THEATER REVIEW : A Mad Endeavor : * Seldom has dramatized insanity been more irritating and more able to suck the life out of everything around it.

One way of putting Dostoevsky on stage is to adapt one of his works--preferably one of his shorter works, such as “The Gambler.” Another way is to put Dostoevsky on stage as Nicholas Meyer did last year with Leo Tolstoy in his playful “Loco Motives.”

But playwright Edvard Radzinsky has found a third way: Create a character insane enough to think that he is Dostoevsky, with another willing enough to go along and make believe that she’s his wife, Anna. The third way, alas, is not the charm.

“An Old Actress in the Role of Dostoevsky’s Wife” is Radzinsky’s alluringly archetypal title, and it suggests that the emphasis will be on her, less on him. In director Esther Bates’ staging at the Little Victory Theatre, the effect is something else.

Try as the elegant Irene Roseen might to command attention as the Old Actress who is shunted off by her family to a home for the aged, she must share the stage with Rod Gerber as the kooky guy who is convinced he’s the great author, affectionately called Fedya. It’s a losing battle for her, because it’s a losing battle for Gerber to make this into anything more than a peculiarly asinine depiction of both the insane and the artist himself. Seldom has dramatized madness been more irritating and more able to suck the life out of everything and everyone around it.

If Radzinsky meant to re-create a dostoevskian atmosphere--the pressures of an institution, the blurringsR of identity--he could not have flubbed more. The situation is ludicrous on its face, with the Old Actress pestered in her new room by Fedya, hiding under her bed. Why he’s even in a retirement home is unclear, since Gerber plays him as a man in his 30s or 40s. Why she doesn’t have orderlies remove him at once is even less clear. She’s a serious artiste, of the old school; this fellow possesses all the charm of a ratty-looking dog who never stops barking.

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On this quicksand is built some kind of love story, as Fedya gradually tries to blur the lines between real love and Anna’s and Dostoevsky’s as she described it in her diary. Supposedly, the Old Actress is to feel the double allure of a man adoring her and the chance to play one last great role, even if there’s no audience.

But because Radzinsky does nothing to make these blurred lines dramatically interesting--and Bates adds nothing on her own to theatricalize delusional madness on one end and inspired creativity on the other--actress and madman both end up looking simply . . . mad.

One has to feel especially for Roseen, because she has all of the tools for the finely cultured lady. Her voice is as much theater as we get here, caressing every word with great, elocutionary care. But she has little to play against, and we get only the faintest sense of a faded artistic life.

It would be interesting to hear someone other than Gerber do Fedya, if only to hear something other than Gerber’s puppy-dog approach. No one as well-read as the Old Actress would ever mistake this grinning goof-off for the writer of “The Gambler,” even when he reads from it and recites Anna’s diary from memory.

To add to the play’s own blurred vision, Peter Hyde’s set is the kind of cozy drawing room-bedroom that doesn’t seem very institutionalized, and Kevin Cohen’s lights are almost always at TV-like intensity. A very different kind of light needs to be shed here.

WHERE AND WHEN

What: “An Old Actress in the Role of Dostoevsky’s Wife.”

Location: Little Victory Theatre, 3324 W. Victory Blvd., Burbank.

Hours: 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays.

Price: $15.

Call: (213) 666-3163.