By Cahir O’Doherty

HIS biographers spell it out for you: Irish American playwright Eugene O’ Neill had very good reason to believe that fate is inescapable.

In each of his plays there’s at least one character desperately trying to flee what time and fortune have in store for him (or her). But they slip and falter, these characters, and fate catches up with them eventually, and in those terrifying moments O’Neill’s plays attain their remarkable power.

The Irish Repertory Theatre’s new production of The Hairy Ape, one of O’Neill earliest theatrical successes, quickly reminds us why O’Neill is considered the first great American playwright. O’Neill presents, in the most sobering drama imaginable, a glimpse at both the American dream and the pricetag attached.

The play begins on board an ocean liner, but not on deck. Instead it opens in the cramped quarters where the coal stokers work in a hellish world of fire and steel, and there we meet Yank (Greg Derelian), an ox of a man who is still only dimly conscious of his own lowly place on the social scale.

Director Ciaran O’Reilly honors O’Neill’s stage directions to the very letter — the roof of the claustrophobic engine room is so low that none of the men can ever stand up straight. The workers whirl and pirouette like robots in a mechanical Fritz Lange dystopia.

In this enclosed human cage the stokers work and drink and brawl, unaware of the exalted lives above deck that enjoy the benefits of their labor, and too exhausted to care.

O’Reilly stages the play’s opening scene by contrasting the physically numbing routine of their work with their private hopes and dreams, so that when the first great O’Neill moment arrives, when Paddy the old Irish sailor (Gerald Finnegan) silences the brutish men he’s surrounded with tales of the ships of his youth, you are startled by the sudden tenderness, and the poetry almost pulled out of thin air: “Oh, there was fine beautiful ships them days — clippers wild tall masts touching the sky — fine strong men in them — men that was sons of the sea as if ’twas the mother that bore them.”

Eugene Lee’s impressive set design also honors O’Neill’s symbolic intentions, and the Irish Rep has brought this production to life with a degree of artistic ambition that the space has rarely seen.

In the early 1920’s when The Hairy Ape was written and first performed it struck the audience as a revelation. With its expressionistic performance style and its radical political and social themes -– exploring the blighted lives of ordinary working class people -– it was a departure from the domestic farces that were a Broadway staple at the time. And still are.

The Irish Rep’s production reminds you why the FBI opened a file on O’Neill as a potentially dangerous political radical -– because his interest in and concern for what can happen to a poor simple “Yank” in a world controlled by the rich and the powerful is as richly resonant today as the day it was first performed.

In the title role Gregory Derelian brings this Brooklyn street tough vividly to life. At first believing himself the king of his fiery underworld, he’s affronted when he sees himself through the eyes of a pampered heiress come to gawk at the ships lower decks.

In her eyes he’s an animal. It’s a mortal insult that haunts him for the rest of his short life. His humanity, he discovers, has been robbed by the mechanical world that he works in, and as the play progresses we see how his fate is inescapable, how in fact it was written even before he was born.

Other controversies are retained in this production too –- the casual use of racial epithets by several characters is an enduring counterpoint to the ideal of a melting pot. Trade union leaders want equality for all men, the play reminds us, as long they have similar ethnic origins.

Most memorable of all is the mutual incomprehension that exists between the rich and poor characters, which O’Reilly underscores with his staging. Both have grown so far apart that they can no longer comprehend what they are trying to say to each other. In the vast gulf between them first innocence and then lives are lost.

(The Hairy Ape runs until November 19 at the Irish Rep’s headquarters at 132 West 22nd Street, New York. Show times are Wednesday-Saturday at 8 p.m.; Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday at 3 p.m. For tickets call 212-727-2737 or visit www.irishrep.org.)