These Irish Eyes Are Filled With Irony : ‘Juno and the Paycock’ evokes gallows humor in hard times.

Irish playwright Sean O’Casey understood that the surest way to prick an audience’s emotions is through laughter. One of the great tragic satirists, O’Casey was reared in the hardscrabble tenements of Dublin and mastered from an early age that peculiar Irish ability to glean irony from the most desperate of circumstances.

This quintessentially Irish gallows humor is richly evoked in O’Casey’s “Juno and the Paycock” at the Interact Theatre. Set in 1922 Dublin during a time of keen civil unrest, the play revolves around the beleaguered Boyle family, whose troubles are as much a result of their own fecklessness as the times in which they live.

The most feckless rogue of them all is “Captain” Jack Boyle (Leon Russom), a strutting ne’er-do-well who whiles his hours away in the local snug with his mate Joxer Daley (Dave Florek), a fair-weather hypocrite who would sell his sainted grandmother for the price of a pint. Also bent on folly is Boyle’s daughter Mary (Christina Carlisi), who spurns the love of the honest Jerry (James Calvert) for a tumble with a heartless swell (Matt Sullivan). Then there’s Johnny Boyle (Josh Adell), a shell-shocked Irregular who has already given an arm for Mother Ireland, but will pay a dearer price before he’s done.

While the Captain spouts highfalutin platitudes about principles and heroism, his wife Juno (Nancy Boykin) drudges to keep her fast-sinking family afloat. An unexpected legacy signals a more halcyon era for the Boyles, but chaos dogs the profligate clan, despite all Juno’s hard work and selflessness.

The greatness of O’Casey’s drama rests as much on the brilliantly antithetical dialectic between the Captain and Juno as it does on the tragic sweep of events. The Captain is all hot air and grandiosity, dangerously inflated with boozy nationalism and his own self-created myth. By contrast, Juno is earthbound and centered, intent upon more pressing issues of everyday survival.

And a thin survival it is. Bradley Kaye’s sparse set, Cheryl Waters’ economical lighting and Alex Jaeger’s threadbare costumes bespeak the stringency of the Boyles’ marginal existence. Yet director Dan Kern and his cast are never meager in their attack. On the contrary, the stage teems with a profusion of lively, flawed humanity, an often comic, sometimes brutish parade. The occasional errant Irish dialect, of which there are a few, matters not a whit in this otherwise rigorous production.

Sharon Madden shines as the hilarious Maisie, a coarse and florid neighbor whose friendship ultimately extends only as far as her pocketbook. Her polar opposite is Mary Carver’s wispy but heroic Mrs. Tancred, a bereaved mother made eloquently bitter in her grief. Florek’s Joxer is a paragon of venal self-interest, while Russom’s Captain Jack gradually unveils the darker side of his sad buffoon. As for Boykin’s Juno, her careworn face could be a road map to all suffering Ireland, forever struggling to forge a path through its own winding, weighty myths.

BE THERE

“Juno and the Paycock,” Interact Theatre, 11855 Hart St., North Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends Jan. 4. $20. (888) 566-8499. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.