J.M. Synge was a poet of a playwright, and his The Playboy of the Western World is a muscular ballad of a play, a vernacular ode to the Irish peasantry of the Aran Isles – their heroes, their language, the occasional wildness of both.  Mark A. Rhea and The Keegan Theatre make a fine case for the play’s enduring worth as a piece of theater, but it's hard nowadays for an audience to grasp why Dublin erupted in riots when the Abbey Theatre premiered the piece back in 1907.

For that, you need a little history:  It was nationalists, most of them Catholics, who objected to what they saw as the Anglo-Irish Synge’s critical and condescending depiction of his characters—colorful country folk who speak in anything but plain language.  Pegeen Mike Flaherty (Helen Pafumi) and the rustics who frequent her da’s scruffy shebeen discourse instead in a heightened, almost overlyrical version of the lilting English spoken anywhere Gaelic grammar has applied its pressures.  And what transpires when their lives are interrupted by the fugitive Christy Mahon (Carlos Bustamante), who’s killed has abusive father and fled to their quiet corner of the islands, has a lot to say about how Synge sees the Irish and the unhappy state of their society.

And that state isn’t much to celebrate, at least from one perspective:  This is a desperately poor place where the strong men flee for distant America, where the men who remain are the feeble and the fainthearted, like Pegeen’s intended, the prosperous but priest-ridden Sean Keough (Mike Kozemchak).  Their women and their drink dominate them, and when a sturdy young creature who’s had spine enough to commit patricide stumbles into their midst, what happens is an exercise in convoluted myth-making and skewed hero-worship. You can see how a partisan might take offense at the suggestion that Christy represents some sort of savior to the poor blighted Aran folk, that their values are sufficiently gnarled and their souls starved enough to make him a man of great consequence.

Absent that backstory, though, anyone encountering the play today will find what seems a mostly affectionate, if exaggerated, portrait of a kooky rural population, along with a perfectly respectable lament for what’s apparently a pretty dire cultural and economic situation.  This contextual nuances come from the study guide, not the show, despite Rhea’s sure and sensitive staging and the fine performances at the production’s core.  Bustamante, in particular, makes an immensely agreeable opportunist of a Christy, vulnerable and a little frightened under the growing self-regard his new coterie of admirers kindle in him; the performance is confident, physical, and a joy to watch. Pafumi isn’t quite his equal, but she meets his assurance with no little fire and a certain sense of the neediness that must lurk under her character’s brusque, brawling public face.

Keegan’s production, for a company that found itself suddenly homeless a few weeks ago, feels surprisingly substantial, with a sensitive lighting design and sturdy, quasi-realistic set that that evoke both comfort and its opposite – perfect for Synge’s picture of a desolate land with an unshakable hold on its people. The play, though – moving as it can be, it probably can’t paint that picture, in all its vivid darks and greens, on the unprimed canvas of a modern audience.