Signs in the lobby have warned of violence, adult language, simulated drug use, and gunshots. So the play begins in an atmosphere thick with apprehension. Two petty thieves, Mike and Torch, have just ripped off three kilos of heroin from a dealer who’s bigger-time than they are and who’ll be out for revenge. The two hide out in an abandoned apartment used by junkies; there, joined by Tony, Mike’s trusted friend, they hunker down to wait out the heat.

First produced in 1995, actor Laurence (The Matrix) Fishburne’s Riff Raff may someday be perceived as an artifact of its time: a work suffused with nostalgia for that authenticity presumed to inhere in the talk of petty criminals, in their rootlessness and violence, in their frayed nerves and their closeness to the edge. The locus classicus of this attitude is Quentin Tarantino’s 1992 Reservoir Dogs, with which Riff Raff shares its premise and some of its main themes — in particular the question of whether loyalty among thieves can be fatally misplaced.

Fishburne’s characters not only embody the object of his nostalgia — they’re nostalgic themselves. Hardly have they settled into their cruddy Manhattan shooting gallery before they begin to tell one another romantic stories about their pasts and about how the bonds between them were formed. Mike and Torch, half-brothers, never knew of each other’s existence till they met by chance in a jail cell and figured out (during, I presume, an exchange of confidences similar to the one we witness) that they had the same irresponsible father. Mike and Tony bonded at their first meeting, worked " flim-flams " together, and did a spell at Rikers Island together.

A constant refrain of the play is that the characters are " in the life " ; but for these people, the life isn’t something one is in but something one talks about. The play’s centerpiece is a long spiel of doggerel recited by Tony about a pimp who murders a whore. The poem colors Riff Raff with a familiar anti-sentimental sentimentality, turning the rawness of " the life " into a literary experience; it’s like reading Iceberg Slim. Other stories are told: one about a hot date that goes south after the guy sees a rat in the girl’s apartment; one about a junkie’s travails with dope and his attempts to kick; and — by the way — an account of the incident that got Mike and Torch into their present jam.

The challenge faced by the writer and the director of Riff Raff is to reconcile its nostalgic, narrativizing impulse with a strong line of suspense and action. In other words, to keep before the audience — if not at all times, then as much as possible — the danger of violent retribution, to stress the specific direction from which it could come, and to convince us that Mike and Torch have at least a chance of avoiding it. And meanwhile to build up — through their stories — a sense of the significance of the three people’s lives, so that we feel their choices and fates matter.

Unfortunately, the play just doesn’t work. Fishburne’s writing has a superficial flash — which comes mainly from the repetition of swear words and criminal argot — but it lacks color and focus and is unmemorable. And he’s careless with the play’s dramatic line: Mike, Torch, and Tony are raconteurs first and characters second, which is the wrong order.

For Riff Raff to come off in performance would require a very high level of direction and acting. Ubiquity Stage’s production, under Craig Houk, fails to achieve that. Houk’s pace is too slow and his staging too static; he doesn’t know how to build tension, create contrast, or give urgency to the many long speeches in the script. The actors are visibly underdirected. Rich Girardi (Mike) and Richard Arum (Torch) create good first impressions, but as they struggle with the artificiality of the play, they seem more and more to be posing instead of acting. And Michael Nurse’s dull performance as the ambiguous Tony kills the play’s suspense long before those threatened gunshots put an end to the reminiscing jag that is Riff Raff.