‘Teresa’s Ecstasy,” by the wonderfully named Spanish American playwright and actress Begonya Plaza, tries to combine the spiritual with the earthly in its story of a woman’s quest for self-discovery while exploring the life of Teresa of Avila, the 16th-century saint.

It doesn’t quite succeed in either department — but it does give us a nifty onstage lesson on making gazpacho.

The setting is present-day Barcelona, where Carlotta (Plaza), a magazine writer, has arrived to research St. Teresa along with her editor, Becky (Linda Larkin). But Carlotta’s also there for another purpose — to serve divorce papers to her artist husband Andres (a fine Shawn Elliott), who’s clearly still in love with her.

The macho Andres takes an immediate disliking to the self-possessed Becky, calling her a prudish American when she refuses to change clothes in front of him. After Becky leaves for a night on the town, he attempts to rekindle Carlotta’s affections by plying her with food and wine, including a homemade gazpacho he prepares as she watches.

Along the way, they argue over organized religion — he uses the Inquisition to make his case for its malevolence — and the mystical St. Teresa herself.

“Teresa was addicted to opium,” he argues. “She wasn’t seeing God, she was hallucinating!”

Their drawn-out interactions comprise the lengthy first act of this lopsided two-hour play. The jarringly short second act has the women returning from their brief excursion to Avila, in which Carlotta has had a life-changing realization about just whom she really loves.

Although couched in spiritual gloss, the play, directed unassumingly by Will Pomerantz, is essentially a high-toned, exotic soap opera. Of the three performers, only Elliott is able to deliver the heavy-handed dialogue convincingly.

This ever-reliable performer — he was in the original cast of off-Broadway’s 1968 “Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris” — is effortlessly natural. The scene in which he joyfully sings and dances along to Cat Stevens’ “Wild World” becomes the inadvertent highlight of the evening.