N. Ireland drama does not travel well

Sometimes authenticity just isn't worth it. Marie Jones'

Rock Doves

is so place-specific, so dependent on knowing and caring about the nasty slums of Belfast, so parochial in its Northern Irish accents and its Northern Irish politics, that an American audience is pretty much left out.

And being left out isn't enjoyable in this production by Amaryllis Theatre Company, especially when the stuff we do get - a soap-operatic plot about parents and children unknown to one another (too late! too late!), meanness, cruelty, regrets and betrayals - is laid on with the heaviest of hands.

The set (Dirk Durossette) establishes this world of degradation: a room about to be demolished where everything is filthy, broken, stained. Its inhabitant, a semi-crazy called Knacker (the excellent Michael Toner), finds he has company: The Boy (Christopher Imbrosciano whose acting runs to illustrative hand gestures and shouting). This teenager is on the run because he "groused" on Topdog, the leader of the local paramilitary group, now, since the "Troubles" are over, dealing in drugs rather than Catholics.

Enter Knacker's pal Bella (Susan Giddings), a prostitute who runs a brothel for Topdog, and Lillian (Christopher Bohan), a transvestite who entertains the brothel's clientele. Everybody is endlessly kind to one another, everybody understands everybody's suffering. Well, after two hours of this shared pain and misery, these unpleasant characters wear pretty thin.

The title refers to the pigeons outside the boarded-up window who coo and are frequently chased away. But these pigeons - or maybe they're other pigeons - turn out to be Symbols: of outsiderness, of coming home, of mating, of the Irish in England, and of angels (I didn't understand that one at all). The dialogue is, when you can penetrate the accents, tedious and explanatory the way soap operas are ("Too many rotten years of washin' and washin' " or "That's your only protection, your madness"), and director Mimi Kenney Smith has found no way to alleviate the tedium or the grimness.

Playwright Jones also wrote the often-performed and overpraised

Stones in His Pockets

, but none of that play's humor or theatricality is in evidence in

Rock Doves

, especially disappointing since Amaryllis has done - and no doubt will do again - such impressive work with Irish playwrights, including last year's production of Brian Friel's

Molly Sweeney

and 2006's double bill of

Blood Guilty

by Antoine Ó Flatharta and

The Good Thief

by Conor McPherson.

At Amaryllis Theatre Company, the Playground at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., through Dec. 7. Tickets: $20. Information: 215-564-2431, Ext. 93, or

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