E-Mail This Article to a Friend Belfast Sundance The mean streets of Mojo and Mickybo BY SALLY CRAGIN

Belfast in 1970 wasn’t particularly safe for anyone, but for Mojo and Mickybo, the Protestant and Catholic children at the center of Owen McCafferty’s one-act play, it’s both battleground and safe haven. Mojo Mickybo won best-play awards at the Edinburgh and Dublin Fringe Festivals and from Granada TV. Súgán Theatre Company artistic director Carmel O’Reilly directs the New England premiere of the work for Súgán at the Boston Center for the Arts starting next Friday.

Old friends and long-time acting mates Billy Meleady and Colin Hamell star as the kids, Mojo and Mickybo, but the adult actors also play a variety of other roles, including the boys’ parents and rival gang members. "We get a split perspective of two grown men returning to their childhood and acting out all the characters in the neighborhood," O’Reilly explains. "They play something like 17 characters, and it’s a very imaginative world."

Despite the hot-spot setting, however, O’Reilly maintains this is a personal story. "McCafferty isn’t writing about the politics and the troubles, but that language permeates the children’s lives, even though they don’t understand the actual events happening around them. But they absorb the fear." In the play, both children develop a compelling fascination with the 1969 George Roy Hill movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Acting out scenes (including the very act of getting into the cinema while they’re still underage) cements their unlikely friendship.

"I remember seeing Butch Cassidy as a kid," recalls the Irish-born-and-bred Meleady, who plays the Protestant Mojo. "And wanting to be Butch and wanting to be Sundance. McCafferty evokes all these images and memories for me that bring me back to that time." But for Mojo and Mickybo, the themes of the movie are potent. "Butch and Sundance talk about escaping to somewhere safe," O’Reilly interjects. Mojo and Mickybo also, "in their childhood minds, need to get away."

Hamell plays the Catholic Mickybo, whom he describes as "the tougher, taller, more outspoken character. He comes from a happier family, and he’s the one who speaks up when they’re in trouble on the playground." Hamell and Meleady have been in a half-dozen shows together, and both men are finding the experience of working with McCafferty’s poetically charged "Belfast dialect" complex and challenging. "The inner city has a lot of their own words," Hamell points out. "It’s very colorful and creative, and there are a lot of words like ‘weeker,’ which you’d think would mean bad, but for these kids it’s a positive thing, whereas the opposite of ‘weeker’ in this play is ‘wick.’ "

While Mojo and Mickybo are battling neighborhood bullies ("Gank the Wank" and "Fuckface") and re-enacting their own personal history, violence erupts in the city, albeit off stage. "They play war games, like chasing each other and throwing bombs at each other," Hamell says. "There are games that are laced with, how do you say it?" He pauses and then murmurs, "the times."

Yet McCafferty is careful not to tip his hand with overt political statements. "No one need know anything about Belfast to understand this play," says O’Reilly. "You’ll identify with these children’s memories into their emotional lives."

"I hope that, for some people, it brings them back to their childhood," Meleady adds. "It makes me smile a lot, but the most fearful moments of your life can be the funniest when you go back."

Mojo Mickybo is presented by Súgán Theatre Company at the Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont Street in the South End, April 2 through 24. Tickets are $22 to $32; call (617) 426-2787 or visit www.sugan.org