Fault! Double fault!

“Deuce,” Terrence McNally’s moldy new comedy about a storied women’s doubles tennis team, has stumbled onto Broadway with the grace of a John McEnroe temper tantrum. This dispiriting waste of talent and time exists solely to let two grandes dames of the theater — Angela Lansbury, returning to Broadway after 24 years, and the ubiquitous Marian Seldes, returning after what seems like 24 minutes — engage in the sort of banter and bathos that went out of style with “The Gin Game.”

During 95 intermissionless minutes, the well-born Margaret “Midge” Barker (Ms. Seldes) and the blue-collar Leona Mullen (Ms. Lansbury) tell Viagara jokes, get trembly-lipped about mortality, and drop the sort of four-letter words that would have sent dear Jessica Fletcher — the gumshoe played by Ms. Lansbury on “Murder, She Wrote” — hurtling over the handlebars of her bike. That these exchanges generate even a tiny handful of laughs has everything to do with the formidable pair of actresses and virtually nothing to do with Mr. McNally or director Michael Blakemore, who appears to have staged the play when he had a few hours to kill one afternoon.

The days of Midge and Leona’s 12 grand slam victories are long in the past, and it’s been a decade since the two have crossed paths. “Deuce” unfolds courtside at a women’s quarterfinals match at the U.S. Open in Queens, where the reunited duo kill time by halfheartedly watching the match, ogling the umpire, nursing old grudges, skeptically regarding today’s female players, and exchanging sub-“Golden Girls” quips:

MIDGE: In Blue Harbor I’m known as the Bitch on Wheels.

LEONA: You always were a lousy driver.

MIDGE: I don’t think they’re referring to my driving, Lee.

LEONA: I know, Midge.

LEONA: It takes very little to make me happy. When I’m regular I’m on Cloud Nine.

MIDGE: When I’m regular I’m on Cloud Twenty.

Mr. Blakemore’s blocking is confined largely to having his stars, who remain seated for nearly the entire play, swivel their heads to the left and right as they follow the unseen tennis match. Mr. McNally, meanwhile, interrupts Leona and Midge’s reminiscences with pointless bits of commentary by subsidiary characters — glib sportscaster patter from two tennis commentators (Brian Haley and Joanna P. Adler) and a series of salutes from a starry-eyed middle-aged fan (Michael Mulheren).

These sequences are presumably designed to give the stars a quick rest, the equivalent of having tennis players grab a towel and a Gatorade after every two games. They are also about as interesting to watch. The worst offenders by far are Mr. Mulheren’s fawning soliloquies, a series of banalities about “the unexplainable, the inexplicable genius of how they did what they had chosen to do with their lives. It took my breath away. It still does.”

The admirer eventually approaches the women with his autograph book, setting off a stroll down memory lane with reminiscences about Althea Gibson, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, and several lesser-known icons of women’s tennis. Characters in previous McNally works have used the arcana of opera (“The Lisbon Traviata”) and musical theater (“Love! Valour! Compassion!”) as totems of fabulosity, lifelines to an earlier, purer era, but never has the author inserted this sort of material so awkwardly.

This largely unchecked nostalgia quickly curdles into a series of curmudgeonly gripes. As Leona and Midge grumble about the grunting, racily dressed youngsters in front of them — “I can see her nipples!” — it’s hard not to assume Mr. McNally shares their concerns. Among his other bugaboos are the airplanes that thunder over the U.S. Open and the sport’s commercialization, embodied here by Peter J. Davison’s logo-coated set.

The Midge-Leona tandem was described in its heyday as “brutal finesse,” which describes Ms. Seldes’s and Ms. Lansbury’s approach well enough. In tennis terms, Ms. Seldes has the stonger net game: When a punch line presents itself, she swoops in with her regal bearing and swanlike limbs, crisply attacking the gag and staying on the offensive. Ms. Lansbury prefers the serve-and-volley approach, tossing in a few stammers and lingering over the material before arching an eyebrow or dropping her voice an octave at just the right moment. The depths of her comic skills become apparent only upon reflection, when it becomes clear that a line such as “I was never a fashion plate — a dish, maybe, but never a plate” has very little to offer on its own.

Early on, Mr. McNally rouses himself into some sharp writing about the male sports world’s discomfort with accomplished female athletes, which manifested itself in an assumption that Leona, Midge, and the others were all lesbians. “They couldn’t accept women wanting to play as hard or win as much as they did,” Leona fumes. “No, not win, but to care so much about winning.” For a few seconds, it becomes clear why this project might have warranted Ms. Lansbury’s returning to Broadway after a quarter-century absence.

Then a streaker runs across the court, and “Deuce” reverts to more penis jokes. Welcome back to Broadway, Ms. Lansbury.

Until August 19 (239 W. 45th St., between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, 212-239-6200).