At first, The Walworth Farce looks like a routine the Three Stooges might have dreamed up -- if Larry, Curly and Moe had been Irish, that is.

The extended bit, accompanied by the liltingly sentimental An Irish Lullaby, involves a dad in a bad wig, one grown son in a dress and another whose skull-top has been shaved so that he seems to be balding weirdly. The action is frenetically fast, as farces must be, but before long an unsettling darkness begins playing tug o' war with the comedy.

And that's how you know you're in for another wild ride with a contemporary Irish playwright.

The Walworth Farce, which begins a four-day run Wednesday in the Carnival Studio Theater at Miami's Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, is the first work by London-based Irish playwright Enda Walsh to make a big splash in the United States. It had an acclaimed 2008 run at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, the same theater where Walsh's companion piece The New Electric Ballroom has just opened.

Winner of the Edinburgh Festival's Fringe First award in 2007, The Walworth Farce is on a world tour through April. The cast is from Galway's Druid Theatre Company, one of Ireland's most celebrated, which commissioned the play in 2003.

Garry Hynes, a Druid founder and artistic director (and the first woman to win a directing Tony Award, in 1998, for Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane), says of Walsh's writing, ``It is entirely distinctive. He manages to create a world entirely of the imagination, and to have an audience live in that world and get inside the heads of the characters.''

She adds that his blending of comedy and darkness is something that comes with being Irish.

``In Ireland, however dark things are, a joke will come not far behind,'' she says by phone from her office at Druid.

Walsh agrees.

``We're quite a sort of morbid people,'' he says, laughing. ``There's nothing better than an Irish funeral! [Irish people] like the surreal and bizarre, and embrace the darkness of things.''

The nugget of inspiration for The Walworth Farce came from Walsh's daily walk past a certain London window. Inside were a man, a woman and their son, apparently Irish immigrants. Always, when he glanced at them, they were in the same positions.

``I noticed the stillness of it, the oddness of repetition, the pattern and routine,'' he says, taking a break from directing The New Electric Ballroom at St. Ann's.

From his experiences with his brothers, repeating ``the same five stories'' over and over, he took the notion of a ritualistic retelling of family myths.

``I wanted a male energy in it. I wanted it to be fast and physical, chaotic and violent. The storytelling is rebinding the family through story. . . . You slip back into what you are in that family.''

Walsh says the play's Irish cast -- Michael Glenn Murphy as the father, Dinny; Tadhg Murphy as the faux-balding Sean; Raymond Scannell as the cross-dressing Blake and Mercy Ojelade as a grocery clerk named Hayley -- brings to it both energy and a deep understanding of the script's layers of reference to other Irish playwrights.

Michael Murphy calls Dinny ``the most challenging part I've ever played, physically and mentally. It hurts to do it. I cut my thumb the other night and poured blood, when I thrashed a pot over Tighe's head and it broke.''

The actor, speaking from the show's pre-Miami stop in Chicago, calls Walsh a genius at writing about ``those airless family relationships,'' and at seesawing from the funny to the tragic and dark.

The cast's other Murphy, Tadhg, calls Walsh ``my favorite Irish writer. He writes from the inside out. He knows the country, knows what we are. He's lived it. But his work speaks universally and touches everyone. It's dark and edgy -- and absolutely hilarious.''

Christine Dolen is The Miami Herald's theater critic.

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