Theatergoers familiar with the plays of A.R. Gurney know exactly what to expect from him. For over 40 years, he has been serving up wistful, pointed comedies about affluent urban white Anglo Saxon Protestants. But in 1995, he diverged from his sociological pre-occupation to write a love story called Sylvia.

Hardly the usual romance, it is instead the tale of Greg, a guy going through a textbook mid-life crisis — dissatisfied with his job and perhaps his marriage, yearning for something more. One afternoon, while playing hooky from work, he encounters a saucy, sassy stray dog in the park and takes her home to his New York apartment.

His practical wife Kate takes an instant dislike to the mixed-breed pooch with a collar proclaiming her to be Sylvia. Kate insists that the dog would be a disruption to their lives at a time they should be enjoying more freedom, not less. But Sylvia yaps her way into Greg’s heart, lavishing sloppy, unconditional love on him. And sure enough, the dog drives a wedge between the couple, threatening their long-term relationship.

For convenience’s sake, we are privy to Sylvia’s internal thoughts and she also manages to converse with Greg and Kate. Don’t question why, just go along with it.

Sylvia is not top-drawer Gurney, but it can be a very entertaining evening with a sufficiently resourceful actress in the title role. At the Boca Raton Theatre Guild, Jacqueline Laggy makes a pretty good Sylvia, sufficiently hyper and fetching, so to speak. But she shows off all her canine moves early on, so the performance does not sustain interest for the entire evening. Still, you can see why Greg has become so smitten with Sylvia.

The Guild’s artistic director Keith Garsson handles the role of male menopausal Greg and, intentionally or not, gives the character a puppy doggish quality. The cast’s only Equity performer, Patti Gardner, is spot-on as exasperated Kate, whose teaching career accelerates just as Greg’s money market sales job goes into decline, but the part is little more than a parental scold.

Gurney is fond of having actors play multiple roles for theatricality’s sake. Here, Mario Betto plays a veteran dog owner, a tipsy female friend of Kate’s and a marriage counselor of indeterminate gender. Betto’s extreme height makes an amusing visual in a scene opposite Gardner.

With Kate’s academic specialty being Shakespeare, Gardner gets to sprinkle her dialogue with quotes from the Bard’s plays and then cite their sources. And in an odd musical theater moment, Laggy, Garsson and Gardner express their inner feelings with a rendition of Cole Porter’s Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye.

The production is directed efficiently by Genie Croft, returning to the Willow Theatre where she relocates her Women’s Theatre Project next month. There is a funnier play lurking inside Sylvia, but doggone it if the Guild’s season opener doesn’t deliver a diverting couple of hours.