One of the fringe benefits of a playwright's success is to have his works handled with a delicacy that, though born of respect, wreaks boredom. Sean O'Casey was anything but respected in his life-time and his country: the Irish press frequently denounced him, and a full-blown riot took place when The Plough and the Stars, his 1926 drama set against the rebellion of Easter 1916, opened at the Abbey Theatre. But in the United States, where O'Casey has long been championed by influential critics and directors, the controversy has grown remote. So remote that one of the most violent and forceful dramatists in the language could be treated Thursday night like so much Neil Simon.

Environment, however, cannot explain the Loeb's lifeless and pointless production ofPlough and the Stars. Two vital errors in conception crippled it from the start.

First, the scenery. John Lithgow has built the play's four settings with a number of large flats, all but two of them reasonably realistic. The remaining two, used in every act, are unfortunate red concoctions resembling giant Jackson Pollack paintings; they seriously throw off the basic realism of both play and production. Also intruding on the believability of a Dublin tenement are strange hairy things which hang without visible purpose from the proscenium.

But the set is more than physically confusing. It is enormous, so much so that any attempt to build intimacy among characters becomes impossible. Lithgow and director George Hamlin have left the Loeb's three-piece proscenium arch fully opened and have used a good deal of the available depth as well. The result is that actors who might look too small for their roles even on a normal stage are drowned in space.

In part the set is responsible for the show's one-note blocking. Virtually every scene has a group of actors who stand stage left, another stage right, and occasional contact between the two stage center. Only in the third act, outside the tenement, is this left-right structure alternated with a freer, and visually much more pleasing (not to mention convincing) movement.

The second jarring element in conception is the casting of physically small actors to play big characters. Given the necessity of using cleanshaven students for Irish laborers, Hamlin might at least have found tall students, and ones with deep voices. Toby Hurd as Jack Clitheroe (a bricklayer) is so implausible physically that the intensity of his performance goes for naught. M.D. Schlesinger, as Peter Flynn, must rely on a strictly musical-comedy set of old man's gestures which destroy the conviction of every scene he's in.

Both of these performances combine to eradicate the first act. Almost from the moment the curtain rises, O'Casey's realism is locked in battle with the stylized portions of the set, the vaudeville walk of Schlesinger, and the youthful voice and bearing of Hurd. It is this conflict--between the play and the production--which dominates the act and totally obscures its content. Because of it, Jack and Nora Clitheroe can make no impression as characters, and much of the later action, particularly in the last act, means nothing because the Clitheroes mean nothing.

For the most part the production's lifelessness is all-pervading. Several actors have been more appropriately cast than the rest and shine by comparison--Leland Moss as Fluther, Kenny McBain as the Covey, Beatrice Paipert as Bessie Burgess, even Jennifer Crier as Nora. But there are no exciting performances of any size simply because the parts, good and bad, are so deeply rooted in the whole, which is bad.

Two actors seem mysteriously unaffected by the prevailing doldrums: Sheila Hart and Ed Jay. If a production this uninspired could have a saving grace, they would be it.