There are two plot lines in Dolka, but local writer Walt Vail's play about a war criminal living undetected for years in this country allows the most obvious and least compelling one to overwhelm the story that is more intriguing and pertinent to a contemporary audience.

The main character is Josef Metelis, a wealthy 70-year-old stockbroker living comfortably in Villanova in 1990. In the opening scene he is confronted by an elderly woman who claims to be a government representative and who accuses him of having been a World War II Lithuanian police lieutenant who participated in the massacre of 5,000 Jews at Kaunas (a real event).

Metelis denies it, but the Theater Catalyst premiere at the 2nd Stage at the Adrienne is not structured as a did-he-really-do-it? piece. Before the accuser comes on the scene, we have seen Metelis having a dream that reveals his virulent anti-Semitism and shows him behaving badly toward Dolka, a young Jewish girl whose connection to Metelis and his role in the massacre is gradually revealed. With that dream at the beginning of the play, Vail has put the audience on notice that Metelis was a wartime bad guy and that sympathy should not be wasted on him.

Vail spends a great deal of time on Metelis and his wartime activities. His anti-Semitism, then and now, is stressed so much that it becomes tedious, and though the atrocities described as his Nazi-enabler role is unveiled are terrible to contemplate, they are by now familiar Holocaust accountings.

The other plot line is personified by Metelis' 20-year-old granddaughter, Gloria, and Avram, the Jewish youth to whom she is engaged. How these thoroughly American young people, two generations and 50 years removed from the Holocaust, deal with their family involvement in it is the most involving aspect of the play.

However, because of the emphasis on Metelis and his wartime behavior, the young people and their predicament are not as persuasive as they might be. It is difficult to feel Gloria's love for her grandfather, who in her experience has been a "good and kind man," when we don't get the opportunity to see the Metelis she knew - the family man and solid citizen (a Wharton graduate, no less) that he was during his five decades in the United States.

Playing Metelis, veteran local actor Tim Moyer is the most accomplished member of the cast. His strong performance in the unnuanced role makes his unsavory character seem even more dominant and Dolka more of a see-the-villain-brought-to-justice piece than Vail, who also directs the production, may have intended. Sara Pauley offers an assured, credible Gloria, but with much less skilled performances by those playing the elderly woman and Avram, there is a noticeable imbalance in the acting that further weakens the presentation.