FLAME licks the upper corner of a playing card, and the suit is spades. If the graphic in the publicity for Conor McPherson’s “Seafarer” spells deviltry and hellfire to you, you’re getting the message. Set in a coastal town north of Dublin, the play makes no mystery of the identity of one Mr. Lockhart, a new acquaintance who joins a quartet of raffish, hard-drinking Irishmen one Christmas Eve for a high-stakes game of poker.

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

The playwright and director Conor McPherson, left, with Ciaran Hinds, who plays Mr. Lockhart in “The Seafarer.”

A scene from "The Seafarer" with Jim Norton (leaning forward) and, from left, Conleth Hill, Sean Mahon and Mr. Hinds.

Originally produced at the National Theater in London just over a year ago, “The Seafarer” opens Thursday at the Booth Theater on Broadway. As in London the playwright is his own director.

Mr. McPherson made his name with fare like “The Good Thief” and “St. Nicholas,” which were monologues spoken directly to the audience. More recent efforts like “The Weir” and “Shining City” have proved his skills at dialogue. Formally “The Seafarer” is his most conventional piece to date: “one room, one night, real time,” as he summed it up recently. “I wanted to embrace those seeming limitations and see what’s powerful about them.”

But as the denouement of “The Seafarer” approaches, Mr. McPherson gives Mr. Lockhart an interlude that plays like an early McPherson monologue in miniature. Mr. McPherson won’t mind if you think of it as an aria: “The best kind of theater aspires to music. It has to have its fast and slow movements, its ballads and its jigs.”

Left alone with Mr. Lockhart, his quarry asks what hell is. Mr. Lockhart tells him about hell, and heaven too. In the published script, the answer runs three virtually uninterrupted pages.

In London Mr. Lockhart was played to one kind of perfection by Ron Cook, a wiry Englishman. The Broadway cast features the saturnine, big-boned Irishman Ciaran Hinds in the role.

As the quarry Sharky, whose soul hangs in the balance, the American David Morse has little to do but listen during Mr. Lockhart’s monologue. “Is that easy?” he said. “No. Lockhart is talking about where I, Sharky, am going to go. I have to experience what that means. It changes me. Everything you do onstage is in response to what’s before you. I don’t know how you act if you don’t listen.”

Speaking the speech presents different challenges. “In my present state of play I’d do it with my face in my hands, mumbling incomprehensibly,” Mr. Hinds said. “But Conor wants me to take in the audience.”

Mr. McPherson, meanwhile, was sounding tentative. “The speech is a journey between the inner and the outer,” he said. “We don’t break the fourth wall. We stay within the confines of the play. You’re talking about what will happen to Sharky, but you’re also talking about yourself. For me the most important line is ‘Time just slips away.’ Mr. Lockhart’s talking about eternity. Is he trying to soften up Sharky? Or is it just that he has nowhere else to go?”

Mr. Hinds gave Mr. McPherson a look, saying, “You’ll tell me sometime.”

Mr. McPherson said: “We need to get into the theater. The theater will show us.”

In tone Mr. Lockhart’s monologue recalls the mournful Mephostophilis in Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus.”

Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it,
Think’st thou that I, that saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,
In being depriv’d of everlasting bliss?

The interview continues...