NO LUCK OF THE IRISH HERE; `INISHMAAN' DISPELS ROMANTIC NOTIONS.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Theater Critic

Anglo-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh has a word for all those Hollywood Technicolor fantasies of an emerald-green Ireland populated by lovable eccentrics.

That word, to put it far more politely than McDonagh ever would, is ``blarney.''

Yes, if your image of Ireland conforms to the misty-eyed picturesqueness of, say, ``The Quiet Man,'' seeing McDonagh's ``The Cripple of Inishmaan'' at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood may be like tasting your first pint of Guinness after years of drinking nothing but milky cups of tea. Some people undoubtedly will find that taste more abrasive than robust, devoid as it is of any sweetening or consoling sentiments.

But if you stick with it, you hardly can fail to be startled, mightily amused and, at last, deeply shaken by the Geffen's marvelous ensemble and by McDonagh's deft, Swiftian skewering of the romantic falsehoods that for centuries have disfigured not only the outside world's view of Ireland, but Ireland's view of itself.

Did we say ``disfigured''? It's no coincidence that the play's title character is the aptly nicknamed Cripple Billy (Fred Koehler), who in many ways personifies his homeland's plight. While Billy has been handicapped since birth, what quickly emerges in the play is that everyone in Billy's village on the island of Inishmaan, off Ireland's west coast, bears some sort of debilitating impairment.

Raised by his doting, shopkeeper aunts - the fatalistic Kate (Barbara Tarbuck), who talks to rocks, and Eileen (Dearbhla Molloy), who indulges in clandestine candy binges - the bookish Billy is the frequent butt of the locals' jokes, even from his sly friend Bartley (J.D. Cullum). He's particularly intrigued by Bartley's sister Helen (the splendid Derdriu Ring), a caustic redhead who returns Billy's fumbling advances with scornful mockery.

One typically dull day in 1934, the meddlesome town gossip Johnnypateenmike (Max Wright) interrupts these exchanges with the momentous news that the American filmmaker Robert Flaherty has come to the seafaring region to make a documentary, ``Man of Aran.'' (This really happened.) Hoping to impress Helen, Billy begins scheming how to meet the Yanks and get ``discovered'' by Hollywood, as do several other villagers. Like Samuel Beckett's tramps in ``Waiting for Godot,'' the people of Inishmaan start pinning their hopes on a salvation that probably will never arrive, with results that are savagely comic and tragic, but never, ever predictable.

McDonagh writes dialogue with an exaggerated, hyper-realistic quality that rises to a sublime absurdity. His style owes much more to the British postwar comic traditions of Monty Python and Spike Milligan than to Sean O'Casey.

``It was a shark (that) ate daddy, but Jesus said you should forgive and forget,'' says Johnnypateenmike's scruffy, dear old Irish Mammy (Rosaleen Linehan), a dead ringer here for Beckett's great female interpreter, Billie Whitelaw.

Coming from a woman who's merrily drinking herself to death - with her son's deliberate help - that line gives you a feel for McDonagh's facility. It also gives you a feel for his mean side: He enjoys kicking the crutches out from under an audience's expectations.

Last spring's much-hyped New York production of ``Cripple,'' which closely followed McDonagh's U.S. debut hit, ``The Beauty Queen of Leenane,'' was panned by some critics who found its vision too ugly and Jerry Zaks' production too slapsticky. It probably didn't help that McDonagh had been touted as the most important new English-language playwright since David Hare.

The Geffen's production, steathily directed by Joe Dowling, is better attuned to McDonagh's satiric frequency. At first, you don't see it coming. As Act 1 dawns on Billy's tiny village - designed by Frank Hallinan Flood as a claustrophobic jumble of crude, dun-colored houses and monolithic outcroppings - it looks as though we might be in for ``How Green Was My Valley'' by the sea.

How quickly that illusion evaporates. Eggs get smashed over heads. Bad things happen to cats and sheep. Helen rants about the lecherous priests who prey on female choir singers. These people, even the long-suffering Billy, aren't what they seem, and neither is their community, resting as it does on evasions, myths and colorful half-truths.

In painting this cruelly self-deluded populace with such painfully funny and incisive strokes, ``The Cripple of Inishmaan'' transcends its provincial locale and becomes something more universal and stirring. As mythical in its own way as Brigadoon, McDonagh's rural Ireland is a place where people despair of their squalid existence yet embrace their misery as if it were a holy grail.

Playing it beautifully straight, Koehler becomes the strangely unsettling eye of the storm, surrounded by slyly expert comic performances from Wright, Cullum, Molloy and Lineham in particular.

Though Koehler's Billy is no victim, it's hard not to flinch as the final blackout falls on him, examining his blood-stained handkerchief, a portent of the fearful, non-Hollywood dreams that yet may come. In this moment of appalling irony and brutal poetry, McDonagh proves that sometimes the best way for a playwright to stir an audience's heart is by pretending not to have one himself.

THE FACTS

What: ``The Cripple of Inishmaan.''

Where: Geffen Playhouse, 10866 Le Conte Ave., Westwood.

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays, 4 and 8:30 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays; through Nov. 22. Special performance 2 p.m. Nov. 11. No evening performance Nov. 15.

Tickets: $30 to $40; $10 student rush 15 minutes prior to curtain. Call [phone].

Our rating: Three and One Half Stars.

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Photo

Photo: Fred Koehler portrays Cripple Billy, the central character in ``The Cripple of Inishmaan.''

John McCoy/Daily News