Khaliah Adams and Tony McKay portray the young acolyte and aging guru in "Cecil and CleopaYtra." Click photo for larger image. "Cecil and CleopaYtra" Where:Jewish Theatre of Pittsburgh at Katz Performing Arts Center, JCC, 5738 Darlington Road, Squirrel Hill. When: Wed.-Thurs. 8 p.m.; Sat. 5 and 8:30 p.m.; Sun. 2 p.m. Tickets: $10-$22; 412-394-3353.

Sometimes the drama is mainly offstage.

I don't know why the Jewish Theatre of Pittsburgh replaced half the cast of the two-person "Cecil and CleopaYtra" two days before its scheduled Oct. 26 opening. But I can well imagine the crazy upheaval that ensued for the new actress, Khaliah Adams, the other actor, Tony McKay, director Gregory Lehane and producer Tito Braunstein as they rushed to integrate Adams into the show so very late in the process.

As luck would have it in this holding-a-mirror-up-to-nature business, creating an actress on the speed plan is just what the play is about. Cecil Stein is an aging and self-described legendary acting teacher and Rosita is a young visiting nurse who is more or less browbeaten into becoming his student and who, from a standing start, is supposed to learn enough in a year to be cast in a professional production of Shakespeare.

Add the further wrinkle that McKay is himself a well-established (if neither aging nor legendary) acting teacher at Carnegie Mellon and Adams is a CMU senior who has been his student, and you can imagine the backstage drama.

In the emergency, they postponed the opening two days, but when I showed up Oct. 28, Adams was carrying the script (of course; she'd had the part for only two days), and it would have been unfair to actors and play to review it based on such a compromised performance. It was particularly hard on McKay, I think, who was in the position of hitting a tennis ball against a backboard rather than with another player.

Returning to review a week later, I found Adams still carrying the script, but really not using it much. That the play comes off as well as it does, framed by the opulent set created by Tony Ferrieri, speaks to the resiliency of this still young professional company.

I just wish it were a better play.

"Cecil and CleopaYtra" is a variant on the time-honored theme of the aging guru and young acolyte -- think "Pygmalion" or "Educating Rita" -- and its debates about the mysteries of art and the balance between art and morality give it some substance. There are plenty of potential conflicts between old and young, man and woman and secular Jew and religious African-American.

Rosita also becomes Cecil's teacher, of course, reviving him with her fresh energy (a relationship long noted between white culture and black). That they should develop affection for each other in one year (carefully marked by Christmas tree, Easter eggs, Thanksgiving, etc.) is plausible. This human drama works pretty well, especially when she gets him to expose his anger at the Jewish bigotry which has embittered him.

But the dramatic result is without surprise. It's fine to make a hero out of an acting teacher, and playwright Daniel Libman taps an undoubted passion about acting and Shakespeare. But the account of the guru process is too superficial. It devalues the skills the play values to imagine that a meandering debate about Shakespeare and the hardest female role in the canon would magically turn a neophyte into an actor, or that presence, integrity, spirit and resolve can take the place of training.

And the talk about training is betrayed by many details. After nine months of working on the play, for example, Rosita is still using a fancy library copy (don't they have fines?) rather than a script she could write in. The part she eventually gets is one that will ask her to speak French. And what acting teacher ever taught someone how to audition before teaching her how to act?

Adams is a vibrant, luminous Rosita, even with script in hand. She doesn't quite get to show the potential Cecil claims to see, either because of that script or because of what it lacks. But her Rosita does eventually impress as an actor, because Adams actually has had training.

McKay's performance doesn't have the same instinctive commitment. He is rich vocally, but with an evenness of tone, as though he doesn't always believe in what Cecil says. (As a skilled acting teacher, maybe he doesn't.) I don't understand his oddly English accent or wheelchair, which seem indulgences, either Cecil's or the playwright's.

This Cecil just isn't very curmudgeonly. But the protest against bigotry is a fine moment. And it is to McKay's credit that he never seems comfortable with Cecil's occasional prurient suggestions, which reach their extreme in an offstage bathing scene that I found witless.

Lehane's direction seems solid, as much as one can tell. It isn't his fault that the ending of Act 1 is phony (of course Rosita is coming back) or that it takes her just 15 seconds to pack up a whole year's worth of belongings.

But that the play is produced as well as it is under such circumstances is admirable, making a better case than the script does for what actors can accomplish.