Last call!

In an Irish pub, that would stir you to action -- why not in an Irish theater? If you've a mind for Irish comedy, tragedy, language and wit, this is fair warning that the final weekend of the Synge Cycle is upon us, all four programs, seven plays in all.

The odds are you'll find the cycle at its ripest, since actors tend to relish their final performances. And Synge, the great playwright of the early 20th-century Irish revival, offers up a power of words such as would set the stones, let alone actors, to dancing.

Whatever you see, you'll see a lot of Derdriu Ring, the Kerry actress by way of New York and Cleveland who appears in four of the seven plays and might be considered the spiritual center of Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre's amazing endeavor. If so, she comes by it honestly, having done Synge's "Riders to the Sea" in Dublin at age 18: "It was the closest to who I was and where I come from that I'd ever played. Doing that play changed me."

It changed her so much she went to the Aran Islands, as Synge did a century before, "trying to find someone to keen for me." She found an 82-year-old woman on Inishmore who introduced her to the culture of the island wakes, with their sex and dances ("that's our social event").

"Once I did 'Riders,' I wanted to do Pegeen in 'Playboy,' then all of them," she says. So a call to join the Synge Cycle here was simply fate. She'd already done four plays for PICT: the title roles in "Portia Coughlin" and "Major Barbara," along with "The Cripple of Inishmore" and "Boston Marriage."

Asked how she could access all the anger Portia required, she said simply, "I was brought up with it." That would explain a lot of her success in Synge: She's clearly at home, whether as the canny widow in "Playboy," the conniving tinker in "Tinker's Wedding" or the wary wife in "Shadow of the Glen."

But it hasn't been easy. She says it's like "a total immersion. Last week was the worst, the last lap, really tough for everyone." She praises the technical crew, which is stretched out as much as the cast. "It's been like a tightrope with no net," she says, "which is terrifying but also exciting."

After the final program opened Saturday, she took herself back to her apartment and slept 14 hours. That's partly because she and her husband of one year, Vince Horvath, are expecting a daughter in just four months

Although she's had her run-ins with PICT's Andrew Paul, she says, "I hope Pittsburgh realizes what he's done. He makes actors want to come here. It's very hard to turn down these plays and these roles. Friends in Cleveland and Ireland say, 'God, you're so lucky to get to do those plays.' "

Ring comes from the small town of Cahirsiveen in South Kerry. An older sister wanted to be an actress but didn't get the chance, going on to become an expert on autism. One brother is a university librarian, and her other brother runs Nighttown Jazz, a Cleveland restaurant Ring manages between acting gigs.

She wasn't originally destined to be in theater, either. "The first week of university, I knew I wanted to be an actor. I called my parents, but it wasn't an option." So she majored in music and English literature, playing piano and Irish harp but also making Synge one of her special subjects.

After University College Cork, she studied with Joe Dowling at a two-year conservatory program at the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin, just before he went off to run the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, which proved a useful connection after she came to this country.

But first she worked for a few years in Dublin, interning at the Gaiety and acting at the Abbey and City Arts Centre. She and a friend wrote a play that took up a year of their lives. And she did some stage managing, notably a Dublin production of "Mother of All the Behans," which starred Rosaleen Linehan, the great actress who's also come to PICT. "It was the best workshop on comic timing I could have had."

She came to America because Peter Hacketty, then artistic director at the Cleveland Playhouse, invited her to audition. Typically, she bought a one-way ticket, determined to give it a good chance. "I was being typecast as a character actor, the girl from Kerry," but Hacketty let her play ingenues and American roles, so she has spent about half of each year in Cleveland as part of the Playhouse's acting core, along with acting a good deal at the Guthrie and in New York.

"I have an ear for it," she says of Synge's rich, heightened Irish speech. "That's where my music comes in. I listen to myself on tape over and over." For the best accent in the Synge plays, you want to train your ear on Ring.

"Joe [Dowling] always said you have to treat Synge like Shakespeare, as heightened reality," she says. "It's poetic, not naturalistic. When you don't engage the language but sit on it, plebian and everyday, it goes flat. It's no coincidence that Synge's first love was music, too."

Synge Cycle schedule: "The Playboy of the Western World," Fri.-Sat. 8 p.m.; "The Tinker's Wedding" and "The Shadow of the Glen," today 8 p.m. and Sat. 2 p.m.; "Riders to the Sea" and "The Well of the Saints," Sun. 2 p.m.; "When the Moon Has Set" and "Deirdre of the Sorrows," Sun. 7 p.m. Tickets: $17-$47 at 412-394-3353, www.ProArtsTickets.org or www.picttheatre.org.

After Sunday's final performance, about 9 p.m., there'll be a talk-back free-for-all (in both senses), involving as many of the 16 actors and five directors as are still standing, plus as much of audience as chooses to gather around -- and it's free, whether you go to that night's performance or not.