This is the crux of That Championship Season, which debuted at Joseph Papp's Public Theater in 1972, was transferred to Broadway later that year, and the next spring won both the best play Tony and the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

It is also the story of That Championship Season, which opened in a star-studded but disappointingly lackluster revival at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre Sunday night. Jason Miller's play was once a champion--it became a well-regarded 1982 film, with another all-star cast--but what's now onstage at the Jacobs is forgettable, maudlin, overly tidy and dramatically unconvincing. Like its characters, it has reached middle age, and like them, middle age doesn't look good on it.

The scene is a worn Victorian living room someplace in blue-collar Pennsylvania. It's 1972, and four members of the 1952 state-champion high-school basketball team are gathered at Coach's house to commemorate that great win, to drink and brag, as they do every year. They were, we're told, a legendary squad.

Twenty years later, they're still tight, big men in their small city. George is the mayor, up for reelection, mildly corrupt and mildly competent. Phil is a successful businessman, making money by polluting the city, paying George with campaign donations so the government looks the other way, driving fast cars and sleeping around. James is dedicated but dutiful, George's campaign manager and a junior-high principal, feeling trapped in his job. Tom, his brother, is a charming alcoholic who bounces from city to city. And then there's Coach, to whom they all still turn for guidance, a petty but inspiring bigot with no family of his own, obsessed with the past, from that championship to Teddy Roosevelt to Joe McCarthy. As the evening progresses, they'll get drunk, reveal truths, confess doubts, hug and make up. It's a play about simple men adrift in a rapidly changing America, astonished and dismayed that a Jewish environmentalist could potentially unseat good old Mayor George.

Ah, the past. When That Championship Season opened at the Public in 1972, Clive Barnes called it in The New York Times "the perfect Broadway play of the season, perfectly acted and perfectly staged" (with the asterisk that "it happens not to be on Broadway"). So how come it's now so far from perfect?

Perhaps it's because the play is so predictable. From searing classics like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to amiable trifles like A Perfect Future, which recently came and went Off Broadway, the drunken-night-of-revelation genre is well worn. None of the revelations are particularly surprising, as the script dutifully rotates through its players, giving each an opportunity for his crisis. In fact, the only surprise might be that these men, who betray each other in turn, inexplicably end the night as friends again.

Perhaps it's because the world has changed so much. America in 2011 is going through profound transformations, economically, socially, demographically, that are not dissimilar to those buffeting northeastern Pennsylvania in 1972. But in facing our own problems, it is hard to have sympathy for a bunch of corrupt racists, high-school jocks who discover a winning season doesn't guarantee a winning life.

And perhaps it's because this Championship cast never melds into an effective whole. Clive Barnes called the original ensemble "simply the best of the season," and maybe if the current group could become a convincing band of brothers, its disintegration would be meaningful. But director Gregory Mosher, who did such excellent work last season in A View From the Bridge, allows his high-profile cast to display such a range of acting styles that the men barely appear to be in the same play, and certainly not on the same team.

The estimable Brian Cox is Coach, and he plays the character that represents the past as an actor from another era. His performance is all oration and sputtering, a high-energy vaudeville routine disconnected from the others' naturalism. Jason Patric, whose father wrote the play, portrays Tom as a 21st-century ironist, a wise drunk who comments on the scene with wry detachment, never making himself present, not even when he's the focus of attention.

In the middle are Kiefer Sutherland as James, Chris Noth as Phil and Jim Gaffigan as the mayor, who all manage to get it right: They effectively portray stolid, all-American Real Men, from a time when all-American Real Men took the role seriously. Sure, Mr. Sutherland is miscast--Jack Bauer shouldn't try for nebbish--but he does all right. Mr. Noth is spot-on as the slick, rich nihilist, a role for which he has plenty of practice.

The revelation is Mr. Gaffigan, best known as a comic and making his Broadway debut. He's charismatic while playing a loser, sensitive in playing a boor. He, here, is perhaps the only champion.

There are many things to admire about Good People, a very funny and very serious drama about class and conflict in Boston that opened in a Manhattan Theatre Club production at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre last week. Chief among them is its very good people.

It is written by David Lindsay-Abaire, whose Rabbit Hole debuted at the Friedman five seasons ago, won the Pulitzer, and became a film this winter. It stars Frances McDormand, who has a big enough name to help lure ticket-buyers while also being an excellent theater actress, here giving an anguished and moving performance as Margie, with a hard G, the Irish Catholic single mother at the center of the play. And it is directed by Daniel Sullivan, who, as he did with Donald Margulies' Time Stands Still at the same theater last year, assembles a talented and coherent cast and uses them to make a good play great.

