"DruidMurphy - Plays by Tom Murphy," at Lincoln Center - NYTimes.com The Ireland of the painful past, the Ireland of the haunted present and perhaps the Ireland of the future are engaging in fractious battle in "DruidMurphy," the latest adventure in epic theater-making by the invaluable Druid Theater Company, led by the brilliant director Garry Hynes. Theater lovers will well remember the company's triumphant presentation of "DruidSynge," the cycle of the complete plays of J. M. Synge that roared into New York in 2006 as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. This year the company, based in Galway, returns to the festival with an equally ambitious production, three full-length dramas by the contemporary Irish writer Tom Murphy, whose modest renown in the United States is belied by the breathtaking variety and consistency of his work. The scope of Mr. Murphy's achievement is not possible to accommodate even in an undertaking as ambitious as "DruidMurphy" - he has written more than 20 plays in a career dating to the 1960s - but Ms. Hynes has selected from its varied whole a cycle of plays that are tied loosely by the theme of emigration, rooted in the calamity of the potato famine of the 1840s. Taken together, "Conversations on a Homecoming" (1985), "A Whistle in the Dark" (1961) and "Famine" (1968) explore how the forces of history - and of want, of faith, of indomitable pride - have shaped generations of Irish men and women in ways that rarely rise to consciousness but can nonetheless thwart their hopes and damn them to self-destruction. As always with this remarkable company, the acting is of a quality to leave you dumbstruck with admiration: visceral, precise and saturated with raw wit and honest feeling, it represents ensemble work of the highest order. Ms. Hynes and her cast draw forth the vigorous humor, the explosive violence and the keening humanity of Mr. Murphy's writing in such measures that the plays easily transcend their surface nature as commentary on people of specific times and places. Even as it addresses the cultural legacies that are Ireland's alone, "DruidMurphy" illuminates the universal human comedy, the drive to endure in the face of the unendurable and the eternal conflicts between nourishing hope and paralyzing fear. "Conversations on a Homecoming," presented as the first play in the cycle - which can be seen either individually or in a full-day marathon on Saturday, at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater - is structurally the simplest but perhaps the most resonant. Set in real time in a Galway county bar in the 1970s, the play explores how a small group of friends is destabilized by the return of one of them, who left for America to pursue an acting career. Michael (a terrific Marty Rea), a young man whose bright bloom just barely hides a bruised soul, has come home for the first time in a decade. Searching for emotional harbor, he instead finds himself drawn into an increasingly bitter feud with Tom (Garrett Lombard), his former best mate. Although he once had ambitions to write, Tom has become a schoolteacher, and the acid undertone in his friendly voice speaks of a long steeping in disillusion. Soon after they have settled into an easy camaraderie over drinks - in the company of their mutual friend Junior (an amusingly taciturn Rory Nolan); Tom's fiancée, Peggy (a hilarious Eileen Walsh); and an onlooker, Liam (a surly Aaron Monaghan) - Michael and Tom are at loggerheads over the meaning of their collective past, specifically a man named J J who was once a formative influence but has since descended into alcoholism. With the help of his young admirers, J J established the pub, called the White House (a now faded portrait of John F. Kennedy adorns the wall) as a fulcrum for change in a stagnant society. A sort of cultural center, it was meant to galvanize Tom and Michael's generation, to free them from the oppressive forces - the Roman Catholic church, the bone-deep conservatism and distrust of outside influences - that J J and his young followers believed had poisoned the country. But time and experience have wrought harsh changes in Tom's perspective. J J, he now feels, was a fraud, and they were fools to believe in the hopes he inculcated in them. For reasons that become piercingly clear as the evening progresses, and both men imbibe freely, Tom needs to cling to his faith in the hollowness of J J's dream, just as desperately as Michael must hold fast to his own belief in its beauty. Although the production relies on the integrated work of the whole cast for its emotional resonance, Mr. Lombard's infinitely touching performance as Tom is of central importance: His character embodies most fully, and most agonizingly, the conflicts that are central to Mr. Murphy's examination of the harsh costs of idealism - or "romanticism," as Tom insists on calling it - when the cold circumstances of life intrude.