Written by the Spanish dramatist Juan Mayorga and translated by David Johnston, "Way to Heaven" addresses an extremely difficult topic for artistic treatment, the Holocaust. Indeed, Gad Guterman, dramaturg for the play's production at the New Jewish Theatre, devotes much of his program note to the "impossible challenge of representing" the Holocaust, and quotes the writer and survivor Primo Levi's caution that even first-person nonfiction proves hopeless.

So the creators of "Way to Heaven" were not insensible to the difficulty of their task. But they fall short, as they must. Mayorga's honest, though ultimately inadequate, approach is to write what amounts to two different plays, then jam them together. Either one might have been more successful on its own than they are in this awkward mismatch.

"Way to Heaven" was inspired by a real incident, a 1944 visit by Red Cross officials to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. To fool the visitors, the camp was tricked out as a "model village" where contented Jews lived in safety. Of course, the illusion was built on nothing. The camp also included a route to an "infirmary," known as the "way to heaven." In this "infirmary," nobody got well.

Mayorga devotes his first act to a pair of long monologues, which director Doug Finlayson entrusts to two deft performers.

Jerry Vogel portrays the Red Cross inspector, returning to Theresienstadt after the war, guilt-stricken and baffled. Was he stupid? Gullible? Dressed warmly, his lips pursed but his eyes dry, Vogel embodies a whole world that only sees what it wants to. Why, he wonders, did nobody give him a signal? He doesn't ask why he didn't see the signals right in front of him.

Of course, a good effort was made to confuse him. As the commandant of the camp, Jason Cannon presents himself as a man of culture. Cannon, who's big and strong, looks imposing in his smart uniform, the image of a man laying claim to an honorable military tradition. He's also nuts, a detail that emerges more clearly in the second act.

But in Act One, the monologues create twin versions of self-delusion. Nearly by themselves, Vogel and Cannon turn the ambiguous first act into a thoughtful study of perception and its distortions. It's rather oblique, but Mayorga does create a mood and raise hard questions.

The second act takes a completely different tack as the commandant informs one of the Jewish prisoners, played with delicate hesitancy by Terry Meddows, that he is now the "mayor." As such, he must do the commandant's bidding, leading other Jews in a pageant of village life designed to impress the Red Cross.

They are given lines to say, blocking to execute, props to handle. Many of them are children, a shattering detail: We know how easy they are to replace if they fail to perform to the satisfaction of their director, the commandant.

This act, in which the commandant takes on his theatrical duties with gusto, has an easy-to-follow story. As the commandant tries to work up the mayor's enthusiasm, using thumbtacks to mark the actors' positions on his model of the 'stage," Mayorga flirts with very bleak humor. Needless to say, the mayor has next to no idea what is expected of him. He has no background in theater. He wants to save everybody he can, and knows that's impossible.

When Meddows talks quietly with a pretty little girl, nicely portrayed by Elizabeth Teeter, he can barely manage to speak, let alone tell her what he needs to say. In that moment, which is heartbreaking, Mayorga goes too far: he's trying to show what, as he surely knows, cannot be shown, and runs right into the difficulty that Primo Levi warns against. He tries to depict the sacred. Nobody's touch is that delicate.

A much more conventional Holocaust drama than the first act, the second act has its own integrity. But together, they grate against each other. When he chose to address this subject, Mayorga must have recognized the enormity of his challenge. But he could have met it more fully, or at least more keenly, by settling on a single style.