'Take Me Away': It Won't Budge

There's work, and then there's family. Or there's neither, if you play your cards as badly as the lads in Gerald Murphy's dark Irish comedy "Take Me Away."

The play, getting its American premiere by local Irish specialists Solas Nua, depicts three dull brothers and their desperate father, who are complaining at a virtual standstill for much of its 100 minutes. Watching a bunch of losers go down hard can be brutish fun, but Murphy's sarcastic script is hardly foolproof. The production never really gets into the daffy swing of hypocrisy and self-destructiveness in the face of failure, leaving the audience little to do but squirm.

"Take Me Away" strikes a far more subdued tone than that of another Irish work in town, the riotously gratuitous bloodfest of Martin McDonagh's "The Lieutenant of Inishmore," now at Signature Theatre. The lone bit of bloodletting in "Take Me Away," which opened last weekend at Flashpoint's cozy Mead Theatre Lab, is telling, but Murphy's script spends a lot of time vamping in place before stripping off the pathetic little lies to which his figures are addicted.

Of course, in Irish drama, even ineffectual vamping can be entertaining. The brooding of these three lads and their braying, oafish da -- all of them tied in a mysterious knot over the condition of the matriarch we never see -- occasionally hits fine notes of blind stupidity.

But these florid Irish chronicles of weasels and wimps place demands on actors -- demands that Linda Murray's cast can never quite meet. Alex Vernon has the most daunting challenge as Andy, a small-time hustler with (sigh) a heart of gold. The character swings from thuggish guffaws to nearly moving confessions (he's too poor to keep his wife and child), and Vernon has trouble plausibly bridging the gap.

As the innocent youngest son and the domineering father, Kevin O'Reilly and Joe Cronin are trapped in single, repeating notes of despair (one soft, one loud). Jared Hill Mercier is likewise hemmed in by skepticism as the brother who reluctantly hosts this botched meeting. The crude self-absorption that marks the whole bollixed clan is never detailed enough to unlock much laughter.

The single-set play takes place in a cheap, new apartment that looks as if it were furnished in an afternoon spree at Ikea, which is Murray's sly way of tipping you off to the play's "Celtic tiger" theme. (These are the folks who aren't making it.) In fact, the funniest thing about the production is how the sons fade into the soulless beige decor as they dress up to meet their ma, hoping there might be money in the visit.

They never go, of course; their dreams are dead, but you leave without having warmed to their troubles.

Take Me Away, by Gerald Murphy. Directed by Linda Murray. Set, costumes and sound, Dan Brick and Linda Murray; lights, Marianne Meadows. About one hour 40 minutes. Through Oct. 26 at Flashpoint, 916 G St. NW. Call 1-800-494-TIXS or visit http://www.solasnua.org.