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Few contemporary playwrights portray violence as well as Martin McDonagh. In recent Broadway outings, the brutality has been overt – torture and dismemberments in The Lieutenant of Inishmore and The Pillowman. This prolific Irish writer can once again be found onstage in New York with Garry Hynes' gently affecting, often icily hilarious, revival of The Cripple of Inishmaan, playing at off-Broadway's the Atlantic Theater Company, where "Inishmore" began, and while the sort of overt savagery that theatergoers have come to expect from McDonagh never materializes in this play, its presence can always be felt just below the surface.

First seen in New York in 1998, "Cripple," set in the early 1934, takes place on a remote Irish isle, just like "Inishmaan." The title character, Billy (played with heartbreaking physicality and emotional nuance by Aaron Monaghan) has grown up an orphan – his parents having died in a mysterious boating accident when he was just an infant. He's been raised by Kate (Marie Mullen) and Eileen (Dearbhla Molloy), the women who run the island's under-stocked general store. Now well into their twilight years, they fret about Billy endlessly, and wait, like many women their age do, for the latest gossip, which is delivered by local "newsman" JohnnyPateenMike (a supremely oily David Pearse). As the play opens, he arrives in the women's store (the cornerstone to Francis O'Connor's marvelously rustic and flexible scenic design) with three pieces of news, including word of a brewing feud between two locals (one man's goose bit another man's cat) and of an American film crew having descended on the neighboring island of Inishmore.

The second item sets the people of Inishmaan buzzing. Helen (simultaneously a terrifically dangerous creature and alluring coquette in Kerry Condon's performance) and her dim younger brother Bartley (Laurence Kinlan) convince BobbyBobby (a grand mercurial turn from Andrew Connolly) to take them to the neighboring island in hopes of getting a job on the film, and possibly getting away from Ireland altogether. Billy also finagles a ride with BobbyBobby, a move that proves to be a double-edged sword for the young man.

As "Cripple" unfolds, McDonagh reveals, in exquisite detail, the eccentricities of each of these characters, as well as their strange combination of fierce national pride and equally intense distaste for their homeland. During the course of the play, each of the characters actually attempts to rationalize Ireland's importance in the world, musing how the country must not be that bad of a place if Americans, French, "colored people," etc. want to visit.

Hynes' production, which she's staged as a co-production between the Atlantic and her own Druid Theatre Company in Dublin, and the performances deftly navigate the duality of McDonagh's script, which, on one level, is something of a simple slice of life play about this tight-knit community and its idiosyncratic inhabitants' predictable day-to-day existence. What sparks "Cripple" to a level beyond being just a humor infused charmer is McDonagh's ability to combine the ordinariness of Inishmaan with a hefty level of danger. As the offstage goose-cat feud intensifies, theatergoers can't help but think of the bloodshed that results in "Inishmore" over a dead cat. Similarly, as lies are revealed onstage, it seems inevitable, at least for McDonagh, that death, dismemberment, or worse, must follow. Such events never come to pass, although one character does receive a hefty beating – not entirely unwarranted, and Helen, who earns a living delivering eggs, has a field day with using them as weapons.

The real assault that ultimately arrives as Billy's story unfolds and audiences come to care about him and his neighbors is on theatergoers' hearts. As "Cripple" reaches its conclusion, the play's emotional toll is not only quite high, it's also enormously satisfying.

---- Andy Propst

The Cripple of Inishmaan plays at the Atlantic Theater Company (336 West 20th Street). Performances are Tuesday through Friday at 8pm; Saturday at 2 and 8pm; and Sunday at 2 and 7pm. Tickets are $65.00 and can be purchased by calling TicketCentral at 212-279-4200 or by visiting www.TicketCentral.com. Further information – including revised holidaytime schedule – is available online at www.AtlanticTheater.org.