When Irish eyes aren't smilin'

NEW YORK -- The Irish flair for storytelling has been well documented, so it should have surprised no one that the best plays of the 2004-'05 Broadway season both came from sons of Erin.

OK, so John Patrick Shanley, the Irish-American author of the Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning Doubt, is technically a son of the Bronx. And Martin McDonagh, whose Tony-nominated The Pillowman earned equal acclaim, was raised in London, though he would travel to his parents' native Ireland during summers. In any case, his and Shanley's new off-Broadway offerings are as different, and as briskly compelling, as their previous efforts.

Shanley's Defiance (***1/2), which opened Tuesday in a Manhattan Theatre Club production at New York City Center (through April 30), is the second in a trilogy launched by Doubt. Like that last play -- also initially presented off-Broadway by MTC, under Doug Hughes' direction -- Defiance finds Shanley drawing on his personal experience with a revered, patriarchal institution, in this case the military, and examining how such institutions can test and betray our sense of autonomy and faith.

The play is set in 1971 at North Carolina's Camp Lejeune, where Shanley himself was stationed as a Marine at the time. Amid boiling racial tensions, to say nothing of festering disenchantment over Vietnam, the feisty Lt. Colonel Littlefield promotes a black captain, Lee King. King admires Littlefield's apparent fair-mindedness but is wary of being pushed forward as a symbol.

For a while, Defiance suggests an earnest reflection on race relations and the social discontent of the era. But then a white private enters King's office with a complaint that has nothing to do with the color of the captain's skin and everything to do with the content of Littlefield's character, and the play veers into more complicated, and exciting, terrain.

Chris Chalk and Steven Lang are robustly convincing as the young black captain and the aging white colonel, a well-meaning man with his own struggles. Margaret Colin effectively plays Littlefield's smart, elegant wife, through whom Shanley critiques the inferior reasoning powers of lust-driven men. (In some respects, she is a gentler descendant of Doubt's Sister Aloysius, who was frustrated by the male-dominated hierarchy of the Catholic Church.) And Chris Bauer is excellent as a military chaplain whose own passion is funneled into an unforgiving moralism.

Padraic, the title character of McDonagh's The Lieutenant of Inishmore (****), in its American premiere at the Atlantic Theater Company through April 9, has found a different outlet: terrorism, with an emphasis on exotic torture. Not even the Irish Republican Army will sanction this lieutenant's experiments in mayhem and dismemberment; the more extreme splinter group he runs with is having some doubts as well.

Padraic does have a soft spot, though: for Wee Thomas, his great love and only friend in the world, who happens to be a cat. If you're fond of felines, as I am, what befalls a couple of them here might make you squeamish. But the cats in Inishmore ultimately seem more resourceful, and smarter, than the two-legged characters, who in many cases come to even more grisly ends.

And besides, McDonagh, as is his wont, finds brilliant comedy in the blackest of places and slips us food for thought even as he's wildly entertaining us. He's abetted by Wilson Milam's razor-sharp direction and a superb cast that includes David Wilmot as Padraic, Peter Gerety as his hapless dad and Kerry Condon as a fledgling terrorist and fellow cat lover.

Kudos also are owed scenic designer Scott Pask, whose flair for vivid, hilarious gore would be the envy of any B-movie director.

I wouldn't count on the luck of the Irish bringing this bloody gem to Broadway. But then I didn't expect that Pillowman would be judged safe for matinee crowds, so you never know.

To see more of USAToday.com, or to subscribe, go to http://www.usatoday.com

© Copyright 2006 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.