Accomplished entertainer though he is, Tony Cleary — who performs under the name of the Amazing No Instrumental Man — doesn’t have a thing on his creator. True, using only his mouth and hands, Tony is able to summon a church organ, a harmonica, a trumpet and, most amazingly of all, the fabled tenor John McCormack singing on a scratchy 78-r.p.m. record.
Nonetheless, this virtuoso is strictly small-time compared to Mikel Murfi, the inexhaustibly multifarious writer, director and sole performer of “I Hear You and Rejoice,” which opened on Sunday night at the Irish Arts Center in Hell’s Kitchen. Tony is a very minor character — in a flashback within a flashback, to boot — in Mr. Murfi’s one-man, one-chair, 80-minute production.
But Tony’s turn in a less-than-sparkling village talent show might be seen as a miniature model for Mr. Murfi’s far greater performance, in which an entire town is summoned into being. You should know that many of its inhabitants are inspired mimics — of birds, livestock and one another — which means that Mr. Murfi becomes, among other things, a sort of infinite and dizzying echo chamber.
Imitative skills are essential in a place where storytelling, and the caricaturing of your fellow citizens, is what transforms a seemingly uneventful backwater into a soap opera of endless fascination. Gossip here magnifies the smallest details of daily life to the outsize proportions of legend.
No one looms larger than the recently deceased Kitsy Rainey, whose funeral is the taking-off point for the stand-up reminiscences of “I Hear You.” Kitsy was the town soccer coach, florist and wife of the mute cobbler, Pat Farnon. Their earlier relationship is the subject of “The Man in the Woman’s Shoes,” staged here to warm reviews in 2015, which Mr. Murfi is performing in repertory with “I Hear You.”
These pieces are part of a flourishing tradition in Irish theater of maximally populated plays performed by minimal casts. In tone, “I Hear You” falls somewhere between Marie Jones’s frolicsome two-hander “Stones in His Pockets” (about a movie crew’s invasion of a rural town) and the darker, creepier “Misterman” by Enda Walsh, a dramatist in whose works Mr. Murfi has appeared as an actor.
Unforgettably life-affirming types — who always speak their minds and grab each moment with two fists — are by no means my favorite fictional characters. And it must be said that there’s a lot of twinkling through tears in “I Hear You” as various speakers testify to the impact a charismatic woman had on their lives, at a funeral she had custom designed with her priest, right down to her own, Kitsy-fied versions of the Beatitudes and the gospel according to St. John.
Yet it’s ultimately impossible to resist the gale theatrical force as Mr. Murfi presents his heroine through a multi-angled prism, with body language as precise, condensed and evocative as Morse code. The presence of Kitsy herself, as she is remembered by her widower, Pat, is signaled by a shifting posture that turns out to come from her bras never fitting properly.
It is in Pat’s mind that we spend the most time, as he speaks in an eloquent, impressionistic language audible only to the audience. Mr. Murfi has only to duck his chin to let us know that Pat is back, as his face becomes the very essence of incalculable loss.
Of the many noises that emanate from Mr. Murfi, the one that you are likely to keep hearing long after the play is over is the numinous whooshing of a wind. That’s the sound of one woman dying, and really never dying at all.
