Afratricide. A fake corpse. A violent demise at sea. Two lovers joined in death in a murder-suicide. A priest tied up and stuffed in a bag. That’s entertainment to director Garry Hynes, whose marathon production of “DruidSynge” offers eight and a half hours of J.M. Synge dramaturgy. Starting today, the acclaimed production, which has played Ireland, Edinburgh, Scotland, and Minneapolis, will play seven times at the Lincoln Center Festival.

A full, working day of theatergoing is a lot to ask of even the most dedicated follower of the stage. But, to Ms. Hynes’s thinking, tests of endurance are exactly what audiences are craving. “I think that nowadays we need the challenge of something bigger,” Ms. Hynes said in a recent interview. “We need a sense of an event, a sense of an occasion. It’s important for the theater to continue to stress its importance as a live act. I often think it’s quite extraordinary in its way that audiences will actually pay to go into a darkened room and allow a group of people to exert their imaginations on them. Too often we throw away that opportunity.”

Ms. Hynes grabbed opportunity by the throat seven years ago when she and her colleagues at the Druid Theatre Company hatched the idea of presenting all six of Synge’s plays back-to-back. Did they have their reasons? You bet, and the director will enumerate them for you. “One: Synge has a short canon of work. He died tragically PleaseseeSYNGE,page13at the age of 37. So, it’s actually a physical possibility to do all of the work. Second of all: He’s a writer whose work is dominated by one play, ‘The Playboy of the Western World,’ and sometimes some of the other plays are unjustly neglected because of that. And third of all,” — here she returns to her “big theater” refrain — “it’s a big commitment for people to go to the theater and we have to keep the excitement and challenge in that.”

The six plays that make up the experience are “Riders to the Sea,” “The Shadow of the Glen,” “The Tinker’s Wedding,” “The Well of the Saints,” “Deirdre of the Sorrows” (which Synge left unfinished when he died of Hodgkin’s Disease in 1909), and, of course, the immortal “The Playboy of the Western World,” the one Synge play everyone knows. Reading these brutally satiric plays, one understands where a contemporary Irish playwright like Martin McDonagh — “The Lieutenant of Inishmore,” “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” etc. — derived his playnaming skills, as well as his unflagging interest in death and unsentimental attitude toward the Irish. (Not unsurprisingly, Mr. McDonagh has also found a home at the Druid.)

Ms. Hynes has long harbored an interest in Synge’s work; “The Playboy of the Western World” was part of the debut 1975 season at the Druid, which was co-founded in Galway by Ms. Hynes. She directed that production and has staged the work since. The playwright is an undeniable, though often overlooked, player in Irish theater history. Together with W.B.Yeats and Augusta Lady Gregory, he founded what would become the Abbey Theatre. It was there that “Playboy” was first presented, resulting in the infamous riots by audience members who considered the work — in which a young man thought to have killed his father is lionized by a small town, until it’s discovered he’s innocent of the crime — a slur on Irish character.

In later decades, however, Synge was neglected by theaters, his works relegated to the classroom. His plays weren’t seen nearly as often as those of fellow countrymen Beckett and Wilde. “He’s maybe defined more by his absence from the stage than by his presence,” Ms. Hynes said. “I think his position as this kind of revered icon is strong, but the productions of his plays are not that frequent. There was something groundbreaking and uncompromising about Synge’s vision. There’s an audacity about the theatrical vision, about the language, the compressed nature of the writing, the absolute ruthlessness of the vision. All of these things make him the giant of 20th-century international writing that he is.”

Ms. Hynes suspected a presentation of Synge’s oeuvre would set the writer’s reputation right. To assure that his achievement would be received as a solid whole, she and the cast adhered to a specifically disciplined rehearsal schedule. “What are we doing here?” she asked rhetorically of her collaborators. “Are we simply creating an assembly of productions? Or are we creating a dramatic world and some overreaching narrative arc?”

“It would have been very easy to get bogged down in one play either because it was moving very well or because it was presenting particular difficulties,” she said. “I was very aware of that. So we were very strict that each week we had to do five of the six plays. We would spend a morning on one play and then in the afternoon move on to another play.”

Additionally, she met with designers to carve out a unified pictorial vision of Synge’s world. It’s a wind-andrain-swept sphere of torn, bedraggled clothing, ramshackle structures, and a color wheel that — aside from a flash of red when blood is spilt — doesn’t stray far from black and earthen tones. “Synge’s world is gritty and hard,” explained Ms. Hynes.

The director said that, the work put into the piece notwithstanding, she was surprised by the unanimous acclaim that greeted “DruidSynge.” “In a venture of this kind, quite naturally you’re pursued by doubt. So I was very thrilled it was received so well.” Has the success led her to consider similar career reappraisals for the future? Say “DruidWilde” or “DruidFriel”?

“One is always cooking up various ideas,” she replied.