Subway savior Jesus hops at Company One BY CAROLYN CLAY

Sartre got it only half right about Hell being other people. In the innermost circle of Inferno, the other people are doubtless subjecting the damned to a religious harangue. Moreover, the lock-up at Rikers Island, where a vulnerable youth is proselytized by a born-again serial killer in Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Jesus Hopped the "A" Train, is a pretty hellish spot. The cacophonous opening of the Company One production, a clanging combination of stunted prayer and angry, answering profanity, makes that clear. The staging, by Summer L. Williams, gets a tad too amiable further out. But both the play, by the author of the current Off Broadway success Our Lady of 121st Street, and the production are worth the trip to the chain-link-rattling, bully-driven Hades they invoke.

Guirgis’s plays, which also include the 1999 In Arabia, We’d All Be Kings, have gotten more attention than they otherwise might in that all three were first directed by the celebrity actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. Like Guirgis, Hoffman is a member of the Off Off Broadway troupe LAByrinth Theatre Company. But Jesus Hopped the "A" Train — which opened in 2000, went on to win an Edinburgh Fringe First Award, transferred to London’s Donmar Warehouse, and wound up on the West End (where it was co-produced by Madonna) — has more to recommend it than association with The Talented Mr. Ripley. In some ways a typical if crackling prison drama, complete with sadistic guard and crusading lawyer, the play raises — and fails to answer neatly — thorny questions about religion, responsibility, and redemption. And it puts its inquiry into a compulsive, rapping, rat-a-tat form that surges with linguistic and comic brio. There are some clichés lurking in the guardhouse shadows, but the play runs over them like a tank.

Angel Cruz is a 17-year-old Puerto Rican who, frustrated up the yin-yang by a Reverend Moon–like cult leader who’s taken over the mind of his lifetime friend, shoots the Lexus-driving holy man in the backside. When "Reverend Kim" suffers complications and dies, the youth, who’s new to trouble, is charged with first-degree murder and moved to the lock-up, where for one hour a day, in adjoining rooftop exercise cages, he’s thrown together with personable "saved" psychopath Lucius Jenkins, who murdered eight people while high on crack cocaine before finding God. Lucius’s lawyers are fighting his extradition to Florida, where he’ll be executed. Lucius says God forgives him. Angel’s lawyer, an Irish-American female hot shot who’s touched by the intense young man, maintains he was "making a statement" rather than intending a murder. Angel says he’s done nothing wrong. God, however, works his way through Lucius’s rant and the chinks in the chain link into Angel’s hurting, sullen face.

Williams’s staging too is in-your-face and simple — though she perhaps allows Vincent Siders’s charismatically crazy Lucius too much showboating. As if to make up for that, Michael Premo, when he isn’t exploding in defensive argument or cakewalking through beer-and-chicken-wing-greased fantasies of freedom, makes Angel a sensitive, closed-down-on-himself presence. And Mason Sand underplays the guard Valdez, by nature the play’s most violent character, though as he purrs with genial threat, "The law prevents me."

Valdez contributes to the overriding themes in his opening monologue, which he performs while outfitting himself with the tools of the correction trade. In his former life as a garbage man, he offers, he was infuriated by what people "cavalierly" discard. "Everything is not replaceable," he intones, "and once an irreplaceable thing is discarded, it’s lost forever." Which seems more applicable to innocence than to color TVs. As for that "cavalierly": despite Guirgis’s apt use of profane, multi-ethnic vernacular, his characters do occasionally seem to have transferred to Rikers from Reading Gaol.

The most problematic character is Angel’s lawyer. Mary Jane Hanrahan disqualifies herself in her first scene, after her client defends himself by admitting, "All I did was shoot him in the ass." Then she inexplicably replaces her replacement, refuses a plea bargain, and sells her susceptible client up the river, all the while cheerily narrating her own burgeoning downfall. Sarah Shampnois forges through, but she hasn’t much edge — a quality most of the actors could use more of. These are not slickly polished performers. But Premo and Siders, in particular, rise to their borderline-absurdist verbal duels, getting under each other’s skins. Richard Arum appears briefly as a guard who befriends, and is affected by, the reformed Lucius, but his overlong second-act monologue is one of several that slow the "A" train down.