Two’s a crowd in Stones in His Pockets, which is an oddly eccentric doodle to have had such commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic. The brainchild of Irish actor, playwright, and seasoned film extra Marie Jones, the piece explores the colonization of Ireland (hardly the firest) by the bulldozing nation of Hollywood. Catch is, the invasion of County Kerry by a high-powered film crew is seen through the eyes of a couple of ordinary blokes hired to be extras in a quintessential celluloid tale of turn-of-the-century Celtic romance played out against a pageant of rich greens and the sod-digging dispossessed. And all of the parts in the play, which won both the Olivier and London Eastern Standard Awards for Best Comedy and was nominated for a 2001 Tony, are taken by the two actors who play the central supernumeraries, failed video-store operator Charlie Conlon and failed emigrant Jake Quinn. When the pair aren’t enacting the put-upon extras, they turn on a dime to become (among others) the film’s dismissive Brit director, its American prima-donna star, and "the only surviving extra on The Quiet Man," the 1952 John Wayne movie that set the hokum standard for the genre.

The old less-is-more maxim is one of the things that makes you root for Stones in His Pockets, whose two thespian chameleons are backed by naught but celluloid-framed fluffy clouds and a long, Beckettesque row of shoes. But the touring production at the Shubert is somewhat disappointing, leaning as it does on exaggeration and little added jokes. I did not see the play in New York, where the work of Irish actors Sean Campion and Conleth Hill, who had ridden the play from Belfast to London to Broadway, was widely praised. Here Irishman Tim Ruddy is paired with Perfect Strangers star Bronson Pinchot, who’s removed in ethnicity from Mypos to Ballycastle in the north of Ireland. Ruddy gets into the mincing, fetching comic persona of third assistant director Aisling, who is sleeping with glowering second AD Simon, a Dubliner contemptuous of the locals. But most of his characterizations are delineated and believable. Pinchot is on another page, versatile to be sure, and making hay of his facility with accents, but milking the play the way the villagers do their cows (bovine citizens at one point deemed by the film director "not Irish enough," whereupon "black fluffy ones" are ordered up).

You get the idea. The play riffs on Irish cliches perpetuated by the Hollywood machine but also underlines, in its central nobodies and in the way the moribund community exploits the film for any life support it can get, what Jones calls (in Mel Gussow’s introduction to the printed script) "the whole disintegration of rural Ireland." The oldest living extra keeps admonishing his mates that they’re in control and can’t be fired because they’re already "in the can." But in a way, he seems to refer to rural Irish culture, which also might be said to be in the can.

In the course of the play, which is part spoof of the unlikely Hollywood-Ireland alliance, part call to self-esteem and the proverbial bootstraps for a defeated culture, a drug- and depression-addled local boy walks into the water (laden with the rocks of the title). This leads to a dark night of the soul for Jake, who like most folks in town is related to him, and a big headache for the fifilmmakers, who must accommodate the funeral. In the end, the tragedy inspires Jake and Charlie to envision their own movie, in which the fifilmmakers are minor characters and the extras, the suicide, and, most exultantly, the cows that the dead boy loved get their close-up. (Cut to Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan, in which filmmaking also figures, and whose central character, Cripple Billy, likewise communes with cows.) This may under ideal circumstances make for a triumphant and moving conclusion. But at Tuesday’s preview, a chair broke (these things happen), and that led to laughs on the part of audience and, though they fought it madly, the cast.

Playwright Jones’s husband, Ian McElhinney, directed the award-winning production. It’s hard not to wonder whether this touring one, with Pinchot comically showboating and Hugh Borthwick at the helm, hasn’t been broadened (and the pace slackened). In particular, Pinchot, who is actually rather subtle as the dead boy’s pal, turns the American film star into a writhing, horny Southern sexpot without even the savvy the script allows her. The guy may be talented, but he needs stones in his pockets to anchor him to a modicum of reality that would allow us to receive the play as anything other than sketch comedy.