Chad Batka for The New York Times  Woody Harrelson, left, and Frankie Hyman.  WORKING construction in Houston one sweltering morning during the summer of 1983, Frankie Hyman overheard the site supervisor chastising another employee for arriving two hours late. When he heard an easy, drawling voice retort, “What are you talking about, I’m usually the first one in and the last to leave,” a claim that “definitely was not the case,” Mr. Hyman chuckled and decided that “I liked this guy, and I hadn’t even met him yet.”  Follow @NYTimestheater for theater news and reviews from Broadway and beyond.  From left, David Coomber, Brandon Coffey and Tyler Jacob Rollinson in âBullet for Adolfâ at New World Stages.  The honey-voiced laggard was Woody Harrelson, still a couple of years away from his breakout role on the television series “Cheers,” and he and Mr. Hyman promptly became friends and then roommates. Now, working together again nearly 30 years later, they’ve written a play, “Bullet for Adolf,” that draws on the instant camaraderie they felt and the odd characters and situations they encountered that summer.  Since Mr. Harrelson is white and Mr. Hyman is black, “Bullet for Adolf,” which opens Off Broadway on Wednesday at New World Stages for a run scheduled to conclude on Sept. 9, also touches on the question of friendships across racial lines and several other aspects of ethnic and workplace politics. It is profane and provocative, making liberal use of a common racial slur, but its primary objective, both authors said — Mr. Harrelson is also the director — is to be funny.  “Early on, this was a straight-up drama, with a lot more heavy material,” Mr. Harrelson said last Sunday, seated at Mr. Hyman’s side at a playground in Harlem, Mr. Hyman’s old neighborhood. “We kept developing it, thinking: ‘We want to make people laugh. Do we want to make them think too? Maybe every once in a while.’ ”  Fliers being distributed in Harlem urge residents to see the play and offer a substantial discount on ticket prices, and also caution that “if you’re easily offended, this play ain’t for you.” But race is not the only contentious issue the play addresses in blunt language. There are also jokes about pedophilia, the Holocaust and placentas.  “We do want to challenge people, and part of the humor does have an edge,” said Mr. Harrelson, who has two Academy Award nominations for acting, for “The People vs. Larry Flynt” and “The Messenger,” both dramas. “There are a lot of edgy jokes, and a few are really sharp edged. Certainly, watching ‘The Book of Mormon,’ my thought was that you can go further than I had thought.”  Mr. Hyman and Mr. Harrelson said that all the characters in “Bullet for Adolf” are based on people they knew that summer, and that real names have been retained. There’s a street-savvy black guy named Frankie, played by Tyler Jacob Rollinson; a splenetic foreman with a thick German accent named Jurgen; women named Shareeta, Jackie and Batina as romantic interests; and a jive-talking, work-shirking colleague, based on their half-Chinese, half-Mexican co-worker, who isn’t black but wishes he were.  The major exception is the character based on Mr. Harrelson himself, an easygoing, conniving good ol’ boy who has been renamed Zach for the purposes of the production. “I thought it might take you out of the play a little bit” to use his own name, Mr. Harrelson explained.  The only reference to Mr. Harrelson’s career is oblique, in the form of a brief glimpse of “Cheers” before he joined the cast, part of several video montages that are shown between scenes. To anchor the play in the period, those clips also include snippets of movies, Ronald Reagan speeches, MTV videos and music by Prince, the Police and Michael Jackson.  Even the bizarre tale that gives “Bullet for Adolf” its odd title and turns the second act of the play into a sort of Agatha Christie whodunit is based on a true story, Mr. Harrelson said. A family in California that he knows came into possession of a Luger pistol originally owned by Hitler and was supposedly once used in an attempt to assassinate him. In the play Jurgen owns the pistol, which vanishes at a birthday dinner.
Woody Harrelson and Frankie Hyman, who together wrote the play âBullet for Adolf,â started their friendship as construction workers in Houston.