Dateline: Brooklyn, NY. Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape is downtown, and Enda Walsh’s Misterman is uptown Down Under the Manhattan Bridge. Misterman, a nickname for the comically and seriously disturbed Thomas Magill, has a tape too, and he is reflecting in a different way (and a little more vengefully) than Mr. Beckett’s anti-hero.

Playwright and Dublin native Enda Walsh reminds me of the Venetian composer Antonio Vivaldi.  You overhear a Vivaldi concerto and you may not know what song it is (which season is that? winter?) and where it belongs in the canon, but you know it’s his.  Like Vivaldi, Walsh has only one theme, but it is one hell of a theme.  And when actor Cillian Murphy is the player, as he is in Walsh’s Misterman at St. Ann’s Warehouse, it’s a genius of a theme – the endless, distorted recital of a horrifying personal narrative.

This supposition, the one themed playwright, wouldn’t be unfamiliar to the artist himself if he were confronted with it, at least in terms of Misterman. The dramatist declared the monologue to be “a play that’s had a massive effect on everything I’ve written since 1998″ recently at the Galway Arts Festival where this rebirth of Misterman began. Re-narrative – it is the theme of The Electric Ballroom, The Walworth Farce, and most recently Penelope, to increasing success with each endeavor.

Cillian Murphy is reprising his role from the Galway Theatre Festival, a Landmark Productions and part of Imagine Ireland,  and he brings the necessary star power to keep the tortured young man, eternally rehashing the slights and the not so slights from his fellow townspeople of Inishfree (with obvious reference to the W.B. Yeats’ poem of the same name,)  from getting lost in the cavernous set of  St. Ann’s Warehouse.  St. Ann’s, which has been quite nurturing to the Irish dramatist, having brought many of Walsh’s plays to New York to the great delight of the New York Times among others, doesn’t do Misterman a great service here with a set by Jamie Vartan. Extending far beyond the usual set space, the stage stands in for a real warehouse, the abandoned, not the saintly kind, where Thomas is apparently hiding. The set is seemingly a metaphor for Thomas’ mind: rattlingly large and full of junk – some of that clutter quite malicious under superficial guises of religiosity. But this large, complicated set unfortunately severs a connection between character and audience, in a literary way and in a literal manner – sometimes Murphy seemed so far away that he might as well have been in Manhattan.

In the familiar image of a misfit, teased and possibly abused, “the only kitten in a town full of dogs,” Murphy works exceptionally hard to set this story apart from the rest. He races around the large stage, using an elaborate system of tapes and reel-to-reels to kickstart his stories, going so far as to recreate a rainstorm so he can then strip down to his shorts and don a dry suit, much to the delight, I’m sure, of those who came to see the movie star.

Murphy makes this role his own to such an extent that he finds material that is not even there. Not a joke (there are many, this is Enda Walsh after all) goes un-upended, not a cheesecake goes unmolested under the team work of  star and playwright/director. I wonder: if the play featured a young man whose eyes weren’t piercing blue, if there weren’t so many bells and whistles in the fantastic sound design by Gregory Clarke, would it still hold up? This is speculation. Cillian Murphy is the Thomas without a doubt. Misterman runs until December 22.

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