I do not relish the prospect of praising Woody Harrelson, whose public pronouncements have long suggested that he is an even bigger dope in real life than the ones he made his name playing on television, but his new off-Broadway play, Bullet for Adolf, is a pretty good piece of work. Mr. Harrelson directs the play, which he wrote with his friend Frankie Hyman, but does not act in it. There is, however, a significant element of autobiography in the work: Mr. Harrelson and Mr. Hyman met as young men in the early 1980s working on a construction site in Houston, which provides the setting for the play. The drawling, laid-back scoundrel Zach (Brandon Coffey) is a fairly obvious Harrelson stand-in, while Mr. Hyman’s stand-in is helpfully named Frankie. Mr. Harrelson is (one cannot help but have noticed) white (very), Mr. Hyman is black, and the play touches upon the sometimes sensitive aspects of interracial friendships. Those racial sensitivities are irritated by an ethnically schizophrenic character called Dago-Czech (Lee Osorio), whose oft-declared personal motto—“Half Italian, half Czechoslovakian, 100 percent nigger!”—endears him neither to the two black love interests in the play (Jackie and Shareeta, Shamika Cotton and Napiera Groves, respectively) nor to the soft-on-Hitler son of a Nazi officer, Jurgen (Nick Wyman), the proprietor of the construction firm.

The plot is a bit of a shaggy-dog story: Zach and his Juilliard-bound college buddy Clint (David Coomber) have come to Zach’s native Houston for the summer to earn their