From jeers to cheers

When the curtain went down on the Boston premiere of John Millington Synge's ''The Playboy of the Western World" on Oct. 17, 1911, Isabella Stewart Gardner leapt to her feet. The cultural doyenne led a bevy of proper Bostonians in a standing ovation, but their roar of approval competed with a chorus of jeers from the balcony, where blue-collar Irish-Americans booed and hissed what they called the ''immoral," ''blasphemous," and ''anti-Irish" production by the touring Abbey Theatre.

Also sitting in the Plymouth Theatre on Stuart Street, a young Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy found she was incapable of clapping or booing, she told historian and biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin years later. While she realized that Synge's stunning satire of Irish rural life was ''a work of art," she ''recoiled" from his depiction of bawdy women, ''drunken sods and quarreling fools."

The characters bore too close a resemblance to the stock caricatures of dirty, slothful Irish immigrants that dominated American stages and newspaper pages in the second half of the 19th century. At the same time, Kennedy recalled, she was embarrassed by the outbursts of her fellow Irish-Americans, who took their cue from the Irish nationalists who tried to disrupt the play's 1907 Dublin premiere.

''It's easy to imagine that this play would affect a member of what became a very patrician Irish-American family deeply," says Abbey Theatre artistic director Ben Barnes, who leads the Abbey's 100th anniversary touring production of ''The Playboy," arriving at the Wilbur Theatre on Tuesday, almost 100 years after it first caused an uproar.

This time, ''The Playboy" is making international headlines not because of its content, but because of the Abbey's precarious financial situation, which has been called its worst in 10 years. The company faces a $2.6 million deficit and layoffs, which have been blamed on declining attendance and overspending on its centenary celebration; its board is searching for a replacement for Barnes, who is stepping down next year after a six-year tenure that he acknowledges as ''stormy."

''A theater like the Abbey is often off the arts pages and onto the news pages," says Barnes, who says the financing difficulties stem from the theater's lack of resources. The government-funded Abbey should rethink its mission as a national theater, he says, and restructure to support that mission, part of which means marketing its ''international brand name."

As for the play itself, Barnes says he is bringing Synge's classic to six cities in the United States not just because of the historical connection, but because ''if you make it vital and fresh, it can appeal to people of any generation, at any time," he says.

The Abbey has brought ''The Playboy" to the United States 10 times since its inaugural tour, the last time in 1990. ''This play that was once a problem is now looked on with a great deal of pride," particularly given the recent renaissance in Irish art and culture on both sides of the Atlantic, says Ciaran O'Reilly, an actor who has performed at the Abbey and is now producing director of New York's Irish Repertory Theatre. ''The work itself has held the test of time because it is one of the most beautiful plays in the English language."

Synge, who died at 38, was as extraordinary a playwright as William Butler Yeats was a poet and James Joyce a writer of fiction, O'Reilly maintains.

Synge, Yeats, and Lady Augusta Gregory cofounded Ireland's national theater in 1904 -- nearly two decades before Ireland became an independent nation. An impoverished colony of Great Britain, depleted by mass migration that followed Ireland's Great Famine of the mid-19th century, ''Ireland at the time was a very conservative, Catholic country, very sensitive to its image," Barnes says. Irish nationalists, many of whom would lead the Easter Rebellion and Irish war for independence, envisioned an ideal Ireland that was religious, republican, and rural, its countryside populated by pious peasants.

Synge's radical rendering of rural Irish life in ''The Playboy" portrays the wild beauty and untamed way of life he witnessed while living in the Aran Islands off the western coast of Ireland, the same place that inspired his other ''peasant plays," including ''Riders to the Sea" and ''The Well of the Saints." Ireland at the turn of the last century ''was realistic, sensual, and explicitly theatrical," says Barnes, ''and this was disturbing, particularly because of how well crafted the work is."

Boos and hisses aside, the Abbey's monthlong Boston run in 1911 passed largely without incident and was a critical and popular success, as was the entire tour. That was despite protests in Philadelphia, where the entire cast was arrested on charges of immorality, and in New York, where Irish nationalist agitators were frustrated in a series of attempts to disrupt the run.

The drama is now a 20th-century classic, a splendid example of the influence Synge and Irish dramatists of his era had on the American theater.

During the Abbey's 1911 run in New York City, Eugene O'Neill, a ne'er-do-well drunkard and itinerant sailor living at Jimmy the Priest's, the West Side dive he would later immortalize in ''The Iceman Cometh," traveled uptown to see every performance the Abbey mounted at Maxine Elliott's Theatre.

O'Neill was enthralled with ''Riders to the Sea" and influenced by the entire Abbey repertory, according to his biographers Barbara and Arthur Gelb. ''It was seeing the Irish Players for the first time that gave me a glimpse of my opportunity," said O'Neill, who went on to become the father of American drama.

The Irish playwrights influenced American writers besides O'Neill, says Boston College professor Philip O'Leary, who teaches a course that compares the Celtic and Harlem renaissances. Synge had an influence on W.E.B. DuBois and Claude McKay, among others, ''because of his depiction of rural people who spoke splendidly in a funny dialect," says O'Leary. ''And the Abbey had a huge influence in encouraging the birth of the small, nonprofit theater movement in the United States, a lot of which started with O'Neill and the Provincetown Players, a small group that put on quality plays.

''Synge not only was an extraordinary playwright," says O'Leary. ''He broke new ground as a playwright, and he managed to plumb the issues of Irish identity that made middle-class Dubliners and lace-curtain Irish-Americans uncomfortable."

''The Playboy" is set in an Ireland where neither civic authority nor the Catholic Church holds sway. Its title character, Christy Mahon, staggers into a hamlet and becomes a swaggering local hero when he claims he has just killed his father. The peasants in the town of Mayo are in need of excitement when Christy arrives. Pegeen Mike, who boasts she can knock the heads off two men, fights off competition to seduce Christy and save herself from a joyless marriage to her designated husband, Shawn.

Synge drew on ancient Celtic poetry to create scenes between Pegeen Mike and Christy, ''some of which are among the most beautiful written for the theater," says O'Reilly of the Irish Rep. ''He also shows how quickly human relations can fall apart."

When Christy's father turns up, the hero is exposed, and Pegeen Mike and the townspeople turn on him.

To O'Leary, Synge was a prescient observer of the dark elements of Irish culture -- the rebelliousness and the flirtation with violence -- that audiences are more comfortable with today than when the play premiered.

The Abbey's own situation may be uncertain, but ''The Playboy" is in no danger of disappearing from the international stage. A universal story of reinvention, it has appealed to tale tellers and truth seekers in countless villages and cities around the world where it has been produced, adapted, and even rewritten.

In the late 1980s, writer Mustafa Matura recast the story as an island tale. The production, mounted at London's Cort Theatre, was called ''The Playboy of the West Indies."

''The Playboy of the Western World" opens at the Wilbur Theatre on Tuesday.Maureen Dezell can be reached at dezell@globe.com