THEATER REVIEW; Personal Friends, Political Pawns

From the moment in the first scene when the fiery young Palestinian crashes through the shop window of the curmudgeonly old Jewish baker, life moves at a disorientingly fast clip in Eliam Kraiem's ''Sixteen Wounded,'' the political melodrama with the pace of a sitcom that opened last night at the Walter Kerr Theater.

After meeting cute, if bloody, amid shattered glass in Amsterdam in 1992, Hans (Judd Hirsch), the baker, and Mahmoud (Omar Metwally), his unexpected visitor, sit down to a cozy game of backgammon and almost instantly develop a friendship that bridges a vast ethnic divide. Oh, sure, there are some rocky moments early on, as when Mahmoud realizes that Hans is a Jew and spits on the mezuza nailed to the old guy's door.

But they both get over that uncomfortable episode quickly as Mahmoud, a medical student, agrees to keep working for Hans in the bakery shop where the grumpy but warm-hearted old fellow has cloistered himself. Even when weightier things come between them, like a time bomb, they're able to reach inside themselves and discover their abiding mutual affection. That's just the way these lovable if tragic lunkheads are. And when Nora (Martha Plimpton), Hans's spunky and sexy employee, shows up, you know it's just a matter of very limited time before she and the hunky Mahmoud fall for each other.

Basically, there's not a major emotional reversal -- and they happen with head-spinning frequency in this play, directed by Garry Hynes -- that couldn't be clocked with an egg timer, with a minute or two to spare. Yet as the characters race through their frenzied, predestined dance of friendship, love, loss and destruction, the overall effect is of a turtle race in slow motion. And while the theme of Arab-Jewish relations is normally guaranteed to whip up passionate feelings, ''Sixteen Wounded'' generates less urgency than your average episode of ''Friends.''

These are sad tidings to report in a season when Broadway is suffering from a drought of new plays, and especially of works with the courage and honorable intentions of this one. After 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, it has been heartening to see how many American dramatists, from John Patrick Shanley and Craig Lucas to A. R. Gurney and Tim Robbins, have felt compelled to address the terrifying state of international politics today.

But these works have all been staged in theaters other than the palaces of Broadway, where only the presence of a movie star -- preferably naked and of tabloid notoriety -- can promise success for a nonmusical. Though ''Sixteen Wounded'' does star Mr. Hirsch, popular to television audiences from ''Taxi,'' its cachet is, first and foremost, its topicality. Which means that to draw crowds it needs to be garlanded, through word of mouth as well as critical reviews, with adjectives like searing, unflinching, shattering and revelatory, all followed by exclamation points.

None of these words apply to ''Sixteen Wounded,'' previously staged (in a somewhat different version) at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven. For his Broadway debut, the 30-year-old Mr. Kraiem has boldly taken on a subject that has baffled masterminds of world diplomacy. And it's fair to say that he does not undervalue the Gordian complexity of that subject. ''Sixteen Wounded'' fully acknowledges that any debate about the Middle East among ardent partisans is going to produce no winners.

But for politically themed, slice-of-life theater like this to work, you have to feel emotionally invested in the individuals who are shaped and manipulated by historical forces. And aside from the always excellent Jan Maxwell, who plays a prostitute with whom Hans shares a Sunday kind of love, the performers here are hard pressed to make you care about the people they embody.

The production has gone to some trouble to create an authentic environment, from the designer Francis O'Connor's hunger-inspiring, fully stocked baker's kitchen to the convincing showers of rain and snow created to evoke the changing seasons. But even doing in-the-moment activites like kneading dough or playing backgammon, the cast members register mostly as mechanical cogs in a clockwork plot. (The five-member ensemble also features Waleed F. Zuaiter, who appears in the second act to hurry along the play's inevitably unhappy denouement.)

This sense of affectlessness has much to do with the shortcuts that Mr. Kraiem takes in pushing his characters into relationships. Though Hans advises the restless young Mahmoud that patience is necessary in all things, from the game of dominoes to the art of baking, ''Sixteen Wounded'' does not itself practice this virtue. Structured as an elliptical series of black-out vignettes that take place over two years, the play works on the assumption that the audience will fill in a lot of blanks on what's occurred among these characters in the time between scenes.

Yet even within a single episode, characters are asked to exchange deep secrets, to process that information and then come to terms with it, switching psychological gears in ways more suited to Jim Carrey at his most manic. Perhaps this accounts for the odd disjointedness of Mr. Hirsch's performance, in which lines seem to erupt from him at different pitches like a scale of stylized belches. Mr. Hirsch is an actor of probing intelligence, and presumably he is trying to convey the detachment of a man who has buried his real identity, as he reveals in the second act.

But the ultimate impact of ''Sixteen Wounded'' rests entirely on your belief in the familial love that develops between Hans and Mahmoud and, to a lesser extent, between Mahmoud and Nora. While Mr. Metwally is a handsome and engaging young actor, he never conveys the hair-trigger intensity and feverish warmth Mahmoud is said to possess.

The usually first-rate Ms. Plimpton here lets her mask of a European accent do most of the work in creating her character. (It is supposedly a Dutch accent, but to me she sounded like Ingrid Bergman with a megaphone.) And Ms. Hynes, who brought such gooseflesh-making verisimilitude to ''The Beauty Queen of Leenane,'' appears at some point to have simply given up on forging credible connections among the characters.

It is to the play's advantage, by the way, that it begins with Ms. Maxwell alone on the stage as Sonya, the Russian prostitute who has just finished her weekly assignation with Hans. As she zips up her boots with grim, bored efficiency, Sonya radiates the compelling weariness of someone who has come to see life as a matter of just going through the motions, of surviving from day to day.

Whenever Ms. Maxwell and Mr. Hirsch are alone onstage together, you began to feel inklings of complexity in their characters, a sense of lonely people forced by circumstance to detach themselves from their core identities and deepest feelings. Mr. Kraiem's point seems to be that even in the homey isolation that Hans has created for himself in his baker's shop, there's no escape from a vicious world of conflict, where to feel too much of anything is to court infinite pain.

This premise could be the basis for a seriously moving play. But it's an idea that registers fully only when Ms. Maxwell is around. That her character has the least to do with the play's central plot tells you a lot about how far ''Sixteen Wounded'' remains from achieving its admirable ambitions.

SIXTEEN WOUNDED

By Eliam Kraiem; directed by Garry Hynes; sets and costumes by Francis O'Connor; lighting by James F. Ingalls; original music and sound by John Gromada; special effects, Gregory Meeh; fight direction, Thomas Schall; dialect coach, Stephen Gabis; production stage manager, David Hyslop; Presented by Jujamcyn Theaters, Producers Four and Robert G. Bartner, in association with Debra Black, Lisa Vioni and Michael Watt. At the Walter Kerr Theater, 219 West 48th Street, Manhattan.

WITH: Judd Hirsch (Hans), Jan Maxwell (Sonya), Omar Metwally (Mahmoud), Martha Plimpton (Nora) and Waleed F. Zuaiter (Ashraf).