Promise collides with complications in ‘Last Day’

Vetere, whose “The Marriage Fool,’’ “Gangster Apparel,’’ “First Love,’’ and “Three Sisters From Queens’’ have also been performed at Gloucester Stage, shows an undeniable knack for pungently hard-boiled dialogue. It is when “Last Day’’ turns soft-boiled and even squishy that the play goes astray, with increasingly overwrought exchanges and a love-triangle plot twist that seems less revelatory and resonant than arbitrary and dated.

It’s the last day on the job for a retiring cemetery worker named Ryan (Timothy John Smith), who wears a grimy beard and a backward-facing baseball cap, and whose years of hard labor are evident in his weary movements. “We’re the faceless guys holdin’ shovels, standing in the back waiting for the last rose to be thrown in the hole,’’ Ryan says.

Indeed, Ryan is seldom without his shovel. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a fellow in his line of work, he is also prone to ruminations on the ways of God, the nature of good and evil, and the role Satan might play in human affairs.

Just as Ryan is prepared to lay down his shovel for good, an unwelcome complication arises for him and his best friend, Sean (Francisco Solorzano), a supervisor for the cemetery union. An archdiocesan official calls with the news that there has been, in Sean’s words, “a rush on dead Catholics,’’ and they need to be interred in Section 15 of the cemetery.

Problem is, that’s where Sean buried another cemetery employee, called Billy Sr., after Ryan murdered him a decade earlier. He buried Billy Sr. in Section 15 even though Ryan had explicitly told him to bury the man elsewhere, in an exclusive section of the cemetery that is considered “hallowed ground,’’ and where the body would thus be unlikely to be discovered.