A few scenes in act two suggest that there's a smart, sharp political melodrama somewhere down inside Peter Morgan's "Frost/Nixon," now playing at Geva Theatre Center, but otherwise you'd never know it from Morgan's desultory writing, Steven Woolf's static direction, and the cast's listless acting. I can't remember a first act with so little momentum, or a second in which an onstage narrator insists on interrupting what's happening, often to tell us what we've just seen and heard. It's hard to believe that Morgan is the same man who wrote the screenplay for "The Queen."

Based on talk show host David Frost's television interviews with Richard Nixon, the play pits an ambitious celebrity against a disgraced former president out to restore his reputation. Nixon is intelligent and shrewd, but has profound emotional needs. Because Frost's career is shaky and he is short of money, the confrontation promises to be sizzling, but the play spends the first act sputtering and slouching to get to the big moment.

Frost and Nixon finally face off in the second act. The time is 1977, three years after Watergate led to Nixon's resignation. The ex-president has agreed to what he assumes will be softball questions from a dilettantish show biz type.

Those of us who remember the Nixon years also remember that millions of people watched these interviews. Would Nixon acknowledge wrongdoing and apologize? Egged on by advisor Jim Reston, son of The New York Times' legendary Washington columnist and a Nixon hater of the first magnitude, Frost sets out to get that apology. Nixon, a lot smarter than Frost, toys with him in the first two taping sessions.

In the best-written and best-played scene in the play, a drunken Nixon calls Frost the night before the third and final taping. The astute ex-president sees that both men come from similar backgrounds: their families provided little money and less affection, and the sons were social misfits. Both men now need the limelight desperately; only one can win and the alternative is what Nixon calls "the wilderness." The final battle is joined.

Other than Nixon, the characters are one-dimensional. They holler a lot but reveal little, and Woolf often has them face the audience rather than one another. A telephone argument between Reston and Nixon's chief-of-staff, played ineffectively by Jim Wisniewski and Jeremy Holm respectively, places the two men at opposite sides of the stage, yelling at the audience.

Keith Jochim as Nixon is the ablest member of the cast. He has Nixon's quivering jowls and rounded shoulders, and he suggests the familiar rhythms of Nixon's speech, but he stops far short of mere imitation. It is an odd but genuine tribute to Jochim to say that by the end I felt some sympathy for a pol I've despised for half a century.

Although Geva has a well-earned reputation for wonderful sets, this time around the set is minimal and unimaginative. Stagehands carry furniture on and off the stage, and an overhead rack of a dozen TV sets provides visual context to little effect. Why do we want to watch a smaller image on a batch of TV screens when the person is right there in front of us? Maybe it's trendy but it doesn't add much.

The play ends with a brief homily about the merging of politics and show business, as if that's something new. Maybe it was news in 1977, but it is certainly nothing to stir an audience three decades later. Ironically, the story, itself, remains fascinating, but the play, only a year or two old, already feels tired.

Frost/Nixon

Through November 16

Geva Theatre, 75 Woodbury Blvd.

$20-$57 | 232-GEVA, gevatheatre.org