Directors Randall Wise and John Doyle relish the bickering, bile and blood that make McDonagh's plays like car wrecks, revolting yet riveting. Skull introduces gravedigger Mick Dowd (Bob Weick), who works at night removing old bones from his parish cemetery to clear space for new corpses. His labors lead to his late wife's remains.

Una Dowd died seven years ago in a car crash that Mick insists was a simple "drink and drive," but which policeman Thomas (Markus Zanders)—who fancies himself the next Quincy but is called McMillan and Wife in derision (the play's set in 1984)—suspects was murder.

Iron Age always creates beautifully ambitious sets in their small Centre Theatre, and Wise and Doyle's creation for Skull is one of their best, featuring a ghoulishly realistic cemetery built so that Mick and his assistant Mairtin (Thomas' brother, played by Adam Altman) can actually dig up bones. Though only one scene occurs in the graveyard, its hulking presence haunts the action.

Skull vivisects village life, where rumor and rancor guide people more than the laws of man or the church, and familial relationships harbor both deep devotion and unfettered rage—all fueled by alcohol. Wise and Doyle balance the play's broad humor and explicit violence well: Weick's tortured Mick smolders, Altman's Mairtin is an impetuous fool, Zanders' Thomas brims with desperate self-importance and Susan Giddings' MaryJohnny, just a gossiping bingo cheat at first, reveals unexpected depth. We laugh along with Mick and Mairtin as they drunkenly smash skulls with mallets, knowing that at any moment they'll turn their primitive hammers on each other.

McDonagh's haunting talent for creating morally ambiguous characters—revealing us as children in adults' bodies, endearing yet dangerous—shines in A Skull in Connemara.

A SKULL IN CONNEMARAThrough May 7, Iron Age Theatre, Centre Theatre, 208 DeKalb Pike, Norristown, Pa., 610-279-1013