E-Mail This Article to a Friend Nun sense Stephen Adly Guirgis lays out Our Lady of 121st Street BY SALLY CRAGIN

Sister Rose was an alcoholic parochial-school teacher who carried a big stick and did something special for every kid who grew up around New York’s 121st Street. "A fuckin’ living saint," says one former student — and now the nun is dead. But when her mourners come to the wake at the Ortiz Funeral Home, it turns out her body has been stolen, along with a pair of pants worn by a former student who decided to spend the night.

That’s all to be expected in the wobbly orbit of rising young playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis’s world. In his 2003 Off Broadway hit Our Lady of 121st Street, a stolen body is merely incidental to the main event, which is a sometimes explosive, frequently comic reunion of homeboys and girls from the ’hood.

Our Lady receives its regional premiere courtesy of SpeakEasy Stage Company starting next Friday. If you haven’t heard of Guirgis yet, just wait. Last spring, writing in the New York Times Magazine, Bruce Weber identified him as possibly the best American playwright under 40, adding that he "belongs on the list of accomplished young American playwrights that includes Suzan-Lori Parks and David Auburn, the last two winners of the Pulitzer Prize." Guirgis’s style is Mamet-esque without the pauses and is notable for short, sharp dialogue spoken by a veritable phylum of low-lifes and lost souls.

Guirgis, who is still under 40 but has credits writing for Law and Order and The Sopranos, was an early member of New York’s LAByrinth Theater Company, which was founded by John Ortiz and actor-turned-movie-star Philip Seymour Hoffman; the latter has directed all of Guirgis’s plays in their original stagings by LAByrinth. (Paul Melone directs the SpeakEasy production.) Yet when reached by phone in New York, Guirgis seems equally bemused and perplexed by his increasing success (his Jesus Hopped the "A" Train won an Edinburgh Fringe First Award and also received an Olivier nomination). "There’s a misconception — at least with some of the press that I’ve gotten — that people think that I just burp it out. And that is part of the process. I try to write freely and as unencumbered by myself as I can be, but when you get it out, you try to bring something down to its essence."

Nonetheless, early drafts of Our Lady, which includes a dozen characters ranging from a cop, a talk-radio host, and a luckless priest to various drunks and scam artists, incited massive writer’s block. "Phil [Hoffman] said something really smart. He said, ‘You know all these characters. You have everything in place, and they’ve all earned their right to be on stage, and now you can just say it — to get at what the thing is.’ "

Guirgis counts himself extremely fortunate to have Hoffman directing his work. "What makes Phil special — besides his talent — is his willingness to take responsibility for everything that appears on the stage. And by that I mean set, costumes, actors’ performances. And that is not the norm. At the end of the day, the buck stops with him — and that’s just who he is."

What’s more, this playwright is grateful to be part of a repertory company that helps him develop his work. But he also cites as inspiration his career as an arts educator in prisons, hospitals, and shelters promoting HIV prevention and conflict resolution. "When you walk into environments where people no longer have their freedom — no matter what their crime was — they can’t go out to a store and get a cup of coffee, it puts things into perspective."

Our Lady of 121st Street is presented by SpeakEasy Stage Company at the Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont Street in the South End, March 5 through 27. Tickets are $15 to $35; call (617) 426-2787 or visit SpeakEasyStage.com.