At Solas Nua, 'Bedbound': When The Bedbugs Bite

"Bedbound" doesn't so much begin as unwrap itself, which is a very good way to start, considering the surprising gift inside: a bristly little Irish terrier of a play.

The treats extend to the flavorful performances, especially Brian Hemmingsen's. He brings thuggish, operatic breadth to the rough-hewn salesman who recounts his violent rise in the furniture trade. Playing his mousy, disabled daughter, Linda Murray securely holds up her end of the proceedings -- a galvanic, hour-long march through the bizarre, sourly funny puddles of their lives.

The production comes care of director Dan Brick and Solas Nua, a Washington company of recent vintage specializing in theater with an Irish lilt. "Solas nua" is Gaelic for "new light," and thankfully, this is exactly what Brick and Murray, the troupe's leaders, are letting in. On the evidence of the crackerjack "Bedbound," Solas Nua is a bright new kid on the block.

Enda Walsh, the Dublin-born writer whom Solas Nua has adopted as a house playwright -- the company has staged his "Disco Pigs" and "Misterman" -- gives "Bedbound" a Beckettesque patina. The father and daughter occupy a space anchored in the tragic as well as the absurd. Soon enough, however, Walsh asserts a virtuosic linguistic rhythm in the play's riveting rants and stark reminiscences. The chasm between parent and child is bridged by filling the void with words -- "bruising the air," as one of them puts it, with stories of a family beset by monstrous callousness and brutal disappointment.

The tiny black-box theater at the DC Arts Center in Adams Morgan proves ideal for "Bedbound," and Brick, who also designed the set, launches the play in tantalizing fashion. The thick walls of a large, white box collapse to reveal the bed in which the daughter has been confined by her father. He's so appalled by her condition that he's sealed her off in smaller and smaller spaces. The daughter loses herself in stories, in the imaginative power of language, because that's all she has. "What am I without words?" she asks. "I'm an empty space."

The father, Maxie, has himself retreated to this claustrophobic little haven, the last place on Earth he wants to be, it seems, and the only place left for him to turn. What we learn about Maxie in our hour with him are the scope of his appetites and the scale of his depravity: He's the dad of your nightmares, a figure of violent impulses inclined not only to bring home the bacon, but also to slaughter the pig.

In the stories of Maxie's Darwinian assault on the furniture business, Walsh seems to be poking a stick at the Irish economic miracle. Maxie is the dirty laundry under the business suit, a man whose management style is closer to Tony Soprano's than Bill Gates's. (That the virile, bearlike Hemmingsen bears some resemblance to James Gandolfini reinforces the connection.) Maxie falls into reveries about his heyday in the showroom, revealing a youthful propensity for violence rather than salesmanship. His ascent, he tells us, started in a blaze of glory -- and not strictly in a poetic sense.

Hemmingsen, like Gandolfini, is a ballet dancer in a truck driver's body. He deftly navigates the cadences in Walsh's crisp witticisms, a verbal style joining the coarse and the lyrical. The two strains find their apotheosis in Maxie's very funny recounting of a meeting in Paris with a male furniture executive, a deal consummated, as it were, through an eyebrow-raising physical act.

Walsh takes an extremely jaundiced view of capitalistic drive. Maxie will do just about anything to get ahead -- even stare down an uninviting sexual partner -- just so long as what also appears in front of him are "the faces of my competitors, looking at me with jealousy."

But those days are merely the stuff of rancid anecdotes, a mythology Maxie can keep alive only through his captive audience of one. The winning streak now a shambles, Maxie is tethered in his own way to the bed from which his child has been relating her own sad story of her precipitous decline.

At last, father and daughter are truly bound to one another.

Bedbound, by Enda Walsh. Directed and designed by Dan Brick. Lighting, Marianne Meadows; sound, Chris Pifer. About one hour. Through July 16 at DC Arts Center, 2438 18th St. NW. Call 800-494-TIXS or visit http://www.solasnua.org/ .