A Prickly Friendship Endures, Even as Luck Wears Thin In ‘Chinese Coffee,’ Louise Lasser Directs Austin Pendleton

Chinese Coffee, at the Roy Arias Stage II Theater, is an actors’ evening. It’s directed by a wonderful one,Louise Lasser (an ad for her acting studio is on the back of the program); features a very busy one, Austin Pendleton (himself a fine director); and was performed on Friday night for an audience stocked with lots of other ones, overheard discussing rehearsals, the odd one-woman musical and excellent directors around town. So, here’s to actors, although perhaps not so much to Chinese Coffee, Ira Lewis’s two-hander, whose appeal may be stronger for actors than for audiences. (More actorly cred: Al Pacino starred in a Broadway production, and directed a movie version, with himself and Jerry Orbach, in 2000.) The play has two meaty roles in Jake (Mr. Pendleton) and Harry (Sean Walsh), New York down-and-outers of the artistic sort who talk and talk late into a winter’s night. But at 100 minutes or so, it feels uncomfortably like a long one-act, an extended pas de deux about a prickly friendship.