There’s an undeniable elegance about the Irish singer/performer (composer, orchestrator, producer) Julie Feeney who is appearing for a 10 day booking at the Irish Arts Center on 51st Street. The elegance is there in the assemblage of instruments she has corralled on stage, as well as in the controlled voice, smooth flowing toothy lyrics, and sophisticated orchestral arrangements she deploys. But the elegance really comes about when Feeney emerges into the auditorium, using the regular patrons entrance way, singing in hushed tones the introduction to her song Myth. Leaning over from the aisle, she breathily exchanges some of the words with a surprised, somewhat unnerved audience. She’s sparkling in the reflected stage lights, an ornate crystal gemmed collar on her dress and tiny rhinestones in her hairnet twinkle in the shadows. It’s nothing to get really alarmed about, but that towering beehive coiffure is teased up just that little bit high enough to signal caution; who is this? And the song she is singing keeps dropping into abrupt silences. Before picking up once more and conducting you along a melody that achieves its pop bounce from a delicate arrangement of strings, bowed and pizzicato. She attains the stage and relaxes the audience with a complicit, almost coy smile, while working a silken black balloon dress that is at once sumptuous and brief. It’s a wonderfully poised balancing act between refinement and boldness, and it proves the perfect introduction for what is to follow.

She delivers a succession of self penned lyrical gems that play with a chamber orchestral style as comfortably as they address contemporary pop sensibilities. Using a backing group of seven musicians (she makes each musician, including her backing vocalist, play at least 2 instruments) incorporating a classical strings line-up, a touch of trumpet, and a hint of woodwind, Feeney gently moves through feelings that range from delicately vulnerable to reflexively sharp, by way of fluidly philosophical. Her presence and performance hold an element of theatre which is all of a graceful piece with the imaginative vocalizing and rich musicality. As perfectly manicured as her delivery is, there is enough live nerve on show to require attentive listening and to permit the unexpected. She is that rare thing, a striking mix of eccentric genius and comfortable intimacy.

In this show she presents works from her critically lauded, self produced, first two albums – 13 Songs and pages – and what is surely an eagerly awaited third, scheduled for release this Fall. In the hotbed of young musical talent that Ireland is today she is a strong individual presence, radiating assured musical understanding and punctilious execution. She holds three degrees, at least two of which are music focused (the other is in psychology). In Dublin she has performed at the National Concert Hall to rapturous reception (she is currently working on an opera commission from that quarter) but in the comparatively cozy setting of the IAC’s Donaghy Theatre she is very naturally at ease with a smaller audience. Her wide musical reach and meticulous attention to detail – as well as her sartorial distinctiveness – have prompted comparisons with Bjork, but she is very much her own entity, extinguishing likenesses. The wile and wit woven in to her lyrics, as well as evident in her orchestrations, speak eloquently on that point. In Britain The Guardian has offered its praise in the words  ”the world will listen”, to which I can only add, and so it should! Julie noted.

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• BogBoy, By Deirdre Kinahan, At The Irish Arts Center

Immediately arresting in this production of Deirdre Kinahan‘s new play, BogBoy, at the Irish Arts Center, is Ciaran Bagnall‘s simple stage set of several scrim panels reflecting projected landscape imagery. The mood is heavy and still – darkening flat vistas of bogland stretching off to meet a cloud-crowded sky broken only in places to admit thin fissures of light. The colors shift slowly between sombre browns and blues, with occasional russet veins of sunset. Amorphous, echoing sounds groan forth creating a mournful, timeless feeling. This is a bruised place. Into this scene walks Brigit, a woman as bruised as the landscape, but prickly, defensive, and verbally alert. She is a Dublin rehab patient, a former heroin addict and prostitute, transported to the rural remoteness of Navan, Co. Meath, and initially utterly at sea in this natural wilderness. Warily she begins an acquaintanceship with her neighbor Hughie Doyle, a solitary, slow-thinking bachelor who seems to her as foreign as the landscape. Gradually we watch as their sad stories unfurl.

Originally written for radio, BogBoy retains some of its original source characteristics. It is short, tightly compact, structurally sophisticated, and brisk in the manner of its verbal exchanges. Jo Mangan‘s direction keeps things moving rapidly and this works well with the tone and tempo of Kinahan’s language. Admirably matter-of-fact and colloquial, Kinahan does permit herself the odd shift to a more lyrical register, introducing some vivid descriptive color to the characters’ humdrum exchanges. Brigit, in a letter, waxes unusually eloquent on her discovery of the bogland’s hidden natural charms. But the dominant tone, for all the aura of tragedy here, is low-key. We observe mundane instances of neighborly exchange between Brigit and Hughie that serve as views to an evolving friendship, opening the door just a crack wide enough perhaps to admit hope. Hughie teaches Brigit to ride a bicycle in a light-hearted scene that has everything to do with empowerment, but which spends no time mulling over the fact. Beginning with just this slender degree of interaction, two psychologically convincing characters, relaxed and in extremis, the story stretches effortlessly to encompass themes of political, social, and historical relevance for contemporary Ireland, north and south, urban and rural. Everything resides most naturally within the unfolding drama. There isn’t a whiff of a sermon here, just the sad appraisal of human damage in the aftermath.

Mangan’s choice to have the characters direct nearly all of their dialogue outward, face forward toward the audience, is compelling and intriguing. We get to witness fully the emotional nuance in their faces, as well as some considerable craft in actorly responsiveness. There is also the suggestion that, as much as they want to connect, these characters can never truly face each other. Sorcha Fox is winningly forceful, bossy and vibrant as the wounded Brigit. She embodies an instinctual energy that livens the atmosphere, her large eyes wide and boldly defensive. Steve Blount, resolutely inarticulate as Hughie, is bemused and enthused by her brio, and there is a fine comic contact quickly established between the two. Rounding out the cast are Noelle Brown as Annie, Brigit’s skeptical if well-meaning social worker, and Emmet Kirwan as Brigit’s scathed and unforgiving husband, Darren, both assured turns in brief parts. Philip Stewart supplies the effective sound effects.

This is an impressively compacted story which errs, if it does so, on the side of brevity, driving us rapidly to an abrupt, almost brutal conclusion. I couldn’t help feeling that there’s at least another scene or two tucked into the narrative. A tale of would-be redemption, it never quite gets there for these two lost characters. Neither have the strength to overcome the forces surrounding them. In a letter she is writing to a murdered boy’s sister decades after the event, Brigit describes having seen the sister in the landscape once, surrounded by “bogmen guards” who seem themselves to have emerged from the muck of the bog. But to Brigit, the woman appears distinctive, separate, in a tight white suit with sunglasses – an anomaly in the landscape. For Brigit she is the definition of freedom, success, escape. But, just like all the characters here, this idealized, seemingly emancipated figure will never truly be rid of the bog. A part of her is buried here. Brigit’s letter, an intention she feels is finally something wholly good, will recall the woman once again, oblige her to step into the muck again, albeit to retrieve something ultimately lost. Kinahan’s play has many hidden leaves like this. It could go on unfolding.

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• Julie Feeney At The Irish Arts Center