Two actors, one from a philistine American frontier and the other from a more settled tradition, duel obliquely while, in a manner, performing the same Shakespearean tragic role in New York. Last season’s farcical I Hate Hamlet, where John Barrymore’s ghost accosted a Hollywood actor about to play Hamlet? No, the recent melodrama by Richard Nelson, Two Shakespearean Actors, at the Cort Theatre. During the week between May 3 and 10, 1849, the English tragedian William Charles Macready was performing Macbeth at the Astor Place Opera House in downtown New York City, while the American tragedian Edwin Forrest, the nation’s first theatrical idol, was at the Broadway Theatre in repertory with both Macbeth and a melodrama called Metamora, a sort of pastiche of Fenimore Cooper, largely concocted by Forrest himself, that featured eloquently perishing noble Indian savages. Unruly theatergoers, apparently upset at Macready’s daring to challenge their local darling with a foreign Macbeth, took to disrupting performances at the Astor Place and finally, on May 10, broke into riot. Thirty-four people died. Hundreds more were injured. Macready fled town.

These lurid events are literally noises off in Mr. Nelson’s play, which prefers instead to frequent actors’ haunts such as taverns, hotel dining rooms, and love nests. One keeps waiting for Mr. Nelson to emerge with a theme, to come to grips with the sensational-cum-tragic events just offstage. But he obstinately refuses, confining himself instead to variations of old jokes about actors. Actors,