This is not the emotional tour de force that is Rabbit Hole, but it is a compelling and clear-eyed work, a portrait of proud and tribal South Boston, a struggling woman who knows she's stuck there and one guy--her high-school boyfriend, now a doctor--who made it out. It's a smart exploration of American class divides, so often ignored or smoothed over, and it raises unanswerable question about what makes a good person.

But the greatest pleasure comes in just watching the actors: Ms. McDormand as Margie, both steely and vulnerable; Tate Donovan as the ex-boyfriend-made-good, a charmer with the old-neighborhood edge buried under his Ivy League veneer; Renée Elise Goldsberry as his wife, a privileged woman with her own problems, trying hard not to condescend to an interloper she'd though was the help; Becky Ann Baker as Margie's best friend, tough as nails; Patrick Carroll as the lifelong acquaintance forced to fire her; and, most memorably, the incomparable Estelle Parsons as her blowsy, canny battle axe of a landlady.

It is, you might say, one of the best ensembles of the season.

editorial@observer.com

Fresh off batting away scathing reviews for Sex and the City 2, the erstwhile Miranda will play the best friend to Laura Linney's cancer stricken lead in a recurring guest star role, which will mark the first time since Sex and the City that Nixon has appeared on cable television. Her casting also makes The Big C even more of a must-see. Besides Linney and Nixon, the new series also features Idris Elba, Oliver Platt, Gabourey Sidibe and Brian Cox.

Between The Big C, Weeds (which added Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alanis Morrisette to the cast once again this season) and Nurse Jackie, you have to wonder why Showtime seems to have cornered the market on strong, female roles, while other cable channels (think: HBO) have not. Whatever the reason, it'll probably be a good idea to re-subscribe to Showtime before too long. The Big C premieres August 16.

Abetted by a thin story line and episodic screenplay, The Good Heart never goes anywhere important, but director Dagur Kári creates a spellbinding ambience. The seedy bar is so grim that even the dirt seems picturesque. The light from the wet street shining through the filthy windows, the awful music from the roll-top piano, the gritty clubhouse camaraderie among the drunks—it’s so artfully composed that you can smell the stale beer on the mahogany bar stools. Unfortunately, the film is an uneasy meld of TV sitcom and Eugene O’Neill. Jacques parks his new housemate in a room only one cut above a prison cell, with a bed so uncomfortable that Lucas sleeps on the wood floor. Cursing and ranting, the old man teaches him to make coffee, which Lucas gives away to the homeless. They bring home a white duck for Christmas dinner, which the kid names Estragon and keeps as a pet. Jacques scolds him for being friendly to the customers, and encourages hostility and arrogance. It’s basically a two-hander, with an assortment of drunks, lunatics and deadbeats who frequent the bar with their own individual quirks. The odd couple share their meager existence without much trajectory, until the arrival of a lost, distraught girl named April. When the naïve Lucas insists on marrying her, Jacques throws a tantrum and smashes up the bar, throwing all of his customers into the alley. Lucas displays all the animation of an oyster. April looks like a bagel. They make a perfect matched set. But this movie does not end there. Jacques gets placed on the waiting list for a heart transplant. April freshens up the dismal saloon with flowers and votives, which drives Jacques into another tantrum. “We’re not here to help people,” he says. “We’re here to destroy them.” It moves on, and so will you.

Waiting for something more than a scene from Cheers, we are treated to the goddamnedest parade of choke-provoking philosophical wisdom I’ve overheard in years. It goes like this: “Think of life as a coconut. It’s hard on the outside and if you don’t have the proper tools or the know-how, it can seem totally useless and futile. But if you know how to open it, there’s sweet juice inside. The key is not to keep the coconut to yourself once you learn how to open the coconut, but share the coconut with someone who has no coconut, and then you understand what happiness is.” Who could make up this stuff? Mr. Dano has two expressions—blank and clueless. I think he’s a terrible actor, but listening to dialogue like that and trying not to laugh out loud, who can blame him?

Through a buckled twist of cinematic fate, Jacques finds an organ donor (yes, we are forced to watch close-ups of a detailed heart transplant, oy vay) and becomes a changed man, totally (but not entirely convincingly) rejuvenated. It all ends on the island of Martinique, for reasons I will not reveal. This arcane experience is worth it only for the burnished lemon-wax polish of the cinematography and the fascinating work of Brian Cox. It’s a treat to watch him break up sentences, ending statements with a question mark, washing down homilies with his soup. One of the least likable characters in recent memory—irascible, but with moments of real tenderness—he’s the reason this strange movie takes on a perverse charm that is uniquely its own.

rreed@observer.com

Running time: 95 minutes
Written and Directed by: Dagur Kári
Starring: Brian Cox, Paul Dano, Isild Le Besco

2 Eyeballs out of 4

The prison escape movie—a tired genre—gets some fresh energy in The Escapist, a compelling, carefully written and totally gripping film from the U.K. that is acted with naturalism and conviction by a smashing cast. Made by the Irish Film Board with funds from the National Lottery reserved for the arts (why can’t we do that here?), The Escapist has already won numerous awards on the festival circuit, and I can see why.

