The play’s title is a reference to one of the most important nights in Irish soccer (football), the night in 1993 when Ireland and Northern Ireland played to a 1-1 draw. That was good enough to send Ireland through to the World Cup in the USA in 1994. This play is not about football, though. It is about tribes and tribalism, making it a contemporary subject not a historical one.

Kenneth Normal McAllister (Allan Smyth) is a dole clerk at the Department of Health and Social Security in Belfast. He is a Protestant and rather proud of it. His position gives him a tiny bit of power and his religion marks him as a first-class citizen. When his wife convinces him to take her father to see the match, even though he does not really like football,  his experiences on the terraces change him.

I am a veteran of more than a few soccer clashes among hooligans. For my sins, I am a Chelsea FC fan and attended games in Europe in the 1980s. The things I saw and heard in the crowds sometimes made me ashamed to even be there: black players having bananas thrown at them, chants threatening violence and worse, and genuine violence outside the stadium. Smyth brought all of that back to me in a rather surprising and upsetting way. Forty years on, I am still bothered by it.

So was Kenneth McAllister. Suddenly, his wife’s (Allan Smyth, again, he plays all the parts) concern about paying the golf club dues was not all that important. He gave his Catholic supervisor a ride home one night to West Belfast, where McAllister had never been despite it being just a few miles from his home. He begins to see how very wrong the social arrangements in which he lives are.

There are some wonderful, and very necessary, laughs along the way, but there is a sense of McAllister growing into a man who prefers the tribalism of inclusion rather than exclusion. Patriotism is when a person loves his or her country. Nationalism is when a person just hates all the others. McAllister leaves his nationalism behind to become a patriot.

The staging of the show at the New York Irish Center had the performance space itself between two sets of seats facing one another. This non-standard arrangement was well-used by director Tim Redmond with Smyth moving up and down the stage, into the crowd and around the seats. The pacing is casual most of the time, but frenetic as needed by Marie Jones’ exceptional script.

Smyth himself is difficult top describe but “force of nature” comes close. The show is a long one for a one-man effort at over an hour and a half, and he does not phone it in. I lost count of the number of characters but more than a dozen sounds right. It reminded me of Jesse Tyler Ferguson (Mitchell Pritchett on TV’s “Modern Family”) and his performance of 40 characters in “Fully Committed” about a decade ago on Broadway.

A Night in November speaks to us about our own times, in a divided country. The fact is “The Troubles” visited hell on people in both Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. Another fact is that a few brave people ended them. Hope may be the most important thing I took away from the theater.

Running Time: 1 hour 45 minutes without intermission.

A Night in November played at The New York Irish Center at 1040 Jackson Avenue in Long Island City as part of the Origin First Irish Festival.