A prison play by Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams wrote a prison short story called "One Arm" in the '40s, adapted it into a screenplay in 1967 and spent a chunk of his disappointed late life trying to get it filmed.

Playwright-director Moises Kaufman and his Tectonic Theater Project ("The Laramie Project," "I Am My Own Wife") have spent a decade adapting the screenplay from drafts they found in various libraries and private collections.

The result of all that faith can now be seen in a co-production by the Tectonic and The New Group. Directed by Kaufman with sincerity and self-conscious intensity, the 85-minute drama makes it easy to understand both the fascination of its creators and at least two reasons it never got made.

First, the blunt story of a maimed boxer-turned-male-hooker was way ahead of its time. Equally important, at least in this version, the thing is dull and arch.

Ollie Olsen (Claybourne Elder) is a buff and beautiful Arkansas farmboy, a champion boxer in the Navy whose life is derailed when he loses an arm in a car accident. Unable to find work, he turns numbing tricks in New Orleans and around the country until he kills a porn director. The story is told in flashbacks from a windowless jail on death row, with a narrator (Noah Bean) reading instructions from the screenplay.

Every time a flashback gets passionate, the jailer rips away the memory by announcing the arrival of more mail for Ollie from hundreds of johns. He realizes that, despite what he considers his "mutilation," his life has not been without meaning. Neither is the play, but probably not in ways that Williams hoped.

WHAT "One Arm"

WHERE 410 W. 42nd St.

INFO $60; 212-239-6200; thenewgroup.org

BOTTOM LINE Mainly for historians of Tennessee Williams and gay literature