You’re not going to find Stephen Adly Guirgis writing about hedge-fund managers or Williamsburg hipsters.
The guy sticks to what he does best, which is telling about a racially mixed, mostly working-class New York.
It works for him, too — he scored a Broadway hit three years ago with “The Motherf**ker With the Hat,” a quick-witted comedy about betrayal among the down but not quite outs.
Guirgis’ follow-up, “Between Riverside and Crazy,” is in a more intimate setting, at the Atlantic company, but the M.O. remains the same.
Walter “Pops” Washington (Stephen McKinley Henderson) is an ex-cop and a crusty father figure beloved by family, friends and former colleagues — even though he’s involved in a suit against the city, having to do with an old shooting.
But time is running out for Walter. His wife died a year earlier, his health is iffy, the landlord of his large, rent-controlled Riverside Drive apartment wants him out, and his police buddies pressure him to settle.
Whether any of this comes to pass feels almost irrelevant. The show’s best scenes are just of people shooting the breeze gruffly but affectionately, as when Walter razzes his son’s girlfriend, Lulu (Rosal Colón), who’s meant to study bookkeeping.
Pops has his doubts: “Her lips move when she read the horoscope,” he says. “That ain’t the mark of a future accountant!”
Guirgis is best in the scenes between Walter and his police friends, Audrey (Elizabeth Canavan) and Dave (Michael Rispoli), especially when a relaxed dinner skids into an argument with sharp realism.
Directed by Austin Pendleton, the show strains only when it doesn’t know where to stop — as with Walt Spangler’s set, which rotates distractingly, or with a baffling encounter with a Brazilian church lady (Liza Colón-Zayas), whose magical-realist powers include giving Walter a sexy, sacrilegious Jim Beam baptism.
The scene doesn’t gel with the rest of the show, as if Guirgis needed a goddess ex machina to move things along.
He didn’t — Pops is the kind of New Yorker who can fend for himself.