By NEIL GENZLINGER

No masseuse is credited in the program for “The Hairy Ape,” but a few minutes into this startling production by the Irish Repertory Theater you begin to hope that the actors have access to one. The play, Eugene O’Neill’s tale of a muscular galoot called Yank who goes looking for his place in the world, has several scenes set in the bowels of an ocean liner, and Eugene Lee’s impressive set, per O’Neill’s stage directions, shows no mercy to the actors playing the seamen: the ceiling is low, forcing them to stoop as they stomp around. Just watching them makes the back hurt.
 

The production, directed by Ciaran O’Reilly like a well-piloted ocean liner, sets its course and sticks to it. No modernizing or reinterpreting here; just a gorgeously grim-looking attempt to make the audience of 2006 appreciate what a gut-punch this work must have been when it had its premiere in 1922 (when Alexander Woollcott, in The New York Times, called it “turbulent and tremendous”).

Yank (Greg Derelian) has just about convinced himself that he is a vital cog in the machinery of life — “I start something, and the world moves!” he bellows — when a young society woman (Kerry Bishé) from the top deck ventures down to his domain. In other hands a love story might have broken out; in O’Neill’s a scathing analysis of social divisions materializes. The woman calls Yank a beast, and he spends the rest of the play trying to reassemble his shattered self-confidence.

Not all the actors are comfortable with O’Neill’s naturalistic dialogue, but the acting is almost beside the point here. This production is all about image and sound (by Zachary Williamson and Gabe Wood, rumbly and foreboding), and in both it’s a vivid success.