Playwright: Billy Roche. At: Seanachai Theatre Company at the Den, 1333 N. Milwaukee Ave. Tickets: 866-811-4111; www.seanachai.org; $26-$30. Runs through: May 25
Let's make a few things clear, right at the start: First, this is the 1960s, and Delaney's Traveling Road Show is an honest operation, unlike some of the fly-by-night carnivals roaming rural Ireland today. Second, Theo Delaney's amusements include no freaks, animal acts or hoochie-coochie dancers, but strictly clean entertainmentanchored by boxing matches providing local challengers an opportunity to take on "Killer Deano," the show's in-house slugger. This is not Rocky, however: All domestic violence is kept offstage and all sporting violence occurs while we aren't looking.
Billy Roche, you see, isn't content to treat us like the rubes come to pay strangers for the illusions that are Delaney's stock-in-trade, but instead regards us as contemplative observers more interested in the backstage dynamics of its personnelblustery Theo, the boss; sexy Lily, his box-office manager; swaggering Dean, the aforementioned Killer; gentle Peader, his trainer, and laconic Junior, now the resident handyman, but himself a former pro boxer before being sidelined by a foot injury. What distinguishes this stop on their tour of the Wexford backwaters is not just the uneasy prospect of a village boasting both a marksman who threatens to deplete the shooting gallery's inventory of prizes and a retired middleweight champ seeking revenge for an excessive beating inflicted upon his cousin by an overenthusiastic Deano, but the unanticipated arrival of Emer, Theo's long-estranged teenaged daughter, curious to learn about the father who abandoned her mother on the road before her birth.
Over the course of the lead-ups and walkaways surrounding the Big Fight ( that we will only see in shadow ), we watch an attraction grow between young Emer and shy Junior, their tentative overtures contrasting sharply with the tough-love affection of Lily and Theo, itself a muted version of the volatile marital practices typical of rootless communities. When Junior risks permanent disability after going six rounds in the ring, Emer begs him to leave with her for a more peaceful lifea plea that finds an unexpected advocate in the enigmatic Peader.
Roche's intimate scrutiny of the small life-changing decisions affecting the destinies of common folk may seem drab to those with a low tolerance for sentimentality, but under Kevin Christopher Fox's understated direction, the Seanachai ensemble conjures vivid personalities whose unspoken backstories ( could Peader be Emer's real father? What led Junior to his career in the ring? ) inspire mystery and enchantment holding us rapt for the two hours that we view this sepia-toned portrait of a subculture that outsiders rarely see.