A Joke That Fails to Deliver

Have you heard the one about the rabbi who started dating the lapsed Catholic hired to install new carpet in the temple?

No? We hadn’t either, but playwright Art Shulman’s attempt at turning the situation into a play, “The Rabbi and the Shiksa,” at Group Repertory Theatre, doesn’t make you relish the joke.

Actually, Shulman takes the prospect of a respected veteran rabbi falling for a non-Jewish woman (or shiksa, a derogatory Yiddish term) as no joking matter in the end, and his play ends unhappily. But by then, what could have been a provocative and stimulating comedy of faith and human impulses is as lame as Shulman’s one-liners.

Shulman has uneasily explored this kind of odd-couple material before, with his under-wrought 1998 comedy, “Boxcar and Eugenia.”

As a theater, Group Rep has long devoted attention to broad ethnic comedies. But after the company’s recent, remarkable step forward with Mark Stein’s brilliant “At Long Last Leo,” this play feels like a faltering step backward.

In the most obvious terms, Shulman establishes Rabbi Persky (Shelly Kurtz) as a liberal, even slightly irreverent rabbi of a conservative congregation but never explores how this came to be.

Persky has a loyal secretary in Hannah (Diane Frank); a loyal ally in fellow temple board member Al (Elliott Goldwag); and the inevitable, pesky nemesis in Maury Plotkin (Dominick Morra), who just plain doesn’t like the rabbi.

Knowing full well that he’s in trouble with Plotkin and that his plotters are trying to fire him, even discussing with Al the political balancing act of trying to please the struggling temple’s conflicting interests, Persky goes ahead anyway and gets himself into big trouble.

Her name is Theresa Genovese (Rebecca Westberg), putting in a bid from her company to re-carpet the temple and at the same time shamelessly flirting with Persky. Shulman’s writing throughout is fairly charmless, but Theresa’s introductory scenes are thuddingly so.

For a play that spends so much onstage time with such a contradictory character as Persky, little time is given to exploring what makes him botch things so badly.

Theresa is no believer in either religion or God, Hannah holds out a flame for Persky, and Plotkin is a Brutus-in-waiting. Persky himself knows better, at one point calling it off with Theresa.

But then their love revs up again, in a series of amateurishly plotted scenes that wouldn’t pass muster in a Playwriting 101 class. Al can do nothing, while Hannah betrays her rabbi like a woman scorned and Plotkin goes for the kill. Shulman gives Plotkin a message-y speech about his fears of American-Jewish dilution through assimilation, as if this long-simmering issue in the Jewish community had never occurred to Persky. What had always been obviously a doomed love breaks up unmemorably.

Clearly, this could be powerful stuff, but the combination of soft, wobbly writing and bland direction by Lori Street-Tubert shaves off any possible Shavian edge that might have been.

The actors, for no obvious reason, loudly project their lines as if they’re in the Ahmanson, and Kurtz’s fitful performance make him appear as puzzled as we are at the unexplored mystery at the heart of the rabbi’s character.

Westberg is warm, but brings little to her line-readings and doesn’t really cook up much chemistry with Kurtz. Frank has some interesting moments of frustration, but she’s also saddled with some of the worst moments.

Morra dutifully plays the stock heavy, but only Goldwag brings some real charm and humor. Here’s a guy you’d like to spend time with, especially away from this play. Desma Murphy’s temple office set suggests more texture and detail than anything in the writing.

“The Rabbi and the Shiksa,” Group Repertory Theatre, 10900 Burbank Blvd., North Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Runs indefinitely. $16. (818) 769-7529. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.