Adriano Shaplin specialises in thrilling theatre. His latest play, a contemporary riff on 'King Lear', satirises the banalities of television news coverage. Prepare to be exhilarated, writes Donald Hutera.

'People in the United States can't be blamed for being politically illiterate," says Adriano Shaplin, playwright, actor and director of the audacious, tight-knit US theatre collective the Riot Group. "They're not trained in literacy. There are no resources for them. And because they're denied access to a wealth of information, they buy the lie of journalistic and historical objectivity."

Shaplin, a stocky 23-year-old with a bush of black hair, is just getting warmed up. Fortunately, he has a medium into which he can channel both his bite and the bile that feeds it. Already Shaplin has written six full-length plays for his company, the first - the ominously titled Infanticide, a Celebration of Murder - when he was 17.

Two years later he and fellow Rioters Drew Friedman and Stephanie Viola made their European debut at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with a feisty little number called Why I Want to Shoot the President. (The original title identified him as Ronald Reagan but, Shaplin says, those responsible for the fringe programme made them change it.)

The following year, the Riot Group set its sights on Edinburgh again via Wreck the Airline Barrier, a profound and profane critique of the United States' hell-bent patriarchal culture. This shatteringly good production exemplified the company style: dense, blistering text delivered at breakneck speed by a handful of mostly sedentary actors imbued with a sweaty, white-hot energy. Audiences and critics were left shaken and exhilarated. Shaplin's reward was a Fringe First award.

Shaplin's second Fringe First came last August for Victory at the Dirt Palace, the show with which the Riot Group has just taken its London bow. It arrives at the Helix in Dublin tomorrow, where it runs until tomorrow week, showered with encomiums along the lines of, "Steven Berkoff watch your back!"

Like its Riotous predecessors, Victory at the Dirt Palace is a punch in the face of sedate sensibilities because, as Shaplin sees it, "anything that calls itself theatre should give you a jolt. It should feel like sex, not pornography".

Shaplin's acerbic but unexpectedly poignant script weds a viciously funny take on the news media to a contemporary riff on King Lear. The protagonists are a pair of rival network news anchors locked in a ratings battle. They also happen to be a father and daughter linked, Shaplin says, by a common disability.

"Both lack object permanence - the understanding that objects or people which are out of sight still exist. This functions as a metaphor for journalistic amnesia. At the same time, their relationship provides fertile ground for an exploration of gender, sexuality and power."

Although the play's emotional core is the parent-child dynamic, any vestige of plot - as well as a great deal of comic mileage - derives from a crisis in global relations. "As an underground artist working in the theatre," Shaplin says, "I want to satirise the personalities, conventions and language which marginalise and oversimplify the most pressing issues of the day. There was no way to write about the media and not include the way 9/11 was handled." That global milestone was the playwright's cue for the battery of pumped-up banalities and platitudes spouting from his fictional newscasters' lips.

Shaplin's sharp, outrageous sense of humour has encountered little adverse reaction here or in the United States. "I think many people are weary of the sentimental bullshit that is supposedly coming out of our mouths and going into our own ears," he says.

The Riot Group eschews naturalism in favour of a more heightened, almost agitprop approach to the stage. "Our goal is to make theatre that can be bawdy, dirty and low-brow, but is also politically astute," says Shaplin.

"We've never been interested in disguising our political agenda as parable or psychological drama, nor do we congratulate people for having the 'right' opinion about anything. We don't do romance or love stories. We also don't do sets, video projections, visual aids or other magic tricks. The acting is raw, direct. Basically, we lay ourselves bare in the struggle to make issues-based stories entertaining."

Shaplin's commitment to words and ideas supersedes the need for movement. "My characters are always confined - on planes, in television studios, in prison. As performers we're inspired by newscasters, preachers, politicians, motivational speakers and boxing-ring announcers. We like official speech; it's a very particular type of perverse poetry. And we prefer sitting and standing." In Victory at the Dirt Palace the actors are stuck behind desks. "I direct them to behave like animals in cages, forced to growl and pace back and forth in order to express themselves."

The seeds of the company's intense, low-budget aesthetic were planted in Shaplin at a relatively early age. "I knew from my teen years that I didn't want to sing and do musicals," he says, referring to the often limited theatrical options available in the average US high school.

So, at 14, he joined a "radical, very ambitious" community theatre group in his home town of Burlington, Vermont. It specialised in plays by local writers. Financial resources were always slim. "We rehearsed in basements and performed in cafes. It was an education in obscurity."

His inaugural role was in a production of Brendan Behan's The Hostage. Subsequent assignments included playing the soul of a dead undertaker, a 30-year-old gay man and an alcoholic former boxer. Shaplin branched out with parts in established scripts such as Edward Albee's Zoo Story and David Mamet's American Buffalo. But, he says unapologetically, "I thought some of the plays were crappy." Such critical thinking spurred his own writing.

"I hate interviews where artists' lives are based on what they did in their childhoods," Shaplin cautions. Strictly for the record, then, his mother is a physical therapist. Shaplin père, meanwhile, delivered bread for a living. But that's not all.

"He was a homemaker," Shaplin says, "or housedad, and an amateur political pundit and crackpot history buff who was also a talking head on his own public-access TV show.

"My parents have seen everything I've done," Shaplin adds. "They're liberal and not particularly judgmental. There's never been any pressure for me to be anything in particular, so being a playwright is fine."

His scripts are strictly tailored to the actors' personalities, strengths and weaknesses. "Our productions are co-directed," Shaplin says, "but I have the final cut."

He claims not to read plays. "I'm more interested in the various types of popular performance that touch people and bring pleasure and usually occur outside of a black room: circuses, professional wrestling, dance halls, rock concerts."

Shaplin teaches acting part-time at the University of California, where he is also pursuing a PhD in performance studies. "It's obvious to the students that I choose scenes for them to work on that are based on violent conflict. There is a concern that they will only learn how to express hatred, and the bruises have raised a few eyebrows, but I refuse to help raise a new generation of polite actors."

Next up for the Riot Group is Shaplin's as-yet-unfinished Pugilist Specialist, which Edinburgh's prestigious Traverse Theatre may present at this year's Fringe.

"It's about an elite military unit that's set to assassinate a major Middle Eastern leader," he says with the trace of a wicked grin. "Very timely."

Victory at the Dirt Palace, Helix, Dublin, tomorrow-February 18th, €12, 01-7007000