Loneliness is the real terror in McPherson’s “The Night Alive”

Irish playwright Conor McPherson — author of such plays as “The Seafarer,” “Shining City” and “Port Authority” — is the poet laureate of lost, lonely, self-destructive men. Should you need any further proof of his worthiness for that title, you will find it at Steppenwolf Theatre, where “The Night Alive” is now receiving a blazing Chicago premiere directed by Henry Wishcamper and performed by one of those casts that is a reminder of what great ensemble acting is all about.

The once grand but horribly run-down Dublin house and garden where the play unfolds (the latest of set designer Todd Rosenthal’s masterpieces) is a character all its own — a place whose beauty, civility and genteel allure has been worn to the bone, but not entirely erased.

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The house is owned by Maurice (M. Emmet Walsh, at once droll and enigmatic), a cranky, aging widower still mourning the death of his wife and drowning his sorrows in alcohol. But he is shrewd enough to sense that not everything is as it should be in the room he rents to Tommy (the peerless Francis Guinan in a performance of exquisite quiet desperation), the essentially decent but ne’er-do-well middle-aged nephew he raised, and who is now the divorced father of two teenage children from whom he is estranged. Maurice calls Tommy a disappointment — and indeed, Tommy hardly needs a reminder. He longs for an escape (Finland is his dream destination, just as Moscow lures ‘The Three Sisters”) but knows he is trapped.

Tommy may have little contact with his own children, but he has an impulse to protect those who seem even weaker and more lost than he is, including “Doc” (Tim Hopper, who could give Dustin Hoffman a run for his money as an idiot savant of sorts), who earns a bit of cash assisting Tommy with odd jobs but is essentially homeless — shuttling between his married sister’s place and the extra mattress in Tommy’s room. Things take a different turn with the arrival of Amy (Helen Sadler, a riveting presence whose minimalism exerts maximum effect).

Tommy rescues Amy one night when he sees her being brutally beaten and tossed out of a car by the man she says was her boyfriend. A withdrawn, waiflike figure who probably works as an occasional prostitute, Amy brings out the father-protector (and more) in Tommy. And since both are damaged souls, they quickly forge a mostly unspoken understanding that is at once touching and precarious. Of course McPherson is never one to keep the devil at bay, and he arrives here in the person of Kenneth (a chillingly satanic Dan Waller), a psycho/thug in stylish clothing who has all the polished menace of a Harold Pinter character, and then some.

Wishcamper, who arrived at the Goodman Theatre as resident artistic associate in 2012, has since helmed a series of exceptional productions at theaters throughout the city (including “The Dance of Death” and “Port Authority” at Writers Theatre and “Other Desert Cities” at the Goodman, where he will stage “The Little Foxes” this spring). He is a master of clarity and focus, and, like McPherson, he has a pitch-perfect ear for orchestrating black comedy so that it always draws you back to the pain that is its source — to the “black hole” of existence, the ever-present shadow of mortality and the indeterminate nature of a higher power.