‘Clyde’s’ at Berkeley Rep is engrossing, if a little shallow

Salvation is a good sandwich in “Clyde’s.”

A truck stop is transformed into an altar of sorts in this playful new Lynn Nottage comedy in its regional premiere at Berkeley Rep in a co-production with Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company.

In this greasy spoon, food is a religious experience. Short-order cook Montrellous (Harold Surratt) is the high priest, preaching the gospel of perfectly balanced ingredients while Clyde (April Nixon), the boss, is basically the devil, a Cruella de Vil-style villain complete with satanic cackle.

While Surratt deftly fills Montrellous’s soliloquies to the sandwich with a zen wisdom befitting Yoda, Nixon struggles to flesh out Clyde’s psychology as she struts about the roadside joint in skin-tight ensembles and high-intensity wigs, viciously demeaning her ex-con employees all the while. She knows she can bully and exploit them because no one else will hire them, but it remains unclear just why she enjoys it so much.

When she aggressively fondles the booty of a new male employee, the action feels forced. While most of the characters here behave authentically based on their backstories, Clyde seems cartoonish and unmotivated.

In theater, as in food, the devil is in the details. Director Taylor Reynolds doesn’t dig beyond the sitcom laughs to get at the play’s simmering cauldron of race and class. Too many moments play out so gingerly you can’t tell what the point might be. Certainly, the opening scenes, which should crackle with emotion, feel flat but the production gains momentum as it goes, finally sizzling in its last moments.

Wilson Chin’s dingy neon-lit set evokes a fluorescent purgatory in which the minimum-wage workers are deliciously memorable.

There’s Letitia (a radiant Cyndii Johnson), a black single mother who stole medicine for her sick child in a world where healthcare is a for-profit business; and Jason (Louis Reyes McWilliams) a white man with racist tattoos who lost his solid factory job to corporate greed and took his rage out on scab workers.

As in her finest works, such as “Ruined” and “Sweat,” Nottage, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, has a gift for exposing the systemic economic forces that drive people to make desperate choices.