BLOOD SIMPLE.(The Lieutenant of Inishmore)(Theater review)

The grotesque is a formidable literary strategy. Flannery O'Connor explained it this way: ""To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures." The louts and lunatics who inhabit Martin McDonagh's "The Lieutenant of Inishmore" (which is having its American premiere at the Atlantic Theatre Company, under the firm-handed direction of Wilson Milam) are just such gruesome and unforgettable figures; as all gargoyles do, they inspire an almost childish terror and elation in the audience. Like McDonagh's earlier, similarly gleeful and macabre yarns--"The Beauty Queen of Leenane," "The Cripple of Inishmaan," and "The Lonesome West"--"The Lieutenant of Inishmore" is a sort of cautionary fairy tale for our toxic times. In its horror and hilarity, it works as an act of both revenge and repair, turning the tables on grief and goonery, and forcing the audience to think about the unthinkable.

McDonagh sets his ghoulish satire in 1993, during the Troubles--the euphemism for Northern Ireland's sectarian strife--in an Aran Island cottage as threadbare as the surrounding terrain is inhospitable. The curtain comes up on two men--Donny (Peter Gerety), the middle-aged owner of the house, and a ponytailed teen-ager called Davey (Domhnall Gleeson)--discussing a cat that is lying on the kitchen table with half of its head missing. "Do you think he's dead, Donny?" is the play's exquisitely dopey opening line. We are clearly in the world of what psychiatrists call "negative hallucination," where people can't see what's right under their noses. We are also in the world of Grand Guignol. Donny picks up the limp cat--Wee Thomas, as he's called--and, according to the stage directions, "bits of its brain plop out." "He might be in a coma," Davey says. "Would we ring the vet?" Unfortunately, the person they really have to ring is Donny's son, the infamous terrorist Padraic (David Wilmot), who is Wee Thomas's loving owner.

Padraic's reputation for carnage precedes him: he's so bloodthirsty that even the I.R.A. has refused him. "Sure, Padraic would kill you for sweating near him, let alone this," Davey says, dropping to his knees. McDonagh's two panic-stricken clowns grasp at any excuse to placate their likely executioner. Donny, on whose watch Padraic's cat has apparently died, needs an alibi; Davey, whose only crime was to retrieve the wounded animal, is blackmailed into a false confession. "If you admit it was you knocked poor Thomas down, Davey, I won't tell him," Donny says. "If you carry on that it wasn't, then I will." After Davey agrees to say that he killed the cat, Donny asks, "How?" "However you fecking want, sure!" Davey says. "I hit him with me bike, then I banged him with a rake, then I jumped up and down on the fecker." "You hit him with your bike, uh-huh, I suspected," Donny says. The absurd repartee signals the play's psychotic climate; it also shows off McDonagh's gift for the mechanics of the farcical. (The fluting, camp swagger of some of his lines echoes that of the British playwright Joe Orton, whose dark-comic blueprint McDonagh has adapted for his own subversive purposes.)

McDonagh's tactic is to keep the stakes simple: he forces his craven characters onto the horns of a clear-cut dilemma, then, as they slowly try to wriggle free, he stands back and relishes their panic and pain. He trusts the depth of his characters' folly and his own talent, pushing both to the limit. More often than not, he strikes funny. For instance, once Donny and Davey reach Padraic--he gets the news about his "sick" cat on his cell phone as he's about to remove the nipple of a drug dealer who has been hung upside down from the ceiling--they have to get their story straight; they also have to get a substitute black cat. Inevitably, for two such dimwits, this is an almost insurmountable problem. Finding no black cat on the island, Davey grabs the orange tabby that belongs to his sister Mairead (Kerry Condon)--an act of sibling revenge on the trigger-happy air-gun-toting teen-age termagant, who, in a previous ...