MONA ACTS OUT, by Mischa Berlinski

If not for the opiates in her system, or the weed she vaped to boost the pills’ effect, Mona Zahid might have handled Thanksgiving Day better — not ducking into the bedroom of her Manhattan apartment to hide from her quarreling relatives while dinner cooks, or emerging only to grab her affable beagle, Barney, and head for the front door. But in Mischa Berlinski’s novel “Mona Acts Out,” she is, fundamentally, very, very stoned.

So when, on her way through the building’s lobby, she finds a postcard in her mailbox from Milton Katz, the famous Shakespearean stage director who for two decades shepherded her acting career, its piteous message grabs hold of her fuzzy mind.

“I am dying, Egypt, dying,” he scrawls, repurposing a line from “Antony and Cleopatra,” and even though she well knows the charismatic Milton’s habits of shameless self-dramatization and precision-calibrated emotional manipulation, she worries that he speaks the truth. Ever since a #MeToo article in The New York Times got him expelled from his own legendary East Village company, the Disorder’d Rabble — the name is borrowed from “King Lear” — he has lived in disgraced exile.

Mona, who was one of his leading ladies and remains at least a semi-loyalist, hasn’t seen him in nearly a year. Her imminent turn as Cleopatra for the Rabble, without him at the helm, is only stoking her anxiety. His postcard suggests he knows it.

She must go to him immediately, she decides, and she will walk. That means an hourslong odyssey from Morningside Heights to Brooklyn Heights, but again, she is quite high — and trying to avoid her Trump-voting father-in-law, who is on the wrong side of the Shakespeare authorship question, as well as her doctor husband, with whom she is in a holiday snit.

And so the plot is set in motion in Berlinski’s book, which takes inspiration from a 2017 article in The Times by Jessica Bennett, about nine women accusing the veteran playwright and artistic director Israel Horovitz of sexual misconduct.

It’s unlikely fodder for a comic novel, yet Berlinski (“Fieldwork,” “Peacekeeping”) pulls it off, laughing not at Milton’s trespasses but at the ridiculousness of being human — especially in the theater, and especially in New York. As Mona’s sidekick, the joy-seeking Barney is like a furry little clown.

Structured in five acts and an interlude, this psychologically acute, Shakespeare-steeped tale is about both the aftermath of Milton’s downfall and its plentiful causes over many years. By the time of his banishment, he is something of a Lear figure, and Mona something of a middle-aged Cordelia. But the novel’s curiosity is less about Milton than about her and other women once in his orbit, who figure in Mona’s Thanksgiving.

Like Susan Choi in “Trust Exercise,” Berlinski has an intricate understanding of the dynamics of predation, the psyches of performers and the culture of theater, particularly the grittier, convention-trampling downtown variety.

Ambitious and egregiously self-absorbed — Mona and Milton have those traits in common — Mona always tolerated his aggressive handsiness, his middle-of-the-night phone calls, his chronic inappropriateness. “He’s kissed me more than you have,” she tells her husband. To her, enduring that was the price of making great art, a condition about which Milton had been “totally clear with everyone.”

This puts her at odds with Rachel, her beloved college-student niece. A target for Milton’s unwanted kisses as an intern at the Rabble, she became an anonymous source for the reporter from The Times. There is also Mona’s erstwhile friend Vanessa, once Milton’s latest young discovery, who fell fervidly in love with him, not realizing the danger to her nascent acting career if their affair should end.

The journey of “Mona Acts Out” is insightfully, entertainingly multitudinous. Its destination is a letdown. Too neat, too complacent, too contrived, the ending feels like a cop-out not because it fails to wrap up the story in a particular way, or at all, but because it places characters with a profound and important conflict between them in the same small space and pretends it’s a cozy tableau.

Perhaps Berlinski means this outbreak of placid coexistence to be hopeful, even a metaphor for a less fractured United States: its angry old men and outraged women enjoying a moment of détente.

But it comes across as a willful skirting of confrontation — as if our storyteller had averted his gaze and stepped away, humming cheerfully. In that, though, he is merely following the master’s template. Shakespeare’s comedies often behave similarly, culminating in scenes of harmony that the playwright has essentially magicked up.

“Mona Acts Out” is a comedy, too, but its affinity for Shakespeare gravitates at least as much toward the tragedies, and there remains a swirl of stubborn trauma at the novel’s center. A smudge of complexifying darkness would not have gone amiss in its final moments, just before the Act V curtain falls.

MONA ACTS OUT | By Mischa Berlinski | Liveright | 304 pp. | $27.99