Secrets and lies aren’t the only things that get dug up in A Skull in Connemara. The title character, along with a few other unearthed craniums, is very much present in this the second play of the Martin McDonagh trilogy bookended by The Beauty Queen of Leenane and The Lonesome West. McDonagh’s scabrous and lilting triptych is set in a brutal outback of western Ireland populated by " feckers " and " eejits " and unpunished murderers. The old saying that you may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb does not apply here. In McDonagh’s bleak, rainy rural Ireland, you may get hammered — in both senses of the word — on a regular basis, but you’re not likely to be hanged for anything. The Church is ever-present in the form of dime-store artifacts, but in the words of the suicidal priest of The Lonesome West, " God has no jurisdiction at all. "

It is ironic that the now-32-year-old McDonagh, who was born and bred in Camberwell, South London (though he spent summers in Galway), has with his trilogies set in Leenane and the Aran Islands landed in the Irish playwriting pantheon. It’s even more curious that though the writer eschews theater, claiming to have been influenced by Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, the 1997 A Skull in Connemara makes reference not only to Beckett and Synge but also to Hamlet, with poor Yorick the subject of not just apostrophe but also assault. The play takes its title from Lucky’s long, fragmented exegesis in Waiting for Godot (just as The Lonesome West’s title is a quote from Synge). And it borrows from The Playboy of the Western World the touted corpse that shows up bloody but undead. Its chief debt, however, is to Hamlet, whose gravedigger clowns it puts front and center as they indulge in a veritable orgy of injuring those past injury. (By contrast, McDonagh’s most recent London hit, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, visits its copious outrages upon the living.)

The play, a corrosive meditation on guilt, centers on Mick Dowd, whose annual fall job it is to dig up those longest interred in the churchyard cemetery to make room for the riper dead. In this instance, the bones he’s set to unbury include those of his late wife, whom he is widely thought to have murdered — though, like Beauty Queen’s Maureen Folan, who bashed her harridan mom with a poker, he got away with it. Well, sort of. He did admit, and continues to admit, to the " drink-driving " incident that ostensibly killed his " missus. " But other " aspersions " persist inasmuch as her head injuries looked to have had more to do with an ax than with a windshield.

A Skull in Connemara is arguably the weakest part of the Leenane trilogy, but it bristles with a perverse poesy nonetheless. And Jeff Zinn’s production for the New Rep, though it mines the merciless humor in McDonagh’s mean-spirits and lame-brains, is not without a haunted feel. Apart from Mick, the characters include Maryjohnny, a sanctimonious old bingo cheat, and her doltish grandsons: the abused and dopy Mairtin, who’s assigned by the priest to assist Mick in displacing the remains, and the older Thomas, a dense cop with Starsky-and-Hutch-rerun-fueled detective aspirations. Cadging, cruel, and hardly brain-surgeon material, these folks lend themselves to grotesquerie. But Zinn has nudged his actors in the direction of the real, with the result that A Skull in Connemara, if not as blackheartedly hilarious as The Lonesome West, comes across as, beneath the black comedy, poignant.

Richard Chambers’s revolving set serves up both the dirt-strewn graveyard, where Robert O’Gorman’s Mick tirelessly shovels sandy soil from plastic-lined graves, and the only slightly less earthy front room of Mick’s cottage. There a small fire glows under a mantel that holds those essential elements of Irish life, Christ on the cross and poteen whiskey in a jar. Eventually the domestic scene will grow to accommodate, in addition to the rubble of exploded bones, a bloody mallet — no hint of Martha Stewart in McDonagh’s wild, remorseless Ireland.

O’Gorman is touching as a taciturn, rugged Mick who, if he did murder his wife, is nonetheless grieved by her loss. As Maryjohnny, Mary Klug is hardly fat, as called for, and her performance, too, is dogged and sinewy. As Mairtin, Scott Drummond is sympathetic, an " eejit " to be sure, but a boyish product of long bullying whose efforts to compute are painstaking if pathetic. Thomas Rhett Kee postures aptly as the would-be-entrapping Thomas, minus McDonagh’s prescribed cigarette and asthma inhaler. The playwright, with his talent for frosting the most heartless interaction in rich language, may be playing an audacious joke in A Skull in Connemara. But when its stunted characters so clearly ache and struggle, they do to your heart what Mick and Mairtin do to those skulls.