Something one notices about the audiences at Manhattan’s 59e59 theater, just off Park Avenue: They don’t look like they’ve come very far to get there. They embody elite comfort and complacency, a fact that actor Dan Lauria, playing Jimmy Hoffa in Good Bobby, puts to sharp comic effect: He enters through the audience, greeting “friends” and slapping backs, pointing out faces in the crowd—“Now there’s a working man!” —as the half-abashed theatergoers, who look like they have never been so much as downwind of a Teamster, smile nervously: They’re in on the joke, and they are the joke. (An earlier production at 59e59, A Lifetime Burning, merely sneered at the haute bourgeoisie from within a miniature Design Within Reach showroom, and was much less satisfactory.) Good Bobby is about the career and Oedipus complex of Robert F. Kennedy, but Hoffa is in many ways the hero of the story, and Mr. Lauria is quite something in the role.

Brian Lee Franklin plays RFK and, having written the play, has no one but himself to blame for the demands of the role—he is seldom off stage—or for the inadequacies of the script. He looks the part and the costuming comes off as delightfully natural, something possibly attributable to Mad Men’s revival of mid-century style. (Should you desire to become the man in the gray flannel suit, Brooks Brothers will sell you its limited-edition Don Draper number for $1,000, but Joe Biden’s obviously botched transplant operation