‘The Rules’: Best friends — and in love with same cad

What feels right about this San Francisco Playhouse world premiere is the dynamic among its three young female characters, Mehr (Amy Lizardo), Ana (Sarah Moser) and Julia (Karen Offereins), all friends since college.

In one scene, they’re so at home in Julia’s office — an overworked therapist, she schedules visits with friends between client appointments — that they lounge on each other like human couch cushions.

In the next, it’s “I’m sorry” upon “I’m sorry,” but not in the way that apologies from women are so often rendered in performance, inviting audiences to laugh at their passivity and self-effacement.

Valmont’s anachronism speaks to another way in which “The Rules” holds promise.

[...] having set up that interesting scenario, Guha doesn’t fully develop it.

The second half of the 90-minute, intermission-less play is either repetitive — with Valmont approaching each woman in turn to tell her he “felt something,” a “heat,” eventually convincing each to stay with him despite her doubts — or confusing.

Moser, one of the Bay Area’s finest young performers, does magnificent work in the play’s first scenes, when she and Valmont are on first dates; she takes joy not just in Ana’s coy, spare flirtations, but in the moments before she speaks them, when she gets to hold a line on the tip of her tongue.

San Francisco Playhouse produced “The Rules” with a bare-bones aesthetic as part of its Sandbox Series, which is for new work that’s not ready for a full main stage production.