It stars the versatile, always astounding Brian Cox as Frank Perry, a lifer whose grim routine changes when he receives a letter informing him that his only daughter is desperately ill after a drug overdose. Determined to break out and get to London for one last visit with the only person he’s ever loved unconditionally, Frank plans a daring escape with the aid of three other convicts (Joseph Fiennes, Liam Cunningham from the film Hunger, and Brazilian musician Seu Jorge, who are all perfect)—staking his life and expertise on a maneuver that involves elaborate prison blueprints to connect the air vents behind the dryers in the laundry with the shower drains that lead out through the sewers. Nothing unusual yet, but wait. Director Rupert Wyatt, making his feature-film debut, juxtaposes the clandestine eight-day digging and the clandestine rehearsals for the big break with the actual escape itself, mixing up time and action. This gives away some of the results too early, but there are still unexpected snafus and personality conflicts to detour the five prisoners before they reach the underground subway tracks that lead to the Charing Cross tube station. And, miracle of miracles, Mr. Wyatt does it without the usual CGI and high-tech special effects that make these epics look preposterous. Everything in The Escapist looks real for a reason. When the actors dig, they are really doing it all themselves. No painted on dirt or oil-brushed sweat here. This movie pays off, but looks like it was hell to make.

The great thing that emerges from the debris is the human element. You never know more than you should. You don’t even know what these men are in custody for. But you do see the hidden emotional elements, believed to be dead forever in their rusted souls, that rise to the surface in the interdependence of their group effort. Even hardened criminals have a heart. For Frank, redemption is triggered by the arrival of a terrified new cell mate named Lacey, played by Dominic Cooper, the young Lothario from both the wonderful The History Boys and the moronic Mamma Mia! Against his will, Frank is reminded of himself as a lost youth. Lacey is brutally beaten and raped by a monstrous sexual predator named Tony (Steven Mackintosh), the junkie brother of the “wing king” Rizza (Damian Lewis), and Rizza’s sadistic control of the prison population slowly turns into a wedge between the escape artists and their freedom. Frank resents this distraction from his goal, but here is a kid who clearly needs protection, and in odd ways he never thought possible, Frank finds in Lacey a mirror to lost innocence and a chance to regain some of his own value as a man. Ignoring Rizza’s warning (“You got one thing going for you, Frank—you’re too old to die young”), Frank makes a decision that changes the future of his own existence—and the outcome of the escape. No spoilers, please.

Physically violent and psychologically probing, The Escapist reminds me more than any other film of the sensational, groundbreaking TV series Oz, but it’s not really an action film. There’s not much excitement in the set pieces, and the restraint in both the direction and in Mr. Cox’s performance creates an austere depiction of the tedium of incarceration as well as the courage and strength needed to cope with a life sentence. As minimalism, it’s more Robert Bresson than Clint Eastwood. My only caveat is that the cross-cutting out of sequence sometimes interrupts the flow of the narrative. (Why aren’t filmmakers content to tell a story chronologically? Is that considered too “old-fashioned”?) Still, for a first feature, it’s a fine piece of work that passes 102 minutes swiftly, and Rupert Wyatt shows great promise. You won’t feel the need to escape from The Escapist.

rreed@observer.com

is thankfully over, a new season opens with great promise, and I can think of

no better way to start it than with L.I.E.

Resist all temptations to avoid this exceptional film because of its subject

matter (pedophilia) and see L.I.E.

fast. Trust me on this. You will experience one of the most profoundly moving

motion pictures of the year.

A bored, alienated and lonely teenager walks the narrow

rails above the Long Island Expressway. Sylvia Plath said that we live and die

alone, and 15-year-old Howie Blitzer (played with all the querulous

introspection of youth by the extraordinary young actor Paul Franklin Dano) is

daring death to prove it. His mom died in a crash at Exit 52, and he's been

obsessed with the dangers of the L.I.E. ever since. Howie lacks the emotional

guidance at home that helps most kids negotiate the precipitous path between

childhood and the real world. His father, occupied with a new girlfriend and

facing arrest for a shady business deal, is rarely home, and at night Howie

hears the sounds of sex echoing through the bedroom walls. His friends are a

distraction, but they spend their time robbing houses and roughing each other

up. Howie is not like the rest of the herd. Not a jerk, a jock or a clown, he's

sensitive and sexually confused.

