The Weir: Ghost Stories

Stephanie Jean Lane, Philip Themio Stoddard, Harry Smith, Sean Bridgers and Joey Collins in The Weir. (Photo: David Dashiell)

Director Eric Hill, scenic designer Randall Parsons, lighting designer Matthew E. Adelson and a first-rate cast of five actors bring a hushed intimacy and a profound sense of place and community to the Berkshire Theatre Group’s production of Conor McPherson’s The Weir. The play, which premiered in London in 1997 and transferred to Broadway two years later, is set in a rural pub in County Leitrim where four locals share drinks with a young Dubliner, Valerie (Stephanie Jean Lane), who has just rented an old house in the area. Finbar (Harry Smith), a hotel proprietor who no longer lives in the countryside, is showing her around the town. The pub’s owner and bartender is Brendan (Philip Themio Stoddard); the other men in the room, Jack (Sean Bridgers) and Jim (Joey Collins), are older. Randomly the conversation turns to episodes that the tipplers have had, directly or indirectly, with fairies and ghosts.

The set-up is like that of the 1944 English anthology film Dead of Night. But that movie is merely a clever entertainment; except for the thrilling experience of terror and Michael Redgrave’s classic portrait of a ventriloquist possessed by his dummy, you don’t take anything away from it. The Weir, however, like other McPherson plays that venture beyond everyday experience and into the realm of darkness (Shining City and The Seafarer) and his film The Eclipse, is a serious work of art that explores the themes of grief and loneliness. It follows you out of the theatre. After I saw it on Broadway at a Saturday matinee, I remember walking into the street and being alienated by the daylight, as if I’d awakened from a dream at a time when I had no business being asleep. It’s a beautiful little play that sustains its mood entirely on language – McPherson’s mesmerizing poetic language, which builds to a series of monologues that must have given these fine performers, like the ones I saw in New York and the ones I saw when the Donmar Warehouse revived The Weir in London in 2013, some of the most rewarding challenges of their careers. McPherson loves monologues – his 2001 play Port Authority is nothing but monologues – and perhaps no contemporary playwright is as commanding as he is in the writing of them.

The script presents four tales of the supernatural. The first is slight but affecting; that’s the fairy tale. The second gathers its power from the coda, when the teller, Finbar, relates how the haunting of someone else spilled over into his own experience. The third, which takes place at a freshly dug grave, is chilling in ways no one in the audience is likely to expect. The fourth is about the aftermath of a tragedy in Valerie’s life, and it’s so personal and raw that, in the hands of another writer, it would probably unbalance the drama. And then, just when you think the play has to wrap up because there’s no more poignant narrative left to be imparted, McPherson comes up with a fifth, delivered by Jack to Valerie alone, about the death of romantic hope that is a different but equally potent kind of ghost story. I don’t want to fill in the details of any of these narratives because perhaps some of my Massachusetts readers, at least, will seize the opportunity to visit this production before it closes on October 27, and I would wish them to enjoy the surprises in the text unimpeded.

I have nothing but praise for all five of the actors. Stoddard, playing the youngest of the characters and the only one who doesn’t offer a story, has the least complex role but his performance has an appealing freshness. Handling the trickiest monologue, Lane carefully steers it away from sentimentality and histrionics, but her acting isn’t just admirable for what it avoids; it has authenticity and delicacy. Finbar is a businessman whose success has elevated his class status, and, buoyed by drink, Jack gives voice to his resentment that Finbar views himself as superior to his old neighbors. Smith does a great deal with the tension in the character between where he came from and where he is now; he’s dressed more elegantly than anyone else but he hasn’t abandoned his rustic gruffness. Bridgers’s reading of Jack’s story, which recalls the confession speeches in Eugene O’Neill’s late realist plays, is simply magnificent. And Collins brings the physical and vocal imagination of a master character actor to the role of Jim. His rhythms are so unpredictable that his tale – it’s the one about the open grave – seems to leap off the stage. Director Hill’s work with this talented quintet is extraordinary. I made it a point to see this show because I love the play and I thought BTG would run with it. It was even better than I’d hoped.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.