Lowdown laughs

Augustine Early is emphatically not a nice guy. And yet, as Campbell Scott brings this fictional tabloid journalist to life in "The Atheist," Ronan Noone's viciously funny play at the Boston Center for the Arts, he has a certain creepy but undeniable charm. He's despicable, but you want to keep on despising him all night.

The Huntington Theatre Company is presenting "The Atheist" outside its regular season; the timing is due to Scott's sudden availability, as he, Noone, and director Justin Waldman had been seeking the chance to do a full production since presenting a staged reading in the Huntington's "Breaking Ground" festival. And Scott seems casually at home in the scaly skin of this scruple-free reporter, imparting an unholy glee to his outrageous self-justifications as he betrays and exploits everyone he comes across.

So it's surprising that this accomplished actor had to resort more than occasionally to reading his lines on Wednesday's opening night. Granted, Noone's fast-paced 80-minute monologue is a challenge, even with an intermission halfway through, and Scott squeezed this project into his busy film schedule, so he's had little time to prepare. He also makes a lot of the reading flow naturally out of the plot, which has Early making a videotape about his exploits, by quoting sources and victims from a notebook he clutches throughout. Reading those quotes makes sense for the character; reading chunks of his own musings does not.

Scott is such an engaging presence onstage that he manages to brush most such objections aside. Even at the top of the second act, when he faced the audience, took a long pause, then said, "Hold on," before checking the script and exclaiming, "That's it" as he launched into the next bit, he made the moment more amusing than awkward. But people paying at least $50 a ticket for what's billed as a full production - and handsomely staged, with Cristina Todesco's moody set and Alex Neumann's discordant jazz snippets between scenes - should get a play, not a reading.

As for that play, critics in both London and New York, where "The Atheist" was staged last year, have pointed out what a strange newspaper Augustine works for: one where a freelancer writes his own headlines, where controversial stories make it into print with little or no editing, and where reporters can more or less write any story they want, without regard for news value. And it's true that Augustine's journalistic career strains belief more than once.

But it's also true that it's often deeply, painfully funny - especially to anyone who cares about the creeping power of tabloid values even in the "serious" press. Noone can be cruel, as when he has Augustine refer to the "fat O show" and its thinly fictionalized host, but he can also be highly astute about how the hunger for getting the story can twist and weaken a reporter's ethical code.

Of course, Augustine Early himself would argue that he's beyond such concerns. The play takes its title from his declaration that he owes his success to having let go of his belief in God - and to the "carte blanche" that gives him in making up his own rules.

That disregard makes him an entertaining, if appalling, monster, one who happily circulates an obscene video of his own girl- friend on the Internet with the help of an accused rapist, thereby boosting her acting career and implicating a local politician in a sex scandal - just for starters. But what makes this more than an amusingly scabrous portrait of pure villainy is its undertones of complexity, even regret.

Scott deserves credit for some of those subtleties; he is marvelously fluid in inflecting a line or extending a pause to shadow it with fears and doubts that the character himself may not see. But it's Noone, even if this is a lighter and less fully realized piece than his other work, who puts those shadows there - and leads us into them, even as we laugh.

Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.