Here’s an off-Broadway sampler. The Irish Arts Center is giving the American premiere of Kenneth Branagh’s Public Enemy. As an actor, the Belfast-born Branagh is something new, a hybrid of Olivier and Jimmy Cagney. So it figures that he’d write a play about a young Belfast Irishman’s fixation on Cagney. Tommy Black (Paul Ronan) escapes from the brutal realities of Northern Ireland by adopting the Cagney persona. He struts like the Cagney of ““Public Enemy,’’ greets friends with ““Whaddaya hear, whaddaya say?’’ and wins a talent contest with an uncanny rendition of Cagney’s danc-ing in ““Yankee Doodle Dandy.’’ When Black gets caught up in the Troubles, he finds him-self targeted by the Catholic IRA, the Protestant UDA and the cops.

Branagh is still a tyro playwright, resorting to ploys like using an aging boozy journalist as narrator. But the play has drive and passion, is staged sharply by Nye Heron and acted like blazes. Ronan doesn’t do a takeoff on Cagney – he’s possessed by him, a possession that ends in a violent exorcism tagged by another Cagney motif, ““Top of the world, Ma!''

George C. Wolfe is starting his third season as producer of the Joseph Papp Public Theater. Blade to the Heat, a play about prizefighting by Oliver Mayer, demonstrates why Wolfe (““Angels in America’’) is the hottest director in America. Mayer’s play is inspired by the career of Emile Griffith, middleweight champion in the 1960s, who tragically killed Benny Paret in the ring after Paret had called him a maricon, a homosexual. Their counterparts in the play, Pedro Quinn and Mantequilla Decima, feel the pressures of racism and codes of machismo in boxing’s brutal rites of passage. The cast of Latins and blacks is superb, especially Paul Calderon and Kamar de los Reyes as Decima and Quinn. The fights are marvelously choreographed by former middleweight contender Michael Olajide. No phony ““Rocky’’ megaton sound effects here; these guys mix it up at blazing speed that has already resulted in injury to Reyes. The 29-year-old Mayer’s play can be formulaic, but it has the virtue of unsentimentality, it makes connections between boxing and such other cultural aspects as music, and Wolfe generates more excitement than most fights you see on pay per view.

Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion! is a problem. It’s Yes, I amputated a hand somewhere along the way. jk a greatly affecting, tender, funny, painful play about a group of gay men during three summer weekends at a house in upstate New York. The house belongs to Gregory (Stephen Bogardus), a choreographer, who lives with the younger Bobby (Justin Kirk), who is blind. House guests include Arthur (John Benjamin Hickey) and Perry (Stephen Spinella), whose 14-year relationship makes them role models. Their antithesis is John (John Glover), an English musician whose embittered hostility is projected in the S&M rituals he enagages in with his boyfriend, the dancer Ramon (Randy Becker). The court jester is Buzz (Nathan Lane), who’s HIV-positive and fights despair with a barrage of gags and musical-comedy trivia. When James (Glover), John’s AIDS-stricken, sweet-natured twin brother, shows up, Buzz finds someone to love and care for.

McNally’s touch and pitch are almost perfect as he follows the tensions, seductions, betrayals, guilts and glitters of his four couples. Maybe too perfect. Twenty-six years ago, with ““The Boys in the Band,’’ Mart Crowley brilliantly established the genre of the gay play with its own sentimentalities, toughnesses and character types. For all its elegiac appeal, McNally’s play essentially shows the band playing on. Paul Rudnick’s comically audacious ““Jeffrey’’ found a different angle on the dynamics of gay experience. And the epic ““Angels in America’’ may have temporarily exhausted many dimensions of the subject. But there must be complex areas of gay life yet to be explored. Meanwhile, this play is a feast of ensemble acting by world-class American actors under director Joe Mantello (costar with Spinella of ““Angels in America’’). But somewhere there’s a new music waiting to be played by the boys in the band.