not a metaphor -- he makes it a lot easier to find some kind of resolution in all this tiresome, skin-deep introspection. He also takes away the one element that made his scenario feel at all unique. And yet, Bussink put puts across the shark's first-date butterflies with such disarming sweetness that you can't help but be glad we got to hear him speak.

To paraphrase Mahatma Gandhi: Love the player, hate the play.

Swimming in the Shallows is at Catalyst Theater through March 8. It's about an hour and 15 minutes long, and is performed without an intermission. Tickets, as always, are a mere $10 and are available here.