"It's different for Travellers," explains the conflicted young James (Brian Gleeson) during Rosaleen McDonagh's new play Stuck. And though he has a lot to contend with - the Garda barricade that has recently turned his Sligo halting site into a virtual prison, his looming school exams, his boxing practice, and his unappealing career options as either a garda or a drug pusher - here he is discussing matters of the heart.

Explaining to his settled girlfriend Aisling (Liz Fitzgibbon) that he has asked another girl from his own community, whom he barely knows, to marry him, he adds, "once we get engaged we'll probably go on a few dates".

It's an amusing but illustrating detail of a tradition at odds with the modern world, but McDonagh's short play, a low-key, naturalistic drama measured out in two-person dialogues along a slightly awkward plot, is more interested in the darker side of heritage.

McDonagh is better known as a community worker and political activist, and though her play certainly has a political thrust, presenting Irish Travellers as a separate ethnicity with distinct customs, it is refreshingly unsentimental about it.

The barricade may be a metaphor for societal constraints - although it is as grimly real as any appearing in a news story - yet McDonagh suggests that the community's problems actually come from within.

To trace their source, however, her dialogues become a tangle of exposition and evasion.

As James's caring father Bernard (Michael Collins) nurses a secret shame about the death of his wife, the tragedy is sifted up and rationed out so artificially over the course of the play that its details become confusing, its significance so delayed that it is eventually lost.

Oddly, it is John Cronin's Seanie, the gun-toting, drug-dealing hard man of the site, who, though dismissive of Bernard's campaign for Travellers' rights, is more politically concise: "I just want my kids to be well-fed, well-dressed and not looked down upon."

That, essentially, is a desire shared by Bernard and every "Pavee", "Buffer" and member of humanity.

Though Jason Byrne's unadorned production for Project Arts Centre cannot disguise the awkwardness of the play's downbeat denouement (its surprise ending being no surprise at all), that fear of being stuck in an ambition for a better life is not different for Travellers - it's universal. - Peter Crawley

Runs until Dec 15