Pumpgirl Manhattan Theatre Club, New York

Starring Geraldine Hughes, Hannah Cabell and Paul Sparks

FOR most sleepy little towns along the invisible line dividing Co. Down from the Republic of Ireland time has stood still. Debut playwright and Newry, Co. Down native Abbie Spallen knows all about it, setting her new drama Pumpgirl, now playing at the Manhattan Theatre Club at City Center, just a fraction over the border, on the wrong side of a fluctuating exchange rate.

On this side of the tracks no one has heard the Celtic Tiger roaring. Run down shops offer bargains that no one wants, and a string of dead end businesses falter on their last legs.

Pumpgirl is the name of the play and also the name of the central character in Spallen's accomplished new drama. She's a young woman who works in a remote petrol station - a tom girl the local community openly considers a figure of fun - a butch young woman in her twenties who thinks she's known and accepted as one of the lads. But nothing could be further from the truth.

The first thing that draws you into to Spallen's new play is the strength of her narrative voice, and because of it we know from the beginning we're in good hands. Spallen's dramatic structure - three interconnected monologues for two women and one man - is simplicity itself, and from this basic outline the play opens and opens.

In language that's as evocative and realistic as the thoroughly recognizable characters she's created, Spallen invites us into a nightmare world of dysfunctional relationships, longstanding feuds, sexual hang-ups and casual brutality.

What's surprising, given the very dark subject matter, is how amusing Pumpgirl often is as it hurtles along to its shocking conclusion. Nothing is as funny as suffering, Samuel Beckett once remarked, and Spallen's benighted characters prove his point over and over.

In Spallen's world men don't talk to their wives or their children, except perhaps to ask for something, or to emphatically deny it. Wives quietly marinade in years of bitter resentments, finding solace in little acts of sabotage but never outright mutiny, eventually succumbing to tense truces that are always threatening to break down but end up going on for a lifetime.

And there's so much incandescent fury just beneath the surface of her characters' actions that at times you suspect that if they could somehow harvest it, they could power the whole of Ireland for a year on rage alone.

There's also a fierce eloquence at work in Pumpgirl - where characters say what they mean and mean what they say - that marks Spallen out in contrast to other Irish playwrights of her generation.

Her characters don't mumble, fudge or otherwise avoid telling you what motivates them; they don't hide or take refuge in drink. They lay it out there, as much as they can stand, and we can glean the rest in the silences between their confessions.

Spallen's work has been compared to Conor McPherson's because of its heavy reliance on monologues, but in tone and content it's really much closer to the work of Frank McGuinness and Tom Murphy. Here are characters that want to heal, but who lack the courage and the experience to even know how to ask.

There's sad eyed whip-smart Sinead (Geraldine Hughes), the wife in name only who is rattled to find her whole world collapsing over a line of seductive poetry quoted by a doubtful paramour. Or Hammy (Paul Sparks), the macho boy racing stock car driver who never wears a helmet, and who seeks in motion what has been lost in space.

Pumpgirl herself, played by Hannah Cabell, is the most pathetic of the three. Loveless and without a shred of self esteem, she's so far gone from years of neglect and loneliness that she can't even recognize Hammy's abuse for what it is.

In other circumstances each of these souls might have found a measure of contentment and peace. Sinead might have become an artist or a professor; Hammy might have learned that speed is just a metaphor for connection; and poor lonely Pumpgirl might have met a kindred spirit. But their choices were made before they were born and their fates were written before they even knew how to protest them.

Abbie Spallen has written an astonishingly confident debut that from the opening scenes announces her as a major new talent. Pumpgirl is an assured play by a writer who is demonstrably on her way to significant achievement.

(Pumpgirl is playing at the Manhattan Theatre Club at City Center, 131 West 55th Street. Tickets $50. Visit www.citycenter.org.)