James Franco directs his “Child of God” star Scott Haze in Robert Boswell’s drama about a young man wrongly convicted of rape, who re-encounters his accuser nine years later.

While doing eight performances a week on Broadway in the stirring revival of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, the indefatigable James Franco has been juggling a rehearsal schedule for his stage directing debut with the Off-Broadway premiere of prolific novelist and playwright Robert Boswell’s The Long Shrift. Why? That question is never answered during the anesthetizing 95 minutes of this emotionally bogus wannabe Sam Shepard effort, which basically teaches us that all men have the capacity for violence while all women are prone to lapses of hysterical finger-pointing and manipulation. Franco has recruited actor Scott Haze — his onscreen lead in Child of God, and a castmember of three other films he directed — to play the Damaged & Angry Young Man at the center of this monotonous harangue. But Haze’s line readings and characterization are so thoroughly indebted to his director that the performance borders on imitation. What’s more, the stand-and-deliver approach of Franco’s staging does nothing to alleviate the talky drama’s static nature or disguise its wonky construction. As the whiff of pulpy hardboiled masculinity in the title suggests, this aims to be a raw drama about protracted punishment with perhaps a perverse glimmer of comfort at the end. But its circuitously overworked dialogue has the literary feel of a stretched-out short story, and while the production is certainly Actor-y, it’s also resolutely untheatrical.