"Juno and the Paycock" again stimulates Boston audiences with its candid humor soon lost in trenchant satire and irony, and capped by unmitigated and all-pervasive tragedy. Sean O'Casey has chosen 1922 for his grim picture, when much of the actual fighting in Ireland was over, but men were known for their deeds and their sympathies. He sets up a family from the slums of Dublin, and through them he lashes at principles stubbornly adhered to only because they are principles, the folly of romantic and aimless sacrifice, the spirit of brotherly love and humanity that fails as soon as it is put to the specific test. Even God is called to account, but He is absolved by the tragic mother's denunciation of her own species. The Catholic Church does not escape O'Casey's pen unscathed, but the implication is that its oppression is be-wailed only by those doomed to misery in any case by their own impotence.

The most gripping element in the drama, however, is its creation of characters and its treatment of them. The two chief men are debased by the over-whelming catastrophes that hit the family, while a third male is left his ludicrously parasitic self. The mother of the family, however, is ennobled from the position of a comical termagant to that of a tight-lipped, long-suffering heroine. When the daughter is deserted in pregnancy by her shallow, pedantic lover, only the mother is able to pierce the hollow censure of society, and acquit her of guilt. The father is brutalized. He is transformed from a lazy, ne'er-do-well, ignorant, strutting braggart to a despicably small man intent upon upholding his supposititious good name. Having run the family into crushing debt on the strength of an inheritance that was never to be realized, he curses out his daughter in the roundest of terms, and goes out to get drunk for the last time he can pay for. The son, who has become a neurotic one-armed cripple in the violent so-called service of his country, turns out to be equally base. In fact, the play almost reduces to a eulogy of woman as the great creator and preserver, and subscribes to the doubtful thesis that men alone make hate and bloodshed.

P. J. Carolan takes over the role of "Captain" Jack Boyle, the tawdry "paycock," and superbly prevents the depravity of his role from becoming lost in its amusing elements. The latter are dangerously prominent, since the first act of the tragedy is pure comedy. Eileen Crowe is superb for the role of "Juno" Boyle, who receives her divinely regal name for the internal reason that everything in her life happened in June, but for dramatic reasons less fortuitous. F. J. McCormick has created his part of "Joxer" Daly, the fawning hanger-on and salve to the Captain's petty pride, and his rendition of the character is therefore perfect. All the lesser roles are filled with skill to be expected only of acors so devoted to their work as the Abbey Players.