THEATER REVIEW : In Short, ‘Behan’ Too Long : Dull passages add drag to lengthy play. But actor Kavanagh’s Titanic moments are worth the wait.

Brendan Behan, a critic once noted, lived a life, then wrote about it. By age 23 he had already had more than enough life for someone three times his age, and later, when he communed with literati in Paris, none of them--not even the experience-hungry Ernest Hemingway--could hope to match Behan’s real-life epic.

Consider, for instance, that he spent more time in prison between 16 and 23 than out. The Dublin kid witnessed the Irish Republican Army from the ground up, and before that witnessed a Dublin of Dickensian squalor. He boozed and brawled. He labored in Paris’ sex industry. He went from getting shot by British troops to getting lionized by British critics, and then those in New York.

He also wrote a lot, but strangely, only one play really stands the test of time--”The Hostage.” Intensity was this guy’s middle name. Any play about him should fairly blow us away.

Actor and adapter Michael L. Kavanagh’s “Bein’ With Behan,” back for another of its several revivals, this time at Two Roads Theatre before a planned New York engagement, doesn’t quite do that. In fact, the play might strike some as little more than presenting a boozy fellow with a gift for gab overstaying his welcome.

But although “Bein’ With Behan” is much too long, it embodies Behan’s insistence to survive, in this case, to last out the script’s dull spots and fully deliver its powerful ones.

The biographical emphasis is on Behan’s formative years, living amid slum squalor, doing jobs for the IRA, sweating it out as a political prisoner, finally escaping to France and finding his writer’s voice. Kavanagh weaves the story together with anecdotes, small stories within the big life story, just the way a guy would do it at a pub setting like this one, care of designer Stawinsky Anthony.

Kavanagh uses his close resemblance to Behan not as an easy crutch but as part of a total performance that comes close to pulling off the illusion that Behan has come back from the grave. Still, it’s a strange performance. From time to time (especially during dryly sweet anecdotes), Kavanagh is so singsong in his Gaelic twang that he’s nearly sleep-inducing. Then he gets his emotional pistons going and, as in a passage about the dying girl he loves, he can be Titanic.

Bruce Heighley directed (but more likely fine-tuned) what amounts to Kavanagh’s years-long fascination with and immersion in Behan. As director, though, Heighley, should have insisted on some trims in a show pushing three hours. If this is going to New York, he’ll have to.

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WHERE AND WHEN:

What: “Bein’ With Behan.”

Location: Two Roads Theatre, 4348 Tujunga Ave., Studio City.

Hours: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 5 p.m. Sundays. Ends March 12.

Price: $15.

Call: (818) 766-9381.