The Irish theater is bubbling. Again! My old friend, the late Ted Kalem, a revered, longtime drama critic for Time magazine, maintained that one of those small but notable revenges of the Irish over the English was the superior manner in which Irish writers wagged that alien English tongue. And nowhere was that superiority better demonstrated than in the theater.

From Congreve, Goldsmith and Sheridan to Boucicault, Shaw and Wilde, to Yeats, Synge and O’Casey, to Samuel Beckett and Brian Friel, where would English drama be without its Irish accent?

Now a younger generation is making its mark, notably represented by Sebastian Barry, Conor MacPherson (whose fine play “The Weir” is currently on Broadway) and Martin McDonagh, whose Tony-nominated play “The Lonesome West” has just opened at the Lyceum Theatre.

Like last season’s admired “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” this Broadway newcomer is part of McDonagh’s “Leenane Trilogy.” A couple of years ago in London I caught all three plays – including “A Skull in Connemara,” yet to open here – when they were presented in repertory by the Royal Court Theater.

As with Friel’s imaginary village of Ballybeg, McDonagh has his own fictional Irish village, the eponymous Leenane. But while Friel’s Ballybeg seems both a place and a state of mind, McDonagh’s Leenane is more a fantasy and a state of theater.

“The Lonesome West” – the title appears to be some kind of nod in the direction of Sam Shepard’s “True West,” with which it shares certain marked similarities – is concerned with two warring brothers.

One of them, Coleman (Maeliosa Stafford), has murdered their father in a fit of pique and is now being blackmailed by the other brother Valene (Brian F. O’Byrne) to hand over all rights to their joint possessions. This is the price for evidence that the killing was an accident rather than homicide.

Adding to the play’s complexity, if not its depth, are a youngish, dogma-challenged, alcoholic priest, Father Welsh (David Ganly), and the teen-ager, Girleen Kelleher (Dawn Bradfield), who’s in love with him. She’s also apparently the village distributor of that illicit but much prized Irish liquor, poteen.

McDonagh’s black comedy is often funny, and, until the exaggerations become wearisome, his caricatures and stereotypes can be outrageously amusing, or at least amusingly outrageous.

However, nothing in “The Lonesome West” seems to be rooted in life or even in a metaphoric sense of reality. The two central characters, played with virtuosic gusto, are knockabout stage Irishmen, and the only characters for whom the audience feels the faintest empathy are the doubting priest and the girl who’s brashly attracted to him.

The play – from the director Garry Hynes’ own Druid Theater Company of Galway – is sharply directed and beautifully acted. But the work itself remains an overextended cartoon sketch.

*

It is a sign of the sad season that two of the Tony-nominated musicals, “Fosse” and “It Ain’t Nothing but the Blues,” now at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, are revues of familiar musical material, as is “The Gershwins’ Fascinating Rhythm,” which was shut out but, to my mind, was equally worthy.

“The Blues” itself is a good show, tracing as it does the course of the blues from its African roots to its urban angst with intelligence and taste – and a great deal of stupendous, all-around performing.

The show – devised by many of the performers themselves and originally based on an idea by one of them, the vast and powerful Ron Taylor – not only runs the gamut of blues history, but also takes in such blues outposts as country music. It even ventures as far as Peggy Lee, though it carefully eschews rhythm-and-blues and its bastard progeny, rock.

But the pleasures of the evening are less historical or musicological than they are in the lowdown, high-toned performances of one of American music’s great folkloric genres, the blues.

There is little actual staging, although the direction by Randal Myler and particularly the dance movement by Donald McKayle prove deft, and the feel of a concert performance is partially defused by the adroit use of projections.

And even if these convey something of the feeling of a slide show, the actual singing can carry all before it. I have already mentioned Taylor, but attention must also be paid to the others, especially “Mississippi” Charles Bevel, and that remarkable singer Greta Boston, fondly remembered from her stint in “Show Boat.”

“It Ain’t Nothin’ but the Blues” ain’t nothin’ spectacular, and it won’t even lose much when it is eventually transferred to an original cast album CD. But it remains a superior evening of quiet if passionate pleasures, with music that is at times agreeably abrasive, a few lyrics that are agreeably bawdy, and – this you won’t get on any CD – a pleasurable display of stage presence and temperament.