STAGE REVIEW : ‘SPOKESONG’ --DEFT IF NOT DEEP

Stewart Parker has a way with words or, to quote one of his own characters, “a gift for telling the truth with a certain flair.”

His “Spokesong,” now at the Old Globe, will not win prizes for profundity, but it rides circles around the competition. How many plays have you seen lately dealing with the Irish crisis? This is a tender fantasy not so much rocked as cradled by the explosive politics of Northern Ireland in the ‘70s.

Its engaging plea for life is done up as a bit of a parlor game, buoyed by the Trick Cyclist (Charles Hallahan), a song-and-dance man with a touch of the leprechaun, who keeps things pedaling along.

Inside this setting (Robert Blackman designed the top-drawer costumes and a bicycle shop round as a wheel), “Spokesong” charts the Belfast romance of Frank (Thomas Oglesby) and Daisy (Annabelle Price), that same Daisy of the bicycle built for two.

Frank is the wistful owner of arcane beliefs and a bicycle shop inherited from his grandparents; Daisy’s a teacher, more inured to the harsh reality of her immediate present. Enter Frank’s brother Julian (Matt McKenzie, too American for the play’s good), a snake in the grass recently returned from London. It livens things up.

We witness a mild tug of war between brothers (the past and the present, vying) and, in flashbacks, drop in on Frank’s gentle grandfather (Gregory Itzin) and feisty grandmother (Christine Healy) as we wait for the resolution of a three-way conflict that we know is bound to come out all right.

These are the strengths and the weaknesses of “Spokesong”: a witty, lively bit of song and banter among appealing characters that ultimately neutralizes the flintiness of the underlying issues.

Improbably, this play pits the pacifist against his times and almost gets away with it. Its freewheeling metaphor is certainly deft if not deep, and Frank’s championing of the rolling past (the svelte velocipede) in the face of the unstoppable present (the snarling motor car, that “hard shell of aggression for the soft urban mollusk to secrete itself in”) addresses impossible longings in us all. This lulls and seduces us, at least for the duration of the play.

In the end, though, “Spokesong” does seem a hollow triumph of rhetoric over content: the Irish defiantly nursing their dreams even as they blow up around them.

It is more than a little perverse of Parker to insist on so much optimism in a ruthless civil war--but how incontrovertibly Irish of him to find such light-handed (if not lighthearted) humor among the carnage, and a good song to carry the words, even if it does leave an audience feeling blandly contented rather than passionate.

The production itself is beguiling. Warner Shook has directed his handpicked company with a love and care reflected in the performances. Special commendation goes to Hallahan for the vitality and variety of his tasks; to musical director Larry Delinger (a new name around the Globe) for the spirited sound he’s infused in Jim Kennedy’s music, and to musicians Rick Barlow, Richard Green and Danny Wheetman for their twanging, tooting and fiddling.

Performances in Balboa Park run Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m., with matinees Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m., until March 9 (619-239-2255).