By Dave McLaughlin
Special to the Reporter

"The experience of seeing good theater is closer to going skiing than it is to going to the movies," says Fields Corner native Brendan Hughes. "It's just totally different than television or film. With good theater, audiences are signing up for something really intense."

We are having lunch at Lucky's on Congress Street, discussing Gagarin Way, the play that Hughes is currently directing for Boston's Sugan Theatre Company. An electric, dark comedy by the Scottish playwright Gregory Burke, Gagarin Way uses the high-voltage story of a botched kidnapping to explore its characters' conflicting impulses toward apathy and outrage. Two dispossessed factory workers decide to make a political statement by kidnapping an executive from the factory's multi-national corporate owner. The problem is that the Cold War is long since over. The workers are too late for the revolution, and they find that their hostage challenges their assumptions about the evils of the global economy.

In Hughes's words, "These two guys desperately want to care about something, but they struggle with how easy it is not to care."

Hughes, 30, is someone who cares. He says that his insights into this play are rooted in the two years he spent doing community service work with Boston's City Year program. That experience left him with the clear knowledge that working to connect people is far more rewarding than the apathy and self-absorption that our point-and-click culture so often seems to breed. At heart, though, the play isn't about abstract political ideologies; it's about individuals struggling with a sense of being powerless to effect change in their lives and in their communities.

These days, the theater is where Hughes connects people. After graduating from Boston Latin School, he studied acting at UMass-Boston. He shifted his focus to directing primarily because a production came up that offered him the opportunity to work with an actress he had a crush on. Hughes doesn't say what became of that actress, but he does say that the experience of directing that UMass play set him on a new path.

Not long afterward, Hughes dropped out of UMass to take over the Theater Cooperative in Somerville, running it with friends for four seasons before departing for New Haven to study at Yale Drama School. Since completing his studies last spring, he has used New York City as a home base while bouncing around the country to direct shows.

Just back from a gig in Florida, he has been in Boston since the beginning of March, rehearsing for Gagarin Way. This month, he will head to New Haven to direct an opera at Yale, then to New York for two more productions, before returning to St Petersburg for a September production at American Stage.

The common thread in the shows he directs, says Hughes, is dark comedy. He looks for plays that challenge audiences while also making them laugh. The Gagarin Way cast says that Hughes's blend of intellect, compassion, and love of laughter is what makes him so special as a director. They credit him with creating a supportive rehearsal environment, one in which risk-taking is encouraged, while also making everybody laugh so much that the rehearsal process doesn't feel like work. "With Brendan, the work stays really fresh during rehearsals, so the play keeps its spark going into opening night," says the Welsh-born actor and Cape Cod resident Dafydd Rees, who plays the kidnapping victim in Gagarin Way.

Gagarin Way is the third and final play of The Sugan Theatre Company's 13th season of bringing contemporary Irish and Celtic plays to Boston audiences. Hughes admires Sugan founders Carmel and Peter O'Reilly, calling them "so courageous" for their commitment to producing high-quality, challenging work in the Celtic tradition. And he is excited not only about the opportunity to direct a Sugan play (the company very rarely employs guest directors) but also about the play itself, and the ways in which it speaks to young audiences, entertaining them with its fast, edgy pace even as it challenges them to find a way to meaningfully shape their communities.

Gagarin Way runs from April 1 through April 23 at The Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts in the South End where the Sugan Company recently moved into a state-of-the-art 200-seat theater. The center, located at the intersection of Tremont and Berkeley Streets in the South End, is T-accessible, and $12 parking is available in the garage underneath the theater. For more information, visit sugan.org. Tickets may be purchased online, or by calling 617-933-8600.