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In Gary Richards’ drama “The Root,” now in its second North Hollywood production at the Raven Playhouse (Interact Theatre Company staged it in 1996), a chop-shop garage at the foot of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg Bridge isn’t too far from Brooklyn’s waterfront docks.

The first setting is where Richards’ conscience-stricken hero, Vinny (Steve Bessen), decides to take a stand against corrupt cops.

The second setting, of course, is where screenwriter Budd Schulberg’s conscience-stricken hero, Terry Molloy, decides to take a stand against corrupt union racketeers in “On the Waterfront.” Whether or not Richards ever consciously made the connection, the roots of “The Root” are in “Waterfront,” an artistic triumph for both Schulberg and director Elia Kazan that was also Kazan’s dramatized justification for being an informant for Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee.

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All this is of renewed interest now that Kazan will receive an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement at the Academy Awards. Unlike Molloy, however, Vinny plans but never gets a chance to snitch on evil NYPD thug Jerry (Tony Piano). The contorted action that makes this so is just one of several problems with a play that starts off being about moral issues and ends up being about inane plotting.

In one of those painfully obvious expository scenes that clues us in to weak playwriting, Richards has Jerry explain to Vinny what Vinny already knows: that Vinny runs an auto repair shop that takes in cars stolen by slick, likable hood Willie (Nigel Gibbs) and chops them up for parts that are then sold off, with Jerry skimming off a personal profit. Vinny is Jerry’s serf, but he wants out, to run a clean shop as his father did, to reconcile with his father and to reunite with his estranged, offstage wife.

The catalyst is clever--a pair of New York Giants playoff tickets--but the mechanics of the Act II plotting are borderline witless, including a tad too many convenient character entrances. Piano, who also serves here as director, once played a character who stalked Al Pacino; this time, he plays Al Pacino, sans the necessary weight of menace.

Bessen is crucially unable to make us feel Vinny’s life of lost opportunities. Gibbs is silky smooth, even making some of Richards’ creaky dialogue sound effortless, but Shelly Weiss as Vinny’s Zen-obsessed, porn-producer landlord has an impossible assignment as the play’s poorly conceived comic relief.

“The Root,” Raven Playhouse, 5233 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends March 21. $12. (310) 820-4201. Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes.

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