By Ben Brantley

An hour, an actor, a harsh tale told quietly. That's about all that's offered in Conor McPherson's ''Good Thief,'' now receiving its American premiere at the José Quintero Theater. But it turns out to be an abundance.

Mr. McPherson is the young Irish playwright behind ''The Weir'' and ''This Lime Tree Bower'' and a past master of monologues that meander into devastating symmetry. ''The Good Thief'' was first staged in 1994, when Mr. McPherson was in his early 20's, but it shows a sure gift for unsettling by stealth of which few beginners are capable.

Brian d'Arcy James, who is directed by Carl Forsman in this production from the newly formed Keen Company, knows just how to perform the sleight of hand that's required in an exquisitely calibrated performance. What's described is ugly and violent; the description itself is hypnotically soft-spoken. And from this contradiction there somehow emerges a glimpse of redeeming grace.
''The Good Thief'' roves through the now familiar landscape of underworld Dublin, a terrain spectacularly mapped earlier this season in Mark O'Rowe's ''Howie the Rookie.'' Mr. McPherson's story is less flamboyant, told by a self-described ''paid thug'' who roughs up people for a living and says, ''I hate people with skills who can do stuff.''

This unnamed narrator is the opposite of the suave, supremely self-conscious storyteller of Mr. McPherson's ''St. Nicholas,'' a drama critic who falls among a den of vampires. Mr. James's character is brusque to the point of clinical, placing one verbal foot flatly in front of the other in short sentences. In explaining how a routine job developed a double-digit body count, the closest he comes to self-analysis is: ''I felt sad all the time. But I'm not sure what I felt sad about.''

Making louts sound eloquent is never easy in art, and it often leads to parody or condescension. But Mr. McPherson shows how the right arrangement of simple words can offer views of the ineffable, of a consciousness beyond self. Bluntly itemized details -- the modern appliances in a kitchen, the feeling of a child's hands on the narrator's face -- acquire an almost mystical resonance through the silence around them.

Mr. James, best known for his work in the musicals ''Titanic'' and Andrew Lippa's ''Wild Party,'' is correspondingly sparing in his gestures, and when he smiles it's so unexpected that it jolts. With hair cropped close and his body listing slightly, as if before a brisk wind, his natural leading-man handsomeness seems to have gone underground. He would look like nothing more than a garden-variety punk if his eyes weren't so restless and questioning. The performance exactly matches the understatement, indirection and contained tenseness of Mr. McPherson's prose, qualities further echoed in Josh Bradford's day-into-night lighting and Stefan Jacobs's gently ominous sound design.

The whole production lasts barely an hour, although at its end you probably won't have a clue as to how long you've been in the theater. This happens sometimes when you're allowed to walk directly into someone else's life and to share a point of view that's as uncertain and shifting as your own, but in a different way.

''It's sort of funny isn't it?'' the narrator says early on about a conversation he has had in a pub. ''Kind of sick as well. There's something not quite right about it. Hard to put your finger on though.'' It is because Mr. McPherson and Mr. James respect such ambiguity that you sense exactly what this hapless thug is feeling.

THE GOOD THIEF

By Conor McPherson; directed by Carl Forsman; stage manager, Kara Bain; sets by Nathan Heverin; lighting by Josh Bradford; costumes by Theresa Squire; sound by Stefan Jacobs; technical director, Terence McCafferty. Presented by the Keen Company. At the José Quintero Theater, 534 West 42nd Street, Clinton.

WITH: Brian d'Arcy James.

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