Jon Beavers is Yank as Irish Rep revives The Hairy Ape, opening October 4

Ciarán O'Reilly, the company's co-founder, directs. He staged the play on the same mainstage in 2006, and this production marks 20 years since that one, but he has been clear that it is not a remount. In an interview published by Irish Rep, he called the new staging a brand-new production and pointed to the theater's 2014–2016 renovation, which added balcony seating and changed the shape of the room: "This time, we have such luxury. We can actually wheel things off stage right."

Yank is a stoker shoveling coal in the bowels of an ocean liner, sure of his strength and of his place in the world until the shipowner's daughter comes down to look at the men in the stokehole and recoils from him. What follows takes him up into Manhattan, onto Fifth Avenue, into a jail cell and an office of the Industrial Workers of the World, looking for somewhere he belongs. O'Neill wrote it in an expressionist style, and the Provincetown Players gave it its first production.

O'Reilly first saw the play in a low-budget New York staging in the 1980s. "It was like a pure punch in the face," he said. "It was so visceral and strong that it never left me." Of his new Yank, he said Beavers arrived having lived with the script for months: "This guy came in…ready to rock."

Beavers heads a company of 12 that also includes Jonathan Crimeni, Nayib Felix, Joanna Glushak, Ariyan Kassam, John Keating, Hassiem Muhammad, Adam Petherbridge, Elizabeth Teeter, Harrison Tipping, Audrey Cardwell and Richard Hollis.

The play runs 90 minutes with no intermission on the Francis J. Greenburger Mainstage, 132 West 22nd Street, and uses haze, fog and flashing lights. Tickets are $55 to $125 through the Irish Rep box office (212-727-2737) and the theater's production page. Saturday, October 24, is a matinee with free childcare through Broadway Babysitters.