Anyone who has lived in real intimacy with the Irish peasantry will know that the wildest sayings and ideas of this play are tame indeed, compared with the fancies one may hear in any little hillside cabin in Geesala, or Carraroe, or Dingle Bay.  In Keegan Theatre's current production of John Millington Synge's masterwork, Playboy of the Western World, director Mark Rhea gently leads us into the uproariously feral world of Pegeen Mike (Helen Pafumi) and Christy Mahon (Carlos Bustamante) with a few explanatory words from the playwright.  This is to prepare us for the lyrically driven language that follows, as we plunge into the simple story of a man whose claims of patricide make him a local hero.

 

Was there ever a playwright more given to feasting on the luxuriance of poetic imagery than Synge?  And could that feasting be delivered more deliciously than by Rhea and company, who've captured the flavor of the time and place as masterfully as they have the satire and affection of Synge's theatrical baptism of Ireland's emerging nationalism?

 

Playboy, for all its fuss about killing and other great deeds, is really a coming-of-age play, as the peevishly timorous Christy finds his manhood in a crucible of hero worship turned to hate. 

 

Bustamante's Christy is wonderfully layered, hesitantly enhancing the bestowed mantle of ferocity with his own boldness and smarts as circumstances unfold.  As Pegeen Mike, Pafumi reveals the reluctant softness and despairing self-consciousness in a character so often played as a simple shrew. It's a coming-of-age for her, too, in that comically tragic moment at plays end when she sees her tepid future and feels the sharp regret of it, and Pafumi plays it unsentimentally and devastatingly true.