Even before seeing Martin Casella’s play about Irish men and their relationships to their reportedly small penises, The Irish Curse, now at the Odyssey, I was thinking about Nora Ephron’s A Few Words About Breasts.

Many people will always remember Ephron for popular films like When Harry Met Sally, You’ve Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle, but that Nora Ephron couldn’t hold a candle to the one who, along with Joan Didion, made me first understand the power of the writer’s voice—not in films, but in essays that took the deeply personal and made it universal.

Ephron had long since stopped writing for magazines like Esquire, New York, and Look by the time I read her collected Crazy Salad, Some Things About Women, sometime in the 80s, but the timeliness of her take on the world around her wasn’t diminished then, and even now, some forty years after they were first written, her words crackle with electricity and wonder.

Especially in her Esquire essay, A Few Words About Breasts. It is a piece that is still startling in its raw humor.

She was admittedly obsessed, even demented, about the size of her breasts, and with great honesty that never obscures the wry comic rhythm, she declared that her entire life would have been different had she developed larger breasts—and she dared anyone to contradict her assessment of the big bust advantage.

Which brings me to The Irish Curse.

With Ephron’s recent and untimely death, I was hoping for a lot—perhaps too much—from Casella’s tale.

It seemed like a natural—apply the same mix of humor, specific obsessiveness, and honesty, and explore men’s body issues the way Ephron did her own.

Yet what read as great insight in Ephron’s hands, is sometimes quite funny in Casella’s, but ultimately feels like narcissism and self-pity run amok.

It starts with what feels like a phony set-up: We are at a support group in the basement of a Catholic Church, held for the benefit of Irish men, or American men of Irish extraction, who suffer from what is referred to as the Irish Curse—in a way that suggests we all know about Irishmen and their no meat, all veg problem.

(That the producers of the film A Home at the End of the World reportedly cut Irish star Colin Farrell’s frontal nude scene, because the sheer enormity of his “talent” was distracting, goes unmentioned. Perhaps he is the exception that proves the rule.)

That such a group might exist is reasonable enough. That this particular one does is not very believable.

It is peopled the way old World War II movies were, with a broad spectrum of demographics—or at least as broad as you can find within a group of Irish men.

There’s the macho cop who’s actually gay; the short athlete with the even shorter fuse who lies about his conquests; the affable, kindly priest who has to be coaxed to finally utter the word “f--k;” the sad-sack whose wife has run off with a guy whose equipment is supersized; and the new guy—the one meant to shake everything up since he doesn’t know how the group is “supposed” to work.

The men talk and talk and then talk some more—endlessly blaming their failures and unhappiness on their diminutive sexual organs. There are some laughs along the way, and the actors are quite charming and able for the most part—but it just seems like a bitch fest with no real illumination.

The attempt at an exception is the group’s new guy: An Irish émigré who we learn is a week away from getting married and, still a virgin, has never told the woman he loves about his shortcomings.

Played by Patrick Quinlan, his is the one palpable human dilemma in the bunch. Quinlan is compelling and touching, and does a phenomenal Irish accent.

But his revelation comes too late to save the play, and the resolution is too easy and rushed.

Andrew Barnicle directs the physical action well enough—there’s only so much you can do with a play that takes place in real time during a discussion group.

The men sit in chairs. In a semi-circle.

Occasionally, toward the ends of their monologues, they get themselves all het up enough to get up and pace for a minute or two.

Where Barnicle shows little nuance is in the emotional pitch and flow of the performances. Every monologue seems to result in yelling—like in a Norman Lear sitcom from the 70s.

The characters admit they have small penises. Then they say why that’s a bummer.

Then they yell about how no one understands them and how each one believes his situation is worse than everyone else’s, and why should they have to defend how they feel?!

They don’t have to defend how they feel. They have to give us some reason to care about how they feel.

Unfortunately I didn’t.

The Irish Curse

Odyssey Theatre Ensemble through August 26

For tickets, (310) 477-2055 or visit OdysseyTheatre.com.

Samuel Bernstein is an author and screenwriter living in West Hollywood with husband Ronald Shore and their pack of priapic dachshunds.