It seems almost inevitable that this troubled kid should

fall into the hands of a child molester named Big John Harrigan, played by the

bulky, sensational British actor Brian Cox. Thanks to the exemplary, finely

tuned writing of Stephen Ryder, Gerald Cuesta and his brother, Michael Cuesta

(who also directed, with the throbbing accuracy of a tuning fork), and the

fresh, fascinating and always surprising performance by Mr. Cox, Big John is

not the kind of pervert you hear described in police reports. He doesn't hang

around bus stations or surf the Internet looking for victims. Like that

infamous Chicago pederast John

Wayne Gacy-a neighborhood parent-pleaser who dressed like a clown to entertain

kids at birthday parties-Big John is a garrulous, smooth-talking surrogate

father to the boys he lures home. He sings Irish show tunes, dotes on his

elderly mother and cruises the Long Island suburbs in a

flashy convertible, dispensing advice and pocket change.

In his wet, pudgy hands,

Howie is easy, vulnerable prey. Big John seduces him emotionally with lethal

doses of affection and intimidation. When his Dad is imprisoned for fraud,

leaving Howie alone and more bewildered than ever, he turns more and more to

the protection and guidance the old reprobate offers. Howie needs a friend and

a roof over his head, but the storylines are so subtly drawn that it's hard to

tell who the seducer really is-the man or the boy. Howie is playing a cruel

adult game without a moral compass. His father replaced his dead mom with a

bimbo. Now Howie is replacing his dad with a different kind of parent. But this

movie has another surprise in store for an audience that is already rendered

breathless. Through a twist of fate, Howie faces yet another challenge in a

shocking finale that will make you gasp.

This is a very unsettling film that left me shaking long

after I left the theater. Carefully written and meticulously directed, with

marvelously calibrated performances by the entire cast, it's an impossible film

to dismiss on grounds of repulsion. These things are happening to kids in

perilous times like these. You read about them daily. That doesn't

automatically guarantee much entertainment value, and this is not a frivolous

lark at the mall between Slurpees and Double Whoppers. (Never before has a

parental-guidance warning seemed so urgent.) But rational, questioning and

mature filmgoers owe it to themselves to see L.I.E. , not only for its socially relevant content, but for its

honesty, truthfulness, conviction and artful execution. Nothing sexually

explicit is shown, yet the moment Big John shows the kid how to shave-tenderly

moving the razor over the first signs of peach fuzz on his neck-is one of the

most erotically charged scenes ever captured on film. Big John's arousal is

only implied, but the sexual tension is so palpable the woman sitting next to

me almost fainted.

And there is always the reptilian charm of Brian Cox to

admire-skin like cookie dough, hands always moist, playing contrasts with

alarming persuasion. Watching pornographic tapes and singing "Danny Boy" at the

same time, he makes a difficult role almost sympathetic. He's a major part of

this film's success, but his brave, mesmerizing performance is just one of the

elements that makes L.I.E. as

hypnotic as it is controversial.

You Give Rock a Bad

Name

Rock Star is a

grueling and pointless endurance test that exposes the world of rock 'n' roll

for the venal, superficial and hypocritical bastion of bad taste it is. Big news. Mark Wahlberg plays Chris Cole, a kid from Pittsburgh

who fantasizes about being the next Jimi Hendrix, although in his

shoulder-length wig he looks more like Janis Joplin. Piercing his nipples and

wearing his mother's mascara, he is summoned to L.A.

to replace a gay rock icon in a band called Steel Dragon, moving his career up

a notch. Chris Cole becomes Bobby Beers, a screeching idiot mobbed and screwed

by millions on the concert circuit. But, alas, the predictable plot teaches him

that fame is one big, boring orgy, and that the world of sex, drugs and rock

'n' roll is (duh!) not what it's cracked up to be.

As for sex, the tarted-up groupie that Bobby and his

long-suffering girlfriend (Jennifer Aniston) go to bed with at night turns out

to be a man in the morning. As for drugs, every chemical ever invented-and a

few even Courtney Love never heard of-are in constant supply, but they produce

massive hangovers. As for rock 'n' roll, send the wretched soundtrack to the

people you hate. If you have no enemies, you'll make new ones.

The theme, which is supposed to convince kids to "be the

fantasy other people dream about," comes off more like "the life you destroy

may be your own." Smashing furniture and throwing television sets out of

top-floor hotel-room windows isn't as raunchy as reading the New York Post . In the end, the kid from Pittsburgh

becomes disillusioned-not by the ruinous excesses and the bags under the eyes,

but because Steel Dragon wants to record its own rotten songs instead of his rotten songs. Bobby Beers goes back

to being Chris Cole, and another wannabe takes his place in a contrived

follow-the-dots finale shamelessly similar to All About Eve .

Numbingly directed by the untalented Stephen ( Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure )

Herek, there is nothing remotely pleasurable about Rock Star . The acting is cadaverous, the plot derivative, the music

execrable. This hateful waste of time doesn't even look good: Speeded-up cinematography turns lines of traffic into

ribbons of Mylar, and the swirling-clouds routine from David Lynch movies is so

old it's hairy. The saddest waste of all is the retro return of the star, who,

after knocking himself out to get the world to take him seriously, even strips

down to his Calvins. Rock stars have the shelf life of unrefrigerated clams.

