Actor Stephen Rea Relishes Ambiguity of Irish Life : Roles in ‘The Crying Game’ and ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’ on Broadway have helped introduce American audiences to the veteran Irish actor.

While talking about his sympathy for the goals of the Irish Republican Army, actor Stephen Rea suddenly stopped. His mournful features and sleepy brogue became briefly animated. “I’m saying really awful things aren’t I?” he asked. “I’m going to get in trouble for all this. . . .

“But, while I despise tribalism, I don’t feel uncomfortable with the tribe.” The tribe, of course, is the Irish. And Rea these days can be seen in a couple of roles focusing on their cultural contradictions--both the absolutes that have turned Northern Ireland into a battleground and the ambiguities that sit at the center of much Irish writing.

In “The Crying Game,” the new Neil Jordan film that opened recently, Rea (pronounced “Ray”) plays Fergus, an Irish Republican Army gunman whose unlikely friendship with the English soldier he’s guarding opens the door to a crazy London underworld where nothing is as it seems to be. In “Someone to Watch Over Me,” the new Frank McGuinness play that recently opened on Broadway, he plays an Irish journalist who shares a cell with an Englishman (Alec McCowen) and an American (James McDaniel) as the guest of a radical Muslim faction that has taken them hostage.

The two roles introduce to American audiences an Irish actor who has spent the last couple of decades largely shuttling between London and his home in Belfast doing stage work. He’s familiar in art houses as the hapless Northern Ireland saxophonist sucked into the “troubles” in Neil Jordan’s debut, “Angel”; as one of the lupine scavengers in the director’s cult movie, “The Company of Wolves,” and as the unredeemed con man in Mike Leigh’s “Life Is Sweet.”

But theater--classic (Strindberg’s “Miss Julie”) as well as contemporary (Terry Eagleton’s “Saint Oscar”)--covers a large chunk of his resume, particular his work with Field Day, the Londonderry company he founded with playwright Brian Friel (“Dancing at Lughnasa”) to present new Irish writing.

In fact, Rea’s commitment to theater was tested when producer Noel Pearson informed the actor last August that he was moving “Someone” to Broadway after its commercial West End run. Caught up in a scheduling conflict, the actor had to choose between the play and the more lucrative offer of appearing in Stephen Frears’ new film, “The Snapper.” He decided to brave the more perilous shoals of Broadway instead.

“It isn’t quite as unselfish as it sounds,” he said, noting that he felt the combination of movie and play would be a strong calling card, helping him to breach “the portals of the great American film industry.” He admitted that making American movies has been as much a dream as making his Broadway debut. His boyhood in a working-class family was spent steeped in the films of his heroes, Spencer Tracy, Robert Mitchum and James Cagney. An actor’s life, he said, “was a foregone conclusion.”

Indeed, the roles of Fergus and Edward provide a versatile showcase for the actor. The acted-upon IRA foot soldier hardly speaks, his vacuous Easter idol features a blank slate on which the movie sketches its bold designs; the restless hostage can’t shut up, targeting the prissy Englishman for his cutting political barbs.

Sitting in his dressing room at the Booth Theatre on the day of the first preview, a shaggy-haired Rea was as somnolent as Fergus, apologetically blaming his torpor on jet lag and the stuffy room. But the passion that flared up sparingly, particularly when the talk turned to the sectarian troubles at home, is what director Robin Lefevre saw as a key element in the splenetically funny hostage in “Someone to Watch Over Me.”

“Stephen works almost totally on instinct,” the director said. “And then his brain controls that instinct. He’s guarded. He spends his emotions very carefully.”

“He’s a thinking emotional Irishman,” producer Noel Pearson said. “He’s a Protestant from Belfast who’s not afraid to confront the complexities of the situation in an open and inclusionary way.”

The politics of inclusion is not an especially popular ideology in strife-torn Belfast, where the English army presence has been a lightning rod for atrocities perpetrated by both Unionists and Republicans. Shedding the orthodoxies and polarizations of Northern Ireland in favor of a far more complex understanding has not been easy for the actor. The sectarianism, Rea said, “poisons you for life in the sense that you’re completely tribalized. You have to work very hard to escape it.”

In his work as well as in his personal life, Rea has attempted to demonstrate that the two tribes--Protestant and Catholic--are not all that much different in their day-to-day living. What is different, he said, are “the symbols and aspirations, the totems and icons” by which each side defines itself, one hewing to “a romantic British nationalism,” while the other hews to “a romantic Irish nationalism.” While he supports the cause of a united Ireland, he decries the violence and dehumanization of the centuries-old divisions.

“After people see the film, they come up to me and say, ‘Oh, an IRA man with a conscience, that’s a contradiction in terms,’ ” Rea said. “But the great tragedy is that a large number of kind, good, terrific people have felt compelled to be caught up in this conflict. Their actions may be justifiable in terms of ideology but they ultimately become people they don’t want to be. It erases their humanity. But not everyone succumbs.”

Fergus in “The Crying Game” is able to escape the dehumanization. And so, closer to home, was Rea’s wife, Dolours Price, who once worked with the IRA and who, in 1973, was convicted in connection with car bombings in London. Rea refused to speak at length about his wife, except to say that he had met her in Belfast long before her political activism got her into trouble and that they renewed acquaintance in Dublin after her release. “People change,” he said. “They can throw out the old orthodoxies and embrace ambiguities.” The couple have two young sons, Oscar (named after Oscar Wilde) and Danny, pictures of whom are tacked on Rea’s dressing-room mirror. Rea pointedly notes that they are raising their children in Belfast, not London.

“I don’t want them to be English,” he said. “Why should they inherit a history that’s not theirs? I think the English are basically uncomfortable with themselves. The attitude toward the language is to try and drain emotion from it, and the Irish attitude is to express emotion. I’d hate to listen to the color draining out of the way they express themselves.”

But Rea is comfortable with ambiguity and sees it as empowering. He recalls that in the ‘70s, the actor was playing in a production of Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame” at London’s Royal Court Theatre on the occasion of the famous Irish playwright’s 70th birthday. During rehearsals, he took Beckett aside and asked him what a particular line meant. True to form, the enigmatic writer responded, “Stephen, it is always ambiguous.”

“It was wonderful advice for an actor, really,” Rea recalled. “For Beckett, ambiguity is not a confusing thing, but an enriching thing, a powerful thing.”

The actor further maintained that the provisional nature of his society is not altogether a bad thing. In fact, he said, as an Irishman, it made him feel closer to the Americans than to the British. “What intrigues me about America is that everyone seems to be making it up as they go along,” he said. “That can lead to chaos. But it can nurture an openness in which all sorts of things are possible.”