Playwright Mark Clayton Southers' play, "I Nipoti" ("The Nephews") is another installment in what he calls his "culture clash" project dramatizing the intersection between African-Americans and other cultural groups.

He also is artistic director of Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre, which is staging the play in its cramped quarters inside a Downtown parking garage.

Obviously, the target here is Italians -- nephews Tony (Mark A. Calla) and Nico (Tony Bingham), bigoted Americans, and their sick uncle, Tano (Robert J. Roberts), a recent import from the Old Country.

Bending the Medicare rules into a pretzel, the nephews warehouse Tano in an African-American old folks home rather than the hospital when the old guy collapses into a coma.

Blustering bully Tony owns Slice of Life, a pizza joint enjoying good business thanks to Uncle Tano's magical sauce but now threatened by the chef's breakdown. The browbeaten Nico stands guard at bedside in case his uncle wakes up and remembers the recipe.

There he encounters a trio of black people -- Dr. Roberts (Les Howard), Nurse Brenda (Twanda Clark) and roommate Obadiah Fields (Kevin Brown) -- a fate worse than death in Tony's outmoded view of society.

Southers is a disciple of the August Wilson school of drama, at its most elemental, a blend of angry, humorous diatribes and supernatural events leading to an epiphany of sorts.

Obadiah and Dr. Roberts deliver the diatribes including a rambling history lesson on how Hannibal invented pizza and a course in semantics on the words white and black.

Now and then, Uncle Tano wakes up, to be revealed as a far more tolerant man than his dim-witted nephews, although Roberts' Italian accent is on the far side of Chico Marx.

At 2 hours, 45 minutes, "I Nipoti" displays flashes of comic invention and realistic characters, but is preachy and overwritten. Its messages of tolerance and compassion struggle to be heard between the rants and the sermons.

Hand it to director Wali Jamal for handling the restrictions of the small set well, giving the broad acting strokes of Brown, Calla and Howard plenty of room.

Bingham lends a subdued, believable performance as the unconfident Nico, who grows in wisdom by play's end, an end that can be seen as a beautiful spiritual moment or a predictable cliche.