Despite the edge of violence beneath the ordinary lives that are portrayed on stage in This Lime Tree Bower, the play feels like a first cousin to Ah, Wilderness!, Eugene O’Neill’s gentle comedy about a boy coming of age. To be sure, it’s a long way from Middle America between the 20th-century world wars to rural Ireland in the 1990s, but the themes of adolescent rebellion within the confines of a loving family run parallel, notwithstanding the brogue and the four-letter words that fall so trippingly from the tongues of the three characters.

Unlike O’Neill’s depiction of a large, somewhat dysfunctional extended family, Conor McPherson’s play is sparsely populated and the action is related as narrative, yet the pacing and the poetic quality of the language can make you hang on the words. Seventeen-year-old Joe, his twentysomething brother Frank, and Ray, their sister’s boyfriend, relate their intertwined recollections of a time when each had a life-changing experience. Although they are continuously on stage, listening to one another and acknowledging different versions of a story that becomes increasingly entangled, they never speak directly to anyone but the audience.

McPherson is a storyteller who has strayed into the theater. His stock in trade is the shaggy-dog tale that’s spun out in endless detail and doesn’t wind down until the final sentence. Bypassing the conventional rules of dramatic construction, he’ll rely instead on a mesmerizing pile-up of anecdotes that capture you in their cat’s cradle of revelations. Even though his 1998 prize winner The Weir is written as dialogue, he still gives the characters long speeches so they can divulge their secrets. The 1995 Lime Tree Bower, with its series of monologues spoken by the characters to the audience, suggests that the illusionary fourth wall separating actor from viewer has no more substance than a twilight mist on the moors.

These days Irish dramatists like McPherson and Brian Friel and Martin McDonagh and Frank McGuinness are the playboys of the Western world. Their Boston outpost is Súgán Theatre Company, where Carmel O’Reilly acts as local den mother. Following last season’s hit production of McPherson’s one-man drama St. Nicholas (with Richard McElvain), O’Reilly has another winner. This Lime Tree Bower begins and ends with Joe, who finds a best friend, discovers the pain of betrayal, and digs down to his moral bedrock within the two hours on stage. His older brother, Frank, commits a crime (one of those gang-who-can’t-shoot-straight affairs) for the best of reasons: to help their dad. Ray finds himself a hero even though he didn’t mean to get involved. Rather than appearing sentimental or contrived, the happy ending seems a natural turn of events.

O’Reilly has kept the blocking simple and the stage bare, allowing the actors to sit still while talking, only occasionally jumping up to pace from one corner to another when the testosterone level rises. Nathaniel Gundy plays Joe as shy and quizzical yet determined to follow his corrupting new friend, whom he describes but who never appears on stage. Ciaran Crawford’s Frank is a placid, loyal son and perfect older brother who in a heartbeat transforms into a daredevil criminal. As for Ray, a horny philosophy professor who’s revved up by alcohol and driven by a sardonic view of the world and his profession, Aidan Parkinson uses his off-key twang to pierce all pretensions. He suggests a split personality, saint and sinner, who never quite lives up to his own vision of evil. It’s a masterful performance that elevates the temperature of the production.

The play’s title comes from the Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem “This Lime Tree Bower, My Prison.” The relationship between Coleridge’s idyllic site and a village in modern Ireland may be oblique, but the poem’s tone still fits. Coleridge’s verdant resting place, where neither fear nor troubles intrude, anticipates Joe’s lines at the end, “In bed that night I thought about my mother. It was about another time I’d forgotten. Dad was teaching me to skim stones on the beach. And Mom was trying to do it. . . . And I felt safe and the safe feeling stayed.”