SUSAN PFANNMULLER/Special to The Star Joel Rooks transforms himself into George Burns in “Say Goodnight Gracie.”

As a general rule, plays or movies about show business — or show-biz personalities — are to be avoided like the plague.

When these shows go south it’s almost always because the subject is never as fascinating to the audience as he or she is to the obsessed people driven to write about the likes of songwriter Peter Allen, for example, or vaudeville star Al Jolson.

But every now and then you stumble upon one that works. Case in point: “Say Goodnight Gracie,” the one-man play by Rupert Holmes in which comedian George Burns describes from the afterlife his bittersweet love affair and professional partnership with Gracie Allen.

Burns, the Jewish kid from the tenements of New York, and Allen, the Irish-American beauty from a San Francisco family of performers, achieved fame in vaudeville, then in radio and movies and finally in television before Allen, who had been working since the age of 3, announced her retirement in 1958. All she wanted, Burns tells us, was to sleep late, go out to lunch and play afternoon cards with her girlfriends.

One reason this play works is that Allen, whose voice we sometimes hear (courtesy of actress Didi Conn) and whose image we sometimes see in clips from films and television, is as much a character as Burns, played to near-perfection by Joel Rooks in a production at the New Theatre Restaurant.

Rooks was the understudy to the late Frank Gorshin, who performed this piece to acclaim on Broadway and on tour. Rooks, through his acute sense of timing and an ability to color his words with finely nuanced shadings, leads us along a remarkable journey that works on at least two levels.

This is, in part, a love story between two equals who made a life in the toughest of professions. Burns’ devotion to the love of his life is all the more remarkable because of his matter-of-fact approach to the world. He was not a sentimental man, but his love for Gracie never abated, according to this show. As a result the play will stir an emotional response among some viewers prompted to reflect on their own lives and relationships.

On another level this is a history lesson that takes us from the Lower East Side circa 1900 to Hollywood of the 1970s and beyond. By his own account, Burns’ show-biz career began on the street corners of New York, singing with his brothers in a quartet. He worked in vaudeville for years under various names (his real name was Nathan Birnbaum) without much success until he met Allen, whom he describes as the funniest woman he ever met. That’s quite a ride, to go from the days of horse-drawn beer wagons to national radio, prime-time television and ultimately an Oscar for best supporting actor in 1976 for “The Sunshine Boys.”

We’re forced to look back at the origins of American pop culture and question whether we should view the eternal expansion of the entertainment industry as progress or a sure sign of our decline.

Director Richard Carrothers stages the show cleanly and simply, allowing a few chairs and tables and a large upstage screen on which the clips of Burns and Allen’s movies and TV series are projected.

Scenic designer Keith Brumley suggests an afterlife that looks a lot like an old vaudeville house, and Randy Winder’s evocative lighting design helps Rooks shift moods seamlessly.

After it’s all said and done, you have to tag this show as something more than light entertainment. It so convincingly depicts a man reviewing a life that spanned 100 years that it acquires a haunting quality that sticks with you.