Mr. Wahlberg knows that already; he spent the best part of the past 10 years

trying to shed the image of Marky Mark. Why would he want to reclaim it now?

Eat Drink Raquel

Welch!

Endearing and unpretentious, Tortilla Soup is a delicious comedy about love and tacos. A Hollywood

remake of Eat Drink Man Woman , the

1994 foreign-film Oscar nominee directed by Ang Lee, it retains the storyline

about a widowed chef with three problematic daughters, but adds spice and

flavor by moving the action to the Latino community of Los

Angeles, where the Mexican food is almost as famous as

the palm trees.

The excellent Hector Elizondo plays the stern patriarch of

the Naranjo family, whose popular Mexican restaurant has dazzled devoted

patrons and food critics for years. A renowned chef who introduced authentic

gourmet cuisine from his native land to a city weaned on Tex-Mex, the

semi-retired Mr. Naranjo stays home now, raising the exotic peppers and spices

that distinguish his recipes and keeping an eye on his fiery offspring. Too

stubborn to communicate his real hope for their happiness, he relies instead on

the lavish dinners he cooks and serves every Sunday night to preserve a ritual

sense of family tradition. At the same time, the three grown

daughters-beautiful, accomplished and still living at home-fuss over Dad and

feel guilty about their own selfish needs.

On the eve of college, Maribel (Tamara Mello), the pampered

baby of the family, plans to leave the nest and explore the world with a

Brazilian vagabond. Carmen (Jacqueline Obradors), the middle girl, has been

offered an executive job in Barcelona.

Oldest daughter Leticia (Elizabeth Peña) is a repressed spinster schoolteacher

who bristles at the idea of anyone breaking up the family, at least until she

meets the high-school baseball coach and delivers the biggest surprise of all.

While the family dramas unfold, Pop is having problems, too. He's losing his

sense of taste and smell, and sex is only a memory-until a flirtatious,

flamboyant and oversexed widow moves in next door (played with broad humor and

revealing cleavage by a loosely swinging Raquel Welch!).

The script, by Tom Musca, Ramón Menéndez and Vera Blasi, is

an honest revelation of upscale Latino life devoid of the customary clichés,

and the direction by María Ripoll is seamless. Then there's the food. The

Asians had Eat Drink Man Woman,

African-Americans had Soul Food . But

you've never seen so many character-based subplots enacted with a more

tantalizing culinary backdrop than this. In one of the most charming roles of

his career, Mr. Elizondo is a chef who approaches his kitchen like a brain

surgeon entering an operating room. We're not talking stuffed shells at Taco

Bell: His meals are masterpieces, and he spares no detail in the preparations.

We get tamarind-glazed lamb with tangerine sauce. We get squash-flower soup

with serrano chiles, hand-cranked vanilla-bean ice cream, candied pumpkin and

more. The food is sensual and continuous; if only I could get the address of

that restaurant.

By the time Tortilla

Soup ends, you will have spent valuable time with lovable people living

interesting but different lives under the same roof, still finding ways to

strengthen their relationships with maturity and affection for each other. None

of them turn out the way you expect, but they grow, change and even separate

with genuine compassion. As for the food, take it from someone who would walk a

mile without a map just for a bad tortilla: The culinary splendors in Tortilla Soup made me swoon. I was so

hungry by the time it was over I could have happily devoured a tarantula

tostada. According to the liner notes, the meals were prepared by the chefs of

two actual Los Angeles

restaurants-Ciudad and the Border Grill. Reserve immediately.

The McDonagh-McPherson industry is reaching saturation point, if it hasn't already, and that's the fecking truth, as Mr. McDonagh's felicitous characters like to say. Why, apart from their latest productions-Mr. McDonagh's The Lonesome West at theLyceumandMr. McPherson's This Lime Tree Bower at Primary Stages-even more New Wave Irish drama will soon be with us.

There is, for example, Patrick T. Golway's Olivier Award-winning I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen , a darkly elegiac memory play inspired by Sean O'Casey about a beautiful raven-haired member of Riverdance who falls in love with a werewolf. There's Ballybog by the 20-year-old prodigy George Bernard O'Byrne, which has just won the Dublin Prize. Ballybog is an Irish family tragedy about random murder, pedophilia and the Catholic Church that the British critics lauded for reaching the poetic heights in its crystalline moments of metaphoric devastation. Vyvian Holland's sparkling comedy Where Has All the Guinness Gone? is the prestigious Evening Standard Award-winner that I caught in London at the Bush Theater earlier this season; I found it to be the best of all the new Irish plays. It's a timely, refreshing satire, involving ghosts and ghouls and homicidally thick country yokels in a postcard image of quaint old Ireland that takes a healthy swipe at the entire new school of Irish dramatists. My money's already on Where Has All the Guinness Gone? , with its brilliant low-comedy Irish ensemble directed by Congreve Kelleher of the Gnome Theater Company, Galway, to take the Tony for best play next season.

