"It is Ireland's sacred duty," joked English critic Kenneth Tynan in 1956, "to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theater from inarticulate glumness."

Ireland has answered the call. Much of the glory of the English theater is Irish -- think Congreve, Goldsmith and Sheridan in the 17th and 18th centuries; Wilde in the 19th; and Shaw, O'Casey and Beckett in the 20th. Add the more modern masters, from Brendan Behan and Brian Friel to Conor McPherson and Martin McDonagh, and you have a national theater the equal of any in the world.

Pivotal among them is John Millington Synge (1871-1909), who made Irish drama Irish. His predecessors made their names in London, but inspired by turn-of-the-century nationalism and the advice of Yeats, Synge headed the other way, to the rural Irish west, where he grounded his seminal plays in its rich language and feisty, melancholy culture.

His greatest play is "The Playboy of the Western World," an astonishing, even shocking comedy of rural life, infused with a desperate energy and a lyricism based on the actual speech of the countryside, spun by Synge into golden prose.

A co-founder of the Abbey Theatre with Yeats and Lady Gregory, Synge gave that seminal company its early identity. "Playboy's" subversion of easy myths about the noble peasantry caused riots in 1907 Dublin, and that earthy, dark energy is in it still.

They call Synge the Irish Shakespeare. There's pathos in that because he died so young, leaving just seven plays, four of them short. But "Playboy" is legacy enough, and the shorter works such as "Riders to the Sea" and "In the Shadow of the Glen" are perfect in their way.

To honor this achievement, Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre is staging what it calls the Synge Cycle. Artistic director Andrew Paul took the idea from Galway's Druid Theatre, which did its own six-play Synge Cycle in 2005 and brought it to New York. But PICT is doing all seven of Synge's surviving plays, including what organizers believe is the first ever professional production of "When the Moon Is Set," making this possibly the first complete Synge festival ever, anywhere.

After its Beckett Festival in 2006, which Paul considers "the great artistic achievement" of PICT's 12 years, Synge seemed a natural next step. He liberated and electrified Irish drama, influencing all that followed, from the spare classicism of Beckett to the robust, bloody comedy of McDonagh.

And since he died young, PICT can pack his entire body of work into one month. The anchor is "Playboy," now in previews and opening tomorrow, with 17 performances in the intimate Heymann Theatre through Aug. 16. The other six plays are grouped in pairs, each with four to seven performances in the larger Charity Randall Theatre.

"I love the idea of incorporating one-act plays into a festival format," says Paul, "because in America we rarely see one-acts. Synge's are among the best ever written: 'Riders' is probably the perfect short tragedy.

"Synge's plays, no pun intended, sing, combining heightened language with a grasp of human nature. Like August Wilson, Synge created his language: People don't really quite speak this way, but we all wish they did, with beautiful, macabre, ferocious imagery. The language does most of the work, just like in Shakespeare."

One of the strengths of Synge's work is its great roles for women, young and old. PICT has assembled a repertory company of eight men and eight women, each of whom has at least one major role but small roles, too. Such a repertory system creates camaraderie among the actors, who are supported by one design and technical team.

In the aftermath of recent news about a split in the PICT board, Paul points out that the Synge Cycle has garnered the most underwriting ever, $96,500, half from Richard E. Rauh, the rest from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Charity Randall and Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundations and SunKING Digital. Subscribers already fill some 60 percent of the seats, so the cycle should prove profitable.

"Beckett Fest was successful financially, too," Paul says. "Sometimes thinking big can succeed."