NEW YORK -- The most exciting new show on Broadway may be a play about the birth of television. This seems an unlikely subject, but "The Farnsworth Invention," which officially opens Monday night (December 3) at the Music Box Theatre, is a rousing theatrical experience and a triumphant star showcase for its lead actors, Jimmi Simpson and Hank Azaria.

The sleek script by Aaron Sorkin (the Emmy-winning writer of "The West Wing" and "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip") crackles with lively sarcasm and zingy asides. And Des McAnuff, the Tony Award-winning director (of the current "Jersey Boys," among many other shows), shapes the play's complex elements -- a whirl of scientific background, corporate-media history and penetrating biographical detail -- with unflagging clarity. McAnuff is working with a big two-tiered set and a large cast (19 actors, playing a variety of roles and doing on-the-fly set changes, too), but their stage movements have been intricately choreographed by Lisa Shriver, and so he's able to keep the story in nonstop motion. There are no songs in "The Farnsworth Invention" (there is some startling instrumental punctuation), but the show is paced almost like a musical.

The play is an extended verbal joust between two men who never actually met, but whose head-butting legal confrontations were key to the development of television technology in the first half of the 20th century and to the vast media industry that it spawned.

Simpson, who's appeared memorably in such movies as "Zodiac" and the cult film "D.E.B.S.," is the emotional center of the story as Philo T.

Farnsworth, a largely self-educated inventor of protean brilliance.

Born in 1906, Farnsworth had begun working out a theory of electronic image transmission -- television -- as a 14-year-old schoolboy in Idaho. He wasn't the first to apply his efforts in this field, but earlier attempts had been mechanically-based. Farnsworth demonstrated a version of his electronic system in 1927 and subsequently secured patents for his innovations. These soon became a serious annoyance to David Sarnoff (played here by Azaria), the head of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA).

Sarnoff had already presided over the development of commercial radio broadcasting, and he quickly understood the possibilities of the embryonic TV medium. He began funding an electrical engineer named Vladimir Zworykin (played by Bruce McKenzie), a Russian immigrant who'd been working on his own electronic television system, without success, for several years. After paying a visit to the trusting Farnsworth in his San Francisco laboratory, Zworykin appeared to have incorporated one of Farnsworth's breakthroughs in his own apparatus, which led Sarnoff to claim ownership of this system -- of television itself, essentially -- for RCA. Farnsworth claimed patent violation, and years of legal wrangling ensued.

The play depicts Farnsworth and Sarnoff as two different kinds of

visionaries: Farnsworth the man of science battered by the demands of business, and Sarnoff the farsighted empire-builder. Simpson's deft timing and warmth as a performer allow him to portray Farnsworth as more than just a doomed brainiac: He's a humane romantic who's determined not to capitulate to corporate thuggery. And Azaria, the veteran film actor last seen on Broadway as Sir Lancelot in the original cast of the Monty Python musical "Spamalot," brings a gruff, seductive charm to the part of Sarnoff -- he makes us see the man as something a bit more than a hardball business mogul, and we feel his grudging admiration for Farnsworth's achievement.

Simpson and Azaria prowl the stage like gladiators, trading barbed jibes, needling protests and conflicting versions of the events we're watching -- a clever way of dealing with the gray areas in the real-life story. That the script takes some liberties with this tale is to be expected -- there are compressions of both characters and chronology. Unfortunately, in one instance, Sorkin ventures beyond the realm of taking liberties into factual distortion. In a proceeding at the U.S. Patent Office, we see a judge rejecting Farnsworth's petition and awarding the rights to the contested television technology to Zworykin. This is the opposite of what actually happened. It was Farnsworth who prevailed, and RCA was eventually compelled to pay him

$1 million to license his patents. And although the company's ongoing appeals in the case drained the inventor financially, it's not clear that they ground him down into a depressive, alcoholic has-been -- Farnsworth went on to do important work in nuclear fusion, radar and electron microscopy, among other things.

"The Farnsworth Invention" gets a lot of exceedingly complicated history right, though. And Sorkin's gift for vividly distilled characterization and tangy dialogue brings it alive. Simpson and Azaria take it from there, and they take it all the way.