These are hard times for drinkers, and Richard Willetts Tiny Bubbles cares.

Tiny Bubbles Jay Alvarez, left, and Tim Elliott play roommates in the comedy, at the Medicine Show Theater.

If you are the kind of person who enjoys a refreshing alcoholic beverage, you probably know the look of condescension (disguised as sophisticated tolerance) certain to come your way when you dare to order a single glass of white wine at lunch. Accordingly you may yearn for the days half a century ago and epitomized by the television drama Mad Men when the three-martini midday meal was followed by the three-martini cocktail hour, and no one seemed to worry much about it. In the New Directions Theaters likable if shaky production of Tiny Bubbles, now at the Medicine Show Theater, Danny McKenna (Jay Alvarez) appears to be transported to that time. He loves it; he wants to stay. But he learns some sociocultural lessons.

Danny is a smart, wisecracking, single, gay Denver travel agent and old-movie fanatic whose friend and roommate, Kirk Wesson (Tim Elliott), decides to give up drinking and join Alcoholics Anonymous, an organization that Danny finds laughable. This situation leads Danny to his visions of Madison Avenue happy hours and to another series of visions in which he is a nun instructed to help a novice (Amy Staats) having adjustment difficulties. At the convent Danny learns that being in seclusion is not nearly as romantic as it sounded when Maria, as played by Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, experienced it.

Mr. Willett loves writing about vintage cinema. (In his Random Harvest the stars of that 1942 film of the same name haunted a New York apartment.) As directed by Eliza Beckwith, Mr. Alvarez is congenial and funny, but he sometimes seems to be playing a gay man from a couple of generations ago. When his character mentioned Paul Lynde at one point, I thought, yes, thats whom he has been channeling all this time. Ms. Staats is surprisingly sympathetic and believably misguided in a second role, playing the hard-drinking career woman who lusts after Danny in the 50s.

We all understand the constraints of low Off Off Broadway budgets, but Markta Fantovs scenic design comes up short when it represents Kenny and Kirks two-bedroom apartment. It works fine as the convent and as the midcentury cocktail lounge, but youd think the men were living in the back rooms of some sleazy blue-collar tavern. Maybe its symbolic, but its depressing.

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‘Tiny Bubbles’ at the Medicine Show Theater