The great rivalry of ancient Ireland, as recorded in its epic, The Cattle Raid of Cooley, was between the western province of Connaught and the northern one of Ulster. These days, with the political situation at a depressing standstill, the theater of action has switched to, well, theater. Ulster got off the first volleys with Brian Friel, Frank McGuinness, and Gary Mitchell. Then the play boys of the Western world hit back, Tom Murphy and Vincent Woods and " guest " (born in London, actually) Martin McDonagh with his Connemara and Áran trilogies. Now we have Ronan Noone — a native of An Clochán, in the west of Galway — with The Lepers of Baile Baiste, the first of his trilogy (The Blowin of Baile Gall will open at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre next month; The Gigolo of Baile Bréag is set for June).

" Hit " is the operative word here. The Irish drama of Synge, Yeats, and O’Casey delivered tough truths in a state of grace. You might think that contemporary Ireland, with its resurgent economy, would be more gracious still, but McDonagh’s plays wallow in corrosive cynicism, as if the resentment of Catholic dogma and its enduring poverty had finally cracked the tourist mask that the West of Ireland has been obliged to wear. Clerical abuse, the hot-button topic of BU-trained Noone’s drama, is both a stark reality and a metaphor for all the misery that the Irish have repressed over their long history.

Noone’s play is set in the church and the bar (cause and effect) of the small Irish town of Baile Baiste ( " town of rain, " but playing on " baptism " ). Father Gannon starts us off with a sermon about Father Damien and the leper colony, and about how sin is a kind of leprosy; meanwhile we see old (mid 50s) man Seaneen and young (early 20s) barkeep Kellogg in the local. One by one former schoolmates in their late 20s drift in: Laddeen, Clown, Yowsa, and Daithi (who’s just back in town after several years’ absence). Laddeen starts the rumor that Clown’s mother is going out with town policeman Sergeant O’Brien; Kellogg thought it was Father Gannon she was seeing. Kellogg remembers that the Sergeant’s son, Simon, is back from four weeks in the Céili house drying out; Laddeen starts a rumor about Simon and Clown (whose real name is Peter) in the alley. Clown is on the dole: " Celtic tiger my arse, there isn’t any work in this town. Maybe if I knew what a comphewter looked like I’d get on. " We keep hearing that the toilet stinks. Laddeen still has the condoms he bought in 1996; Yowsa is said to have got Dolores Daly pregnant, or maybe it was her sister Sheila, or Kathleen. Daithi arrives with a statue he’s stolen from the church; he’s trying to get Father Gannon to admit the Church stole something from him, something that involves the whereabouts of Brother Angelus. Seaneen, who’d left, returns with disturbing news about Simon.

That sets up act two, where some of the Church’s dirty laundry is aired to see whether the rain of Baile Baiste can get the dirt out even as Kellogg goes to scrub the toilet. The narrower issue is whether Daithi and his schoolmates will ever feel clean, but Noone goes beyond sexual abuse to point up how the Church abuses sex, how the Sergeant’s wife has left him, how Seaneen has no relationship with his wife and may be touching Yowsa’s 10-year-old sister, how Kellogg is screwing Mrs. Daly while his customers try to romance her daughters. No woman appears in this play, and the men have no idea what women are about.

In the excellent Súgán Theatre production under artistic director Carmel O’Reilly, rain falls continually, and the bar, where Jameson’s and Budweiser flow like water, is graced by oversized wall paintings of Hell (Satan from Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights) and Heaven (Fra Angelico’s Strozzi Chapel Deposition; both are gorgeously reproduced). Some subtleties (and this play has many, like Simon and Peter in the alley) get lost in the shouting of the second act, and Chris Burke’s Daithi seems a little stranded, since it’s really Simon who triggers the revelations. Colin Hamell preens impotently as Laddeen; Derry Woodhouse is equally right as off-to-Amerikay stud (or is it all talk?) Yowsa. As Clown, Josef Hansen has a light voice and a variable accent; however his second act, mostly body language, is very fine. Ciaran Crawford is a whiny, priest-ridden Kellogg, but that’s how the play reads; likewise Billy Meleady’s one-note Seaneen is both authentic and scary with that slash-hook he keeps brandishing. John Morgan and Ed Peed make Father Gannon and Sergeant O’Brien as sympathetic as Noone permits. Although the Riders to the Sea allusion of Clown’s closing tale is a puzzler, this lashing drama clears a lot of air. I can’t wait for Baile Gall to blow in.