ALL THEATER FANS with hearing problems should head over to Theatre Row for Groundswell, in which director Scott Elliott (perpetrator of last season’s quickly shuttered Mourning Becomes Electra) has helpfully encouraged his trio of actors—Larry Bryggman, David Lansbury and Souléymane Sy Savané—to yell their dialogue as often as possible.

The characters may have reasons to yell, as desperate diamond prospectors Johan (Lansbury) and Thami (Savané) try to coerce retired businessman Smith (Bryggman) to invest his money in a lastditch scheme to hit the jackpot, but that doesn’t mitigate the annoyance of three grown men bellowing at one another for 100 minutes. Johan, who has the twitchiness of a sociopath, is particularly determined to pry money out of Smith’s cautious hands, and eventually the knife he flashes in the opening scene comes out for a second, more threatening time.

But since Groundswell is set in a South African lodge, the play is about much more than two desperate fortune hunters. Smith, despite the years of service he had given the country he was born and raised in, was forced into early retirement by the new ANC government so that a black African could take his job. Thami is a poverty-riddled African supporting his family after his father disappeared in a mine while working for the old government. And Johan is a white former cop who became a national whipping boy after shooting an unarmed black man.

The three performances all start off strong and then blur together in a haze of shouting and threats. As Smith, a man who refuses to feel guilt for being a white African, Bryggman is particularly fine, even if his character is a little too willing to tolerate Johan’s abuse for such a long stretch of time. Lansbury invests Johan with an off-kilter personality that keeps the formulaic play from becoming too obvious (Death and the Maiden kept coming to mind), but Johan eventually falls apart under a welter of revelations regarding his past, his quest for redemption and the true nature of his beloved friendship with Thami. And though Savané isn’t bad as the native lodge manager,Thami alternates between obsequiousness and low-key irony, hardly the tools to secure his place in the audience’s memory opposite the over-the-top Lansbury.

Ian Bruce’s script gives all three men the chance to rant and rave about the indignities they’ve been put through in life, the unfairness of being who they are where they are, and the better hands everyone else has been dealt in life. But none of it makes any of them more sympathetic. Smith complaining about being ousted from his job in favor of someone who doesn’t know how to do it is no different than being pushed out of a job in youth-obsessed America for someone younger, and Johan and Thami, no matter the color of their skin or the facts of their lives, are still cheap chiselers who refuse to abandon their dreams of easy riches.Who knew the fallout of apartheid turned everyone into characters in a David Mamet play?

> Groundswell

Through June 27. The New Group at Theatre Row, 410 W. 42nd St. (at 9th Ave.), 212-279-4200. $49.00.