The Librarian, the only character in Glen Berger's "Underneath the Lintel," proudly shows the audience his old-fashioned date-stamper. He filched it when the library fired him and now wears it on a cord around his neck. It's his gateway to the past. Flip it to a date, any date, and he'll tell you what happened. He has a great deal of information in his head and, by training, he knows how to look for what he doesn't know. Yet this seedy, methodical middle-aged Dutchman discovers in himself an imagination on fire. He will dart through space and time to seek understanding that lacks logic and offers no comfort, but always turns out to be right.

Berger's very entertaining tour de force, now on the Geva Theater Center Nextstage, is a Tom Stoppard-like whirligig that combines a vaudeville turn with a mystery story with an existential quest. What starts as a dusty lecture by an obsessed failure who can't help being funny despite himself, eventually spins its way into the terra incognita of myth and meaning. "We'll proceed," The Librarian says again and again, as he prepares to show us what he calls his "box of significant scraps."

The character, played with unbridled brio and great sympathetic humor by Daniel Pearce, was in charge of checking in the books that appeared each morning in the library's overnight return. One morning, he finds a copy of a Baedecker travel guide signed out 113 years before by someone who signed his name only as "A." The Librarian determines to track him down, and so the picaresque begins, made somehow dramatic in a one-man theater piece set in a rundown lecture hall.

Before long, the Librarian discovers the mysterious "A," who may - or may not - linger at the edges of paintings and photographs, but who may - or may not - scribble again and again, "I was here," "I was here." Their mutual restlessness makes them kindred spirits; one man's curse is another man's mania. The Librarian concludes that "A" is actually the Wandering Jew of myth, the cobbler in his shop on the Via Dolorosa who denied comfort when the condemned Jesus paused underneath his lintel.

Through his search, The Librarian stumbles upon something approaching the existential meaning of life, such as it is, on a scrubby planet apparently overlooked by God. The play has echoes, not only of Stoppard, but also of Beckett and Camus, though it lacks their deceptiveness, complexity, and darkest ambiguity. The Librarian never quite solves his own mystery or discovers his own life's testament, and he certainly never catches up to the Wanderer somewhere out there ahead of him. Yet unlike Becket's DiDi and Gogo, who can only wait, the Librarian ultimately revels in the life that the accident of the Baedecker has enabled him to choose.

Seventy-five intermissionless minutes with one man's obsession can become wearing, but the Librarian has a blackboard and chalk, a batch of slides in an old carousel tray, and a bag full of wisecracks that never go out of date. He and his tricks keep the play moving, the audience laughing, and everyone paying very close attention. Despite his baggy jacket and cardigan, and a mop of receding hair that refuses to submit to the brush, his combination of shtick and sturm und drang makes him a compelling figure.

Lighting Designer Derek Madonia's faded yellow color palette becomes bright and hard when the Librarian recounts the myth of the Wandering Jew, and the play seems to escape for a brief moment from Scenic Designer Lea Umberger's suitably tired set of an old blackboard on wheels and a soiled screen for the slides. There is also a chair, but the Librarian never sits - nor, of course, does the unseen Wandering Jew.

A lintel, the overhead crosspiece in a doorway, is supposed to be a safe place, but it is also where a haven meets the rest of the world, where people make choices. Most don't matter but a few, or just one, may change a life or come back to haunt. In the existential dilemma, our choices are random yet consequential. The Jew wanders and the Librarian pursues, to find what he can. And for 75 funny, intense minutes we gladly follow behind.

Underneath the Lintel

Through March 7

Nextstage, Geva Theatre Center, 75 Woodbury Blvd.

$24 | 232-4382, gevatheatre.org