Seth Rozin's Two Jews Walk Into a War, a new comedy now launching a premiere-filled season at Florida Stage, has been likened by folks at the Manalapan theater to earlier plays by Neil Simon (The Odd Couple or The Sunshine Boys, take your pick) and Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot).

The comparisons are understandable -- Rozin gives us two incompatible but amusing Jewish men living in a bombed-out Kabul synagogue, waiting for heaven knows what -- yet invoking either Simon or Beckett is a big stretch. While the company does its usual impeccable job with casting, direction and design, the script is neither as adroitly crafted as Simon's early comedies nor as existentially mysterious as Beckett's work.

Rozin, a playwright who is also the founder and artistic director of Philadelphia's InterAct Theatre Company, based Two Jews Walk Into a War on the real story of Isaac Levin and Zebulon Simentov. When Afghanistan's cruel Taliban government was overthrown in 2001, NATO forces discovered the men preparing to celebrate Hanukkah at the synagogue where the two lived, while deeply loathing each other. Though the men had families living in Israel, they stubbornly and miserably stayed on. The media dubbed them ``the last two Jews in Afghanistan.''

Two Jews Walk Into a War takes that basic situation, changes the characters' names and tries to turn it into a rollicking, touching comedy. Oh, the laughs are there: Avi Hoffman, who plays the younger Zeblyan, and Gordon McConnell, as the older Ishaq, are both deft comic actors, and director Louis Tyrrell is adroit at keeping a comedy buoyant.

But as short scene after short scene flies by, ending in a blackout after an intended comic payoff, Two Jews Walk Into a War starts to feel more like a skit in a Catskills hotel showroom than a fully developed play. And the sentimental arc Rozin gives the men becomes a dramaturgical device, not a credible emotional journey.

Hoffman, who soldiered bravely on despite apparently not feeling well on opening night, plays Zeblyan as an energetic, optimistic guy who isn't afraid to acknowledge the yearnings of the flesh. McConnell's Ishaq is crankier, more devout, determined that his faith live on in his homeland.

As much as the actors do to frenetically sell Two Jews Walk Into a War, the play's most artful work comes from set and lighting designer Richard Crowell. Crowell doesn't just supply a small, partially wrecked synagogue in a war zone. He actually rigs it so that, after explosions or the sound of gunfire, pieces of the set go tumbling, flying or crumbling. Now that's great theater. Two Jews Walk Into a War? Not so much.

Christine Dolen is The Miami Herald's theater critic.

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