THE DEAD EYE BOY. By Angus MacLachlan, directed by Susan Fenichell. With Lili Taylor, Paul Dano, Joseph Murphy. Set by Christine Jones, costumes by David Zinn, lights by Russell H. Champa. MCC Theater. 28th Street west of Sixth Avenue. Seen at Friday's preview.

WITH BROADWAY generating more than its usual late-season excitement and clutter, it would be too easy for "The Dead Eye Boy" to get lost in the big-time party noise. This would also be too bad.

The fierce and disturbing new play, which opened Off-Broadway last night at the MCC Theater, introduced the city to Angus MacLachlan- a North Carolina writer with a name to match the odd muscularity of his voice. That voice is already original and compellling enough to have attracted the indie-film toughie, Lili Taylor, to the project in the tiny MCC- incidentally, the only New York theater that dared to offer a home to some little play about ovarian cancer that turned out to be the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Wit."

"Dead Eye Boy" also has an off-putting subject we only think we know from low life daytime TV confessionals. This time, we have a messed-up, made-up family of the eloquent working poor, explosively needy people who use drugs to escape from their demons and use AA to run from the drugs and confuse one another with their struggle against the tedium and the terror. Part "Days of Wine and Roses" for the crack and factory set, the play appreciates the hunger of intimates fighting to keep an electric charge in life without shorting out altogether.

Susan Fenichell, formerly with the Intiman Theatre in Seattle, has directed an explosive trio of acting experts in a tight, rough production that combines pulp suspense with an erotic exhileration. Taylor, the force of nature best known as the shooter in "I Shot Andy Warhol," is fascinating and scary as Shirley-Diane, a squirmy, churning package of liberating seduction and damaged goods. She has a 14-year old son- played with a staggering mix of disaffected white gansta menace and boyish possibilities by Aaron Himelstein. As we learn in beautifully understated flashbacks, this is the teen offspring of teen rape, the "dead eye boy" raised to mix up hitting and hugging, laughing and fury, mother love and the shadow of obsession.

Into this happy homestead comes Billy, a hulk of an ex-con Shirley-Diane met in AA, played by Joseph Murphy with a deep tension between the life he got and the one he desperately wants. There is an exquisite center of tenderness in their insatiable groping and coupling, as if they can use the sex as both an opiate and a path to civility.

MacLachlan writes with a strange, but strangely true rhythm, demanding his characters live on the tip that separates hysterical passions from real hysteria.

Christine Jones' living room set is credibly shappy and poignantly tidy. David Zinn's costumes are cheap and sexy, but never cheesy. In the instant beore each backout, Fenichell gets an expression from these people that says more with a look than many plays say in hours of marquee chatter. Hope someone is listening.