E-Mail This Article to a Friend Lover confessors Old truths inhabit Noone’s town of lies BY CAROLYN CLAY
	The Gigolo Confessions of Baile Bréag By Ronan Noone. Directed by Carmel O’Reilly. Set by Richard Chambers. Costumes by Frances Nelson McSherry. Lighting by Daniel Meeker. Sound and original music by Haddon Kime. With Miguel Cervantes, Judith McIntyre, and Billy Meleady. Presented by Súgán Theatre Company at the Boston Center for the Arts through February 28.

Ronan Noone is full of surprises. The Irish-bred, BU-trained playwright’s award-winning The Lepers of Baile Baiste and The Blowin of Baile Gall were heightened-realistic ensemble pieces set in tiny, troubled Irish towns where clergy sexual abuse and insularity were issues violently pulled to the surface. The final work in the trilogy, The Gigolo Confessions of Baile Bréag, is at once a more ambitious and difficult piece — though it bears Noone’s lyrical signature, writ large. A couple’s purgative trip into a fragmented past, the play assembles itself as it goes along, moving into shapes sometimes piercing, sometimes cliché’d, as one-time gigolo entrepreneur Paddy and long-time love Rosie sift through painful sands of memory, apparently revealing truths long dormant about what went on between and around them in the town of the title, a murky hamlet "at the edge of a rocky shore that steps into the cold, cold Atlantic."

Baile Baiste and Baile Gall translate into Town of Rain and Town of Foreigners. Baile Bréag means Town of Lies, and the dueling confessors in the play scrape layers of untruth off traumatic past events like so much old paint. Of course, their conflict and confessions are stand-ins for those of Ireland itself, in Noone’s rendering a nation rent in recent decades by changing attitudes toward sex and religion. (A program quote is from Yeats’s Purgatory.) Baile Bréag is a bubbling swamp of female desire and male brutality, secrets and lies, in which there are nowhere near six degrees of separation. Everyone has slept with everyone — and with one another’s mothers! The Gigolo Confessions of Baile Bréag is an Israel Horovitz play with an Irish accent.

That lilt, however, is not to be discounted. Noone has gone, sometimes embarrassingly, with his gift, flinging imagery like cake in a food fight. Some of it is haunting, like the rhythmic, mournful scraps of Irish ballad and poetry that meander through the minds of the characters, making their way into the play. But the association of sex with sycamores and blackberries is laborious, and colorful, incantory phrases like "blood bloody blood blood" are more sing-song than sensible.

What takes one by surprise is that the play is not, like its predecessors, naturalistic. Neither does it swell to a violent climax. Rather, it picks through a lurid past — sexual liaisons both remunerated and not, an illegitimate baby, three murders, a car crash — to ebb toward atonement and forgiveness.

In Súgán Theatre Company’s elliptical, well-acted production, Paddy, bearing a bottle of whiskey, arrives on the coattails of Rosie’s encounter with a third character, both a gigolo of the present and a ghost of the past. (That’s why, though the ghost is ostensibly a contemporary of Paddy and Rosie, he’s younger.) As the two live characters fling their revelations and recriminations, he wafts in and out, sometimes lurking behind the scrim panels that flank the stage, portraying assorted characters at command. "Play Daddy," Rosie will order, and the character dubbed William the Gigolo will morph into her mad dad, a wounded and twitching zealot whose God-driven inability to perform in the sack drove her "sprightly" mother away. But most often, the third character is William, who, years ago, was lured by Paddy into the gigolo business, fell hard for Rosie, and ended bloodily, both assassin and victim.

There is considerable art in the way Noone reassembles his puzzle of the past, with the characters abetting one another in a manner that’s almost choral. Yet apart from the gigolo business, which involves posing as window cleaners in order to service unsatisfied women and is sufficiently bizarre to be interesting, Noone works with trite if unlikely materials, from butchered chickens to secret pregnancies to sexual deceit. That doesn’t keep director Carmel O’Reilly from moving her threesome in alternately bristling and shadowy ways around Richard Chambers’s plain-Jane set. And the actors commit to the material, even when it means impersonating barnyard fowl or executing a collision of orgasm and Irish ditty.

Although the mood of the play is doleful, Billy Meleady brings humanity and humor to Paddy. The lovely actress Judith McIntyre, who can seem girlish and worn by turns, conveys the pain beneath her character’s snarl. And Miguel Cervantes contributes, along with pretty a cappella snippets, a vulnerable William. (About lunatic cuckold "Daddy" there’s little he can do.) As for Noone, he has taken risks here. But his Ireland held up better as the torn-apart house of Baile Gall than it does as the musically constructed melodrama of Baile Bréag.