Now, none of the above paragraph is true-as I'm sure you long since guessed. My point is: It could be! So forgive me. As Conor McPherson's Joe puts it in Lime Tree Bower : Better to make something up than tell the literal truth, in that con man's game known as spinning a yarn.

The literal truth is that Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson have between them had six of their plays produced here in little over a year. Even for these gifted writers, who are still in their 20's, it feels like overkill. They come in threes: three plays each for Mr. McDonagh and Mr. McPherson (and three plays this season alone from David Hare). Time out, gentlemen! One thinks, like the testy refrain between the battling brothers in The Lonesome West , "Take a step back, now."

My difficulty so far with Mr. McDonagh is that I find I like his writing more than his plays. He's smart and savagely funny in his dark gallows humor; he possesses the confidence and wit (and cheek) to send up his Gothic melodramas as much as he expects us to take them seriously. But I felt that The Beauty Queen of Leenane was overpraised as a "great play." Come now! It's a yarn . In another life, its old hag from hell would have been played by Bette Davis. It's a Gothic potboiler with a time-honored, creaky plot device: the letter delivered into the Wrong Gnarled Hands.

I think that Mr. McDonagh is having much more fun with his plays than his over-serious admirers are. His maturer The Cripple of Inishman (which was botched in its production here) is his most accomplished play to date. It satirizes the clichéd backwater half-life of rural Ireland while seeming to agonize over its romantic hope and damnation. The Lonesome West -which has been nominated for a Tony-belongs to the Gothic violence of the "Leenane Trilogy," with a nod to a surprising source, Sam Shepard's True West .

What! Is he sending up True West now? Well, I'd guess, partly . Mr. McDonagh remains his own irreverent man, though both dramas have warring brothers who could, at any moment, kill each other. And both are somewhat blatant metaphors-for dislocated, rootless America; for exploding, divided Ireland.

The Lonesome West is set in Mr. McDonagh's fictional hellhole, Leenane (in contrast to Brian Friel's more elegiacally imagined village of Ballybeg). I wouldn't go near Leenane on your travels if I were you. Its native traditions are of serial killings (the old crone in The Beauty Queen of Leenane previously died via boiling and the poker); suicide (by drowning); murderous biblical feuds; rain-soaked feudal poverty; and a drunken damned priest trying to save his pathetic flock. It's a new, and entertaining, form of "Theater of the Grotesque."

In The Lonesome West , Coleman (Maeliosa Stafford) has blown his father's head away with a shotgun. His poor dad, we learn, has been murdered for insulting his son's hairstyle. (Even odder, the excellent Mr. Stafford is bald.) Coleman is blackmailed by his equally foul brother, Valene (Brian F. O'Byrne), who's a proud collector of the plaster saints that fill the shelves of the dump they live in. In return for his silence about the patricide, Valene now owns everything they have-their hovel of a farmhouse, the booze in the cupboard, the biscuits in the locked tin, the bright new cooker (a prize acquisition, like a holy relic, which will also be blown away in time). All the possessions, even including the glasses, are marked with an ugly "V"-for Valene, or Victory (or "Get lost").

Coleman hates Valene-"Ya feckin' fecker ya!"-and the possibly effeminate loon Valene sure hates him, while fearing less for his own life than for the future of his saintly figurines. The brothers are the brutally ignorant, violently insane Irish equivalent to The Odd Couple . "They're the Kings of Odd!" cries Girleen (Dawn Bradfield), the flighty local teenager who fancies the village priest.

Sad, ineffectual, drunk Father Welsh (David Ganly) is "the laughingstock of the Church in the whole of Ireland-and that takes some feckin' doing." He gets soused with the battling odd ones while trying to save them. Fat chance! Father Welsh, in despair, sacrificially scalds his hands in a boiling bowl of Valene's cruelly melted-down plaster saints. (Not Mr. McDonagh's lightest touch.) Then he drowns himself, leaving behind a letter to the Brothers Grim praying for such a miraculous reconciliation between them that he'd surely qualify for canonization.

The brothers then do their sadistic best to "take a step back" but fail to stop fecking fighting even over a miserable bag of potato chips. And by now, if not long before, you will have got Mr. McDonagh's loud message and metaphor about blood feuds, the powerlessness of the Catholic Church, and an Ireland at war that's literally trashing itself to death. The Lonesome West is perfectly acted by its fine Irish quartet; the director is Garry Hynes.

