Weeks after the last production of “A Christmas Carol” has closed, another ghost is haunting the theatrical stage: Budweiser in hand, elbow rested against the bar, a mouth full of obscenities and a lifetime of stories — some true, some probably not — an old guy ready to chat with anyone who’ll listen.

It’s Jack Durant, proprietor of that central Phoenix steakhouse staple, Durant’s. He died in 1987, but his legacy has lived on unspoiled in his dimly lighted eatery — between its tacky red velvet walls, from its sleek, padded bar — in exaggerated rumors and in Mabel Leo’s self-published biography, “The Saga of Jack Durant.” That book forms the backbone of Terry Earp’s latest play, “In My Humble Opinion,” a flashback-style tribute to the man known as a could-be gangster (he was tight with Bugsy Siegel), an old-school lecher and a gruff bastard with a heart of gold, holding court for some 37 years in an establishment where politicos struck deals, celebs hobnobbed and Durant himself chugged down beer after beer while playfully harassing patrons.

Against a dead-accurate reproduction of the bar at Durant’s (courtesy of set wiz Robert X. Planet), Earp’s play summons Durant’s spirit (played wonderfully by Robert Bledsoe) back to the bar one year after his death to amuse us with stories. Durant is aided by a bartender (John Schile, who gets some terribly forced lines) and Durant’s ex-wife Susie (Emma Lehner), re-enacting scenes from his life in flashback.

Earp knows well that ghosts and flashbacks are cheesy theatrical contrivances — she shamelessly uses both in another of her plays, “Love Waits” — and here she struggles in redundancy and chronological slipperiness. On the positive side, those devices allow us to transition from amusing anecdote to anecdote (did you know, for example, that Durant was as fluent in Shakespeare as he was F-bombs?) with little muss, making for a vivific one-hour entertainment. But as the anecdotes pile up, an underlying sense is uncovered: “In My Humble Opinion” never quite gets to the heart of the man himself. It can’t quite pierce below the myth but settles for coddling his stories.

It’s probably as much a fault of larkily elusive Durant as it is Earp’s or Leo’s. He was a man who seemingly didn’t care to see his story told straight, rather fond of exaggerating (or out-and-out lying) his biography at whim. If, as some loyal Durant’s-goers believe, there is a ghost of Jack Durant floating around Phoenix — well, he’s probably amused as hell at what’s been made of him.

Unfortunately, audiences hoping for insight into the man behind the stories will leave “In My Humble Opinion” feeling more than a little hungry.