Dead of Night

However, this is really stretching the meaning of McPherson’s play. After all, sometimes a weir is just a weir, and, frankly, all I learned from Jack‘s monologue is that he’s the kind of guy who breaks into tears whenever someone hands him a ham sandwich. (McPherson‘s stage directions call for a prop TV -- are we to infer that it, too, has ghosts on its screen?)

What, then, is the purpose of this enigmatic play? I confess that I haven’t any idea, although I‘m not tempted to grab on to McPherson’s vague symbols to give it meaning. The playwright has written that The Weir was inspired by visits he once made to his grandfather, who lived near the River Shannon in the very same region of Ireland as the play‘s setting, and that the two would sit around a fire, drinks in hand, as the old man told McPherson stories.

I think it’s plain that The Weir is simply the transformation of those visits into an atmospheric drama with no metaphors attached. And as atmosphere, The Weir has few peers. McPherson has crafted the perfect environment for his story; the pub, with its dim lighting, warm fire and imagination-prodding whiskey, is the drinking man‘s campfire, a place where camaraderie is assured, confidences shared -- and the piss taken out of anyone who becomes too serious. More important, his characters’ stories -- particularly the first three -- are truly chilling, all the more so when we realize they transpired in modern times on an ancient land overpopulated with ghosts.

McPherson also has a natural ear for the speech of his countrymen, a ruminating catechism of irony, exaggeration and consolation. There‘s a moment in which Finbar warns Valerie of predatory older men (unaware that he could be describing himself) and then sketches a bachelor’s desolate home, which turns into a dig against Jack:

FINBAR: . . . Thirty years of old newspapers and cheap thrillers, all lying there in the damp since their mammies died, and that was the last bit of cleaning went on in the place. That right, Jack?

JACK: That‘s us to a tee.

Toward this end, director Randall Arney has assembled a first-rate production, with Karyl Newman’s scenic design gathering us in the intimate embrace of her pub set, which is brushed by Daniel Ionazzi‘s subdued lighting. Arney, the former longtime artistic director of the Steppenwolf Theater, is acutely aware of atmosphere, especially the way it is changed by the arrival of characters and the tidal pull they exert on one another by their gestures or positioning.

Arney’s actors all turn in creditable performances, with Mahoney drawing most of our attention with his turn as the melancholy Jack, an old man who is not a patriarch but nevertheless, late in his life, finds sympathy for a distraught mother. Apart from Guinan‘s jaunty moments as Finbar, the other actors don’t really compete for our attention, partly because their characters are so low-key. Regrettably, too, the cast‘s brogues seem to thicken and falter all over the place, settling into a standard stage Irish. Considering the play’s conceit, however, this is hardly the scariest thing we hear during the evening.