I'm afraid that I have a bias against Conor McPherson's monologues. It has less to do with the talented Mr. McPherson, and is more about the nature of monologues themselves. St. Nicholas , with the great Brian Cox as an embittered Irish drama critic, was certainly enjoyable, though it lost me with the entrance of the vampires. I didn't believe them. I was less struck by The Weir , with its series of ghost story monologues that seemed sentimentally artificial to me. Mr. McPherson's latest outing, This Lime Tree Bower , has three monologues told by three men involved in a drunken misadventure. But I just couldn't connect to it.

We're drowning in a surfeit of wry Irish eccentricity. But that isn't quite it. Lime Tree Bower , directed by Harris Yulin, needs time to develop more smoothly if its three accomplished actors are to bring it to the boil. But they will grow in confidence. No, the fault is mine in that I can't really appreciate monologues as theater.

But isn't it currently the fashion for us to listen to these stories as if-we're told-we are all sitting 'round a campfire? I don't know what that means or why it's a good thing.

A theater isn't a campfire, though I see the folksy point. Brian Cox, a strong champion of Mr. McPherson's (and a friend of mine), wrote eloquently in a recent New York Times Arts and Leisure piece: "The emergence of the monologue in the last decade is no accident. There has been a harking back to the very roots of drama itself, when the storyteller moved from camp to camp, telling tales of derring-do or die." The living tradition of the traveling storyteller in Ireland is still strong. And Mr. Cox likes the monologue form for its challenging immediacy. In effect, a monologue is a soliloquy.

But for me, not by soliloquies alone. Monologues are also short stories. They could be read to us just as effectively-and we can read them like any story. Monologues are to be listened to. They aren't plays but tales. They tell beguiling stories. But they aren't theatrical .

With monologues, it's too easy to close your eyes.

I replied that I was a journalist, for anyone can be a critic. "I'm a journalist, sir!"

"Maybe so, sir!" he said. "But are you any good?"

It was modesty, of course, that prevented me from responding to his question as forthrightly as honesty requires. But it seems to me that in the current mini-invasion of those wizards known as the new Irish dramatists, the one big question not being asked is, "Are they any good?"

If you're Irish, you are therefore seen to be not only a born storyteller, but a great one! You will be acclaimed everywhere, except possibly in discerning Ireland. Even so, I've expressed more than a few reservations about Martin McDonagh's acclaimed Beauty Queen of Leenane , with its gothic blood and thunder and creaky plot devices. ("Don't forget to deliver the letter to Maureen. If there's one thing you must do, don't forget to give the letter to Maureen. Don't you be forgetting now …")

Conor McPherson's St. Nicholas at Primary Stages, with that wonderful Scottish actor Brian Cox, could, perhaps, have been conjured up only by an Irishman. Mr. McPherson, a 26-year-old Dubliner, relishes the telling of stories. His current London hit, The Weir , is about ghost stories told by the habitués of an Irish pub. St. Nicholas (which has been extended through April 25) is about-of all people!-a burnt-out critic and vampires.

All storytellers are happy con men and monologists. " St. Nicholas is a play performed by one actor," Mr. McPherson has written. "He only plays one character and he doesn't act anything out. He just tells us a story. And for me, that's full of mischief." Too much mischief! You have the impression that this talented young dramatist is throwing us teasing curveballs to keep our interest from flagging round the warm glow of the fireside, or stage. Put it this way: Mr. McPherson is good. But do we believe his story?

I was with him all the way until the vampires. St. Nicholas is a tall tale about a cynical, self-hating drama critic who's smitten by a young actress in a bad production of Salomé . That's a great start! And every drama critic watching the drama critic on stage is surely thinking, "I know that man. But he isn't me." Mr. McPherson's desperate critic follows the actress to London on a drunken odyssey in search of a story of his own (or some inner creative life of his own). He finds himself procuring victims for a house full of vampires-and that's an unbelievably grand lie if ever there was one. The theater critic and fallen hero of the story doesn't believe in anything, including theater. Why does he suddenly believe in vampires-and cozily suburban vampires at that? Why should we?

It's a stretch. Brian Cox-who I last saw howling into the wind as King Lear in Deborah Warner's production at the National Theater-is so commandingly good, he almost has us believing it. As the empty vessel of a critic, he has the gift of seeming to be both emotionally dead and utterly alive simultaneously. Contempt is his character's oxygen. (Salvation his last hope.) Actors rarely look you in the eye. They pretend to, peering instead at your forehead. It's more comfortable that way. Mr. Cox is one of the very few actors who dares to look you squarely and nakedly in the eye-daring you to disbelieve his story. This assured virtuoso British actor possesses the heft and voice- the Voice -that can swoop gleefully on a morsel of spooky narrative and give the impression it's a five-course banquet. He plays with us masterfully for 90 intermissionless minutes on a bare stage, as if he arrived there by coincidence. Mr. Cox compels our attention-more, ultimately, than the mischievous story of St. Nicholas , the first shaggy vampire story I ever heard.

