No doubt director Nora Hussey chose James Costigan’s 1958 television drama Little Moon of Alban, which later moved to Broadway, to open the Wellesley Summer Theatre season because of the pertinence of its theme — the New Testament injunction to " love thine enemy. " However, the first act of Costigan’s play is a clunker because it’s so bogged down with the plodding chronology of who has done what to whom that one longs for a program note to dispense with the exposition.

The place and time are Dublin, circa 1919 to 1923, when the Irish had declared themselves a free state, leading to the wrath of the British and its army of occupation. Unlike the great plays of Sean O’Casey that personify the same material through unforgettable characters who bring the political issues to blazing stage life, Little Moon of Alban settles for the obvious. A wounded English soldier is nursed by an Irish lass who lost her father, brother, and sweetheart to the violence. Of course, the man and woman fall in love. But fortunately, Costigan’s reduction of the issues that divide the pair to a replay of the war between the sexes is redeemed by his skill at writing two-person scenes. It’s also to the playwright’s credit that, though the audience might yearn for a happily-ever-after resolution, he eschews the sentimental for a more rigorous ending.

Act one parades the leading characters before us and lets them mouth their positions: Brigid Mary Mangan, the Irish girl whom we watch grow into maturity after she loses her fiancé to a British bullet; her mother, Shelagh, embittered by the deaths of her husband and son in " the Troubles " ; Patch Keegan, the charismatic Irish rebel; and members of the British army, led by Lieutenant Kenneth Boyd. The second act takes place in the British hospital staffed by members of the Catholic lay order Daughters of Charity, which Brigid Mary has now joined. Boyd, who is severely wounded in an ambush by the Irish patriots, becomes her special charge, setting the stage for a relationship to blossom.

Despite the problems of the play’s construction, which include a muddling of the passage of time, Little Moon of Alban was elevated in its initial television incarnation by the actors and is here saved again by a new generation.

In the TV drama, Julie Harris, as Sister Brigid Mary, won one of the four Emmy Awards awarded to the Hallmark Hall of Fame broadcast, with the young Robert Redford playing her fiancé who is killed. In Wellesley, after a stiff first act in which the uneven cast is tested by the challenge of the Irish brogue, Alicia Kahn, as Brigid Mary, moves from suppressed anger to glowing vigor as she falls in love with Boyd, portrayed with ferocious pride and dignity by Derek Stone Nelson. Ed Peed is convincing as both an English foot soldier in act one and as Doctor Clive in the second act, changing posture as well as vocal tone. Elyse Cronyn delivers a moving vignette as Brigid Mary’s mother, arriving with the message about Boyd’s identity that cracks open the action. Ken Flott, as Patch Keegan, gives a reckless performance that suggests the ambivalence of a thinking man whose beliefs have burst all controls.

It’s not hard to find multiple parallels in modern times to the situation of Little Moon of Alban. Now, as in the period during which the play is set, it’s the ordinary folk who are the victims on both sides of whatever conflict — in Afghanistan, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, and the nations of Africa, not to mention the United States, where our security was forever shattered by 9/11. Given the headlines that confront us these days, the rapprochement of Costigan’s play — even between just two people — seems like wishful thinking.