IRISH playwright Frank McGuinness is a singular talent, and his achievement has yet to be fully appreciated. His gift and it is a rich one is his ability to speak directly to the human heart, bypassing the tripwires and circuit breakers that we place there over years of bitter experience.

He has, it seems, little patience for the fraught introspection of so much contemporary Irish drama. Instead in McGuinness' work there's a terrific urgency, an urgency that comes from an awareness of how fleeting life actually is, and how little time there really is to say what must be said. The effect of this awareness an astonishingly potent combination of creativity and candor -can rattle you to your marrowbones.

There's something that's distinctly mythic about McGuinness' characters (and especially his female characters) that owes far more to the work of Tennessee Williams say or to the golden age of Hollywood than they ever do to the signature plays of the Abbey Theatre.

For one there's no mistaking their intentionality. His characters say what they mean and they mean what they say and there are, in fact, no other dramatic characters quite like them in modern Irish drama. They eschew Brian Friel's ponderousness and self-doubt, they are demonstrably more connected to the land and to each other than the blasted denizens of Tom Murphy's plays, they contrast sharply with the groping, half coherent urbanites of Conor McPherson most famous works, and they'd buy and sell the dim witted yokels of Martin McDonagh's demagogic pantomimes until the cows come home.

In Someone Who'll Watch Over Me, a play first performed in London in 1992, McGuinness plays to every one of his strengths as a dramatist. Break Through Theatre Company (with George Heslin directing) has produced the current New York production, and they quickly demonstrate that McGuinness' subject matter hasn't dated.

Set in a grim underground cell somewhere in the Lebanon, where unseen Arab captors hold an Irishman, an Englishman and an American hostage together against their will, the play unfolds in a single room over an unspecified space of time.

The breathtaking cruelty of the men's situations is acknowledged but never belabored. They are simply held together in one windowless room, never knowing if it is night or day, completely cut off from human society and so forced to fall back on themselves and each other for solace and support.

Each of them is fiercely aware of the ironies of his situation and each in turn rebel, their individual struggles and the tensions and connections shared by each of them are where the play derives its at times almost brutally raw power.

How do you survive when you have been essentially buried alive? In McGuinness' view you manage by telling long-winded jokes, arguing, singing songs, exercising and recounting the most transformative moments of your lives. By nurturing your own humanity you can withstand the inhumanity that you're encountering.

There are many reasons to revive this deceptively straightforward play, but it's clear this production has set its sights on what it tells us about the war in Iraq. Operation enduring incomprehension still unfolds between Arab and westerner outside the play's unassailable walls, and McGuinness has a great deal to say about the immense harm that otherwise decent people are willing to do to each other in pursuit of philosophical or political aims and abstractions.

Heslin paces the production expertly, allowing its themes to emerge unbidden. He is assisted by the strong performances given by Mark Anthony Noonan as the exasperated and blisteringly funny Irishman, Michael.

In the role of Edward, the initially stuffed shirt Englishman whose remarkable courage emerges over time, John Brant gives a nuanced and convincing performance. Adam Vorrath is also convincing as the never say die Yankee whose sad fate alas underlines how deeply this play speaks to our current moment.