Conor McPherson, and particularly Martin McDonagh (who announced after five minutes in New York that he had nothing to beat here), should see Danny Hoch's brilliant and troubling stories from another planet, Jails, Hospitals and Hip-Hop . Mr. Hoch is such an honest, unaffected storyteller, the Irish dramatists seem self-consciously literary in comparison. His people from the margins of the American melting pot are the ones we usually ignore. He is saying to us: "Listen to these people you avoid." And once heard, via Mr. Hoch's alchemy, we do not forget them.

Danny Hoch, the urban griot, is more a social commentator than an entertainer, though often he's both. There's no one like him. He makes the award-winning stage docudramas of Anna Deveare Smith look arch, the versatile autobiographical satire of John Leguizamo seem show-bizzy. His talent is unique and full of compassion. Simply put, the 29-year-old Mr. Hoch is the finest solo artist in America.

His previous 1993 solo, Some People , was essentially about language-the English language as spoken by Jamaicans, Jews, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, African-Americans, in the fractured and blurred ethnic world according to Danny Hoch. What's the identity behind the urban barricades and fear? Then, and now, he's asking: "Who are you?" With a neat subquestion: " What are you?"

Jails, Hospitals and Hip-Hop , developed by director Jo Bonney at downtown's Performance Space 122, creates a mesmerizing world of culture clashes and styles-from the earnest Cuban student speaking gangsta rap in Spanish with an American tourist, to the young crippled Puerto Rican insisting he's a cool dancer, to the heroin addict with AIDS consumed by rage in a New York prison, to the gold-tooth sell-out rap star on Late Show With David Letterman , to other fantasists from the ghetto underclass, or survivors from the kingdom of the lost.

Mr. Hoch performs as himself only once-and, endearingly, he isn't as good as himself. Who, we wonder then, is Danny Hoch? But his story about how he was fired as a guest performer on Seinfeld tells us a great deal about him (and about that dope Jerry Seinfeld). He was supposed to play a "typical" swimming pool attendant with a Spanish accent named Ramon, but found he couldn't face it. When the moment came, he just couldn't face selling out. The offended Jerry Seinfeld didn't get it at all. "They didn't want the real thing," Mr. Hoch explained to us. "They wanted somebody who could do the real thing and still be one of them."

It might not be too good for his bank balance, but we're awfully glad he isn't one of them. Mr. Hoch's show is about young people. He makes 50 seats available each night to youngsters at $10 a ticket. The night I attended the show, the studio space was packed with young people who in turn represented a very welcome cross-section of New York. At grass-roots level, Mr. Hoch, the white boy from Queens, is taking theater in exactly the multiethnic direction that is its future. His brilliant work has little or nothing in common with that other storyteller from the melting pot, John Leguizamo. The hyper Mr. Leguizamo's tribal autobiography in the hit Broadway one-man show, Freak , includes jokes, for one thing. He tells the tale of his dad reading him the bedtime story of "Red Riding Hood": "And she lived happily ever after. Now go the fuck asleep !"

But, again, there's been a remarkable transformation in the audience. The producer of Freak , Gregory Mosher (formerly boss of Lincoln Center Theater), has insisted that one-third of the Cort Theater-some 300 seats-be put on sale each night for $17.50 and less. That's a great bargain, which has brought the average age of this audience down to 31 years old, from a Broadway average of 102. And Mr. Leguizamo is playing to capacity.

Messrs. Hoch, Leguizamo and Cox are all good deals and good guys. But I can't close without mentioning my favorite transvestite on earth, the one and only Eddie Izzard. His solo performance, Dress to Kill , at the Westbeth Theater Center in the West Village, is the hilariously surreal tonic we've come to expect from the cherub in the charming chinois tunic. There's no one like him, either. (And his show is also a virtual sellout.) The story that had me on the floor with laughter was his insane riff on how Engelbert Humperdinck got his name.

Did they originally think of Bingelbert Hempledonk? Or was it Geldebert Hingledink? Then, for some reason, Eddie decided to gravely inform us that he had just learned that very evening that Engelbert Humperdinck was dead. Well, naturally, there was a bit of a hush. But then he smiled, and said, "Nah. It's a joke. It isn't true." And then he said, "Actually, it's true. He's dead." And then he said, "I'm kidding!" And then he said, "I'm not really …!"

For some mysterious reason, the routine tickled us all. He had us laughing so hard that I was just about able to count the number of times he repeated the "He's dead/alive" story. It was 26. Conor McPherson of St. Nicholas likes to say that a good lie makes a good story. But I can say that I've seen Eddie Izzard tell the same lie 26 times in about three minutes and have us believe it every time. That's some achievement, and that's no lie.