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In “James Brown Wore Curlers,” the French playwright tries out a more far-fetched premise than in her previous hits, and produces less satisfying satire.

Clocking in at a brisk 100 minutes, “James Brown Wore Curlers” is less a biting bourgeois farce or comedy of bad manners than Reza’s most celebrated plays: It feels slight and hardly packs a punch. The comedy is deepened by the fact that Jacob’s Celine can barely hold a tune. (Though she wrote the play in French, it is performed in Munich in a smooth German translation by Frank Heibert and Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel.) There is background music and song, although none of it by Dion herself. The young actor, who also has a starring role in Stölzl’s acclaimed recent production of Matthew Lopez’s Aside from the Hutners, there’s an unconventional and freewheeling psychologist who zips around the stage on a white scooter, and Philippe, a white patient who claims to be Black and who is Jacob’s only friend at the clinic. Identity certainly looms large in the play, but Reza doesn’t engage with the issue in a serious and sustained way beyond hinting that all attempts at constructing an identity may contain an element — or more than an element — of delusion. What are we left with, in the end? The only thing that lends the evening depth are the performances. Instead of a living room or restaurant, Reza ushers us into a psychiatric ward, where, in the opening scene, Pascaline and Lionel Hutner, a middle-aged French couple, have just decided to commit their son Jacob. The premise is more outlandish than in Reza’s most celebrated works — the Tony-winning satires “ It’s a stage direction that the director Philipp Stölzl has taken to heart in his gently surreal production at the Residenztheater. Here, the target of her satire is less defined.