A tale of warmth and humor, set amid Afghanistan's rubble

The last two Jews in Kabul are old men who profess to hate each other. You're "a lapdog," one man reproaches. You're "a thug," the other responds. Yet no matter what the two men claim, their mutual contempt is the sort that comes from long, deep, and possibly codependent friendship; it's bred by familiarity.

They are the subjects of Seth Rozin's poignant, funny Two Jews Walk Into a War, now getting a solid production directed by James Glossman for Rozin's InterAct Theatre.

His two men have suffered a litany of loss - every anchor they've had in life, except for each other. Persecution isn't just part of their cultural history, it's an ongoing event. The Taliban in Afghanistan wrecked their country and their synagogue, the play's shambles of a set (by scenic designer Drew Francis). Everyone else is gone, either dead or emigrated. Gunshots and mortars - the ammunition of fear and uncertainty - orchestrate their lives. The single, strong pattern that remains is their behavior toward each other.

Two Jews Walk Into a War, a play with a lot more substance than its zinger dialoguesuggests, has been successfully staged by several companies since its first reading only two years ago by PlayPenn, the Philadelphia-based workshop for playwrights. This is its first Philadelphia production.

That reading was delivered by the same team in the current staging: veteran local actor-director Tom Teti, a longtime company member of People's Light & Theatre, and John Pietrowski, artistic director of Playwrights Theatre in Madison, N.J. In engrossing performances, each builds a distinct character and employs those distinctions to give his role depth.

Lacking rabbis or even Torahs, if the last two Jews in Kabul want to keep their community going they have to be both its spiritual guides and its congregants. They set out to make a Torah scroll - a tough task usually fulfilled by learned scribes who follow millennia-old rules without lapses. This is a special circumstance, but the two men must obey the spirit of the task, and that's where Rozin's play really shines.

Teti's character is the one with knowledge; he has memorized the entire Torah - the five books of Moses from the Old Testament - and is ready to recite it. Pietrowski's character is the scribe - religious, but only by rote; he read the Torah long ago, but with a schoolboy's attention.