McPherson's (The Weir, Shining City) punchy play - on Broadway last season with a rollicking and gripping rat-tat-tat cadence - lands on ground that's not exactly unexplored. Consorting with the devil? Been there. Yet The Seafarer can be a tight piece of Irish lyricism, even (and maybe especially) when it's drunkenly foul. And in the end, this play about paying for a life of misadventure is deeply spiritual, with a powerful implication: Why should the devil bother to entice us when we ourselves so eagerly invite him in?

In David O'Connor's curiously jerky production at the Arden - it is solid when it moves along, but it seems to stop for imagined red lights - the devil is in the details.

It's not boozy enough. The five actors delight in throat burns and brain jolts as they swill Ireland's strongest liquor, but all the hooch and beer seems to make them more self-aware than impulsively revealing. They hold their liquor too well.

It's not Irish enough. These guys' accents come and go irritatingly, sometimes taking extended leaves. Nobody would want brogue parodies, but it's hard to buy characters who sound like Irishmen trying to imitate Americans.

It's not extreme enough. We're looking in on four guys living on the edge (the main character, verging on old, is blind since tumbling into a Dumpster on Halloween) and a stranger who eerily knows too much about them. Intense fellows, for sure, in a production without a slam-bang intensity. At moments, it seems like Seafarer Lite.

That said, O'Connor has staged a second half (much of its best action at a poker game) that toward its end allows the play to blossom into a full, dark flower. By that time, Brian Russell as the blind man (who mysteriously is often able to look effortlessly at the person he's speaking to) becomes the blowhard he hints at being all along. William Zielinski, as his brother, wonderfully eyes the stranger with a perfect mixture of fear, hate, and menace.

Anthony Lawton and Joe Hickey, as the two younger men, bring out their characters deftly around the makeshift poker table. And at the end, Greg Wood as the mysterious Mr. Lockhart distills The Seafarer's essence with the sort of force that should be driving the entire evening.

The Seafarer

Presented by the Arden Theatre Company, 40 N. Second St.,

through June 14. Tickets: $29-$48. Information: 215-922-1122 or www.ardentheatre.org.