Brantley reviews The Weir: Dark Yarns Casting Light Walter Kerr Theatre 2 April 1999 If a story is told well enough, you'll follow it anywhere, even when it's leading you to places you never intended to go. Take the plain- spoken, utterly alluring tales unfolded by the denizens of the rural Irish bar in The Weir, Conor McPherson's beautiful and devious new play at the Walter Kerr Theater. At first, they seem to beckon like comfortingly well-worn paths into realms of folklore both exotic and familiar, Gaelic variations on the sorts of campfire ghost stories you recall from childhood. Then a moment arrives, and it's hard to say exactly when because you've shed all sense of time, when you realize that you have strayed into territory that scrapes the soul. Suddenly, the subject isn't just things that go bump in the night, but the loss and loneliness that eventually haunt every life. There's a new chill abroad, evoking something more serious than goose flesh, but there is also the thrilling warmth that accompanies the flash of insight. That the audience of The Weir, which opened on Broadway last night and was first seen in London two seasons ago, is surprised and unsettled by this turn from teasing shadows into a more profound 1 darkness shows that 27-year-old Mr. McPherson is a first-rate spinner of yarns. That the characters onstage seem equally, and convincingly, unsettled and surprised by their own narratives shows that Mr. McPherson is a first-rate playwright. And under the seamless, gentle direction of Ian Rickson, the show's five actors make an unforgettable case for the impossibility of distinguishing the teller from the tale. In its first moments, The Weir would seem to reflect the ultimate cliche of a storyteller's opener: ''It was a dark and stormy night.'' The sounds of ominous winds and driving rains can be heard beyond the at first uninhabited set, a scruffy black box of a barroom designed by Rae Smith. The play's characters arrive at staggered intervals, slightly blown and bedraggled, seekers of refuge from the bluster of the outside world. And, yes, of course there is a fire to huddle around. What Mr. McPherson is doing with this standard Gothic equipment is acknowledging an ages-old tradition, the idea of wayfarers assembling under siege to swap information and accounts of lives as they do in Boccaccio's Decameron. As The Weir continues, it makes a vibrant case for the endurance of that tradition and for the great and essential value of telling stories. Though a feeling of individual isolation in a baffling and often hostile world pervades The Weir, the stories woven by its characters 2 become solid, if temporary, bridges among them. And if the disturbing mysteries of existence haven't been given explanations, they have been given forms, and that in itself is a victory. The notion of the oppressiveness of the immense quiet of country life recurs in ''The Weir.'' Stories are what break the silence. At the center of the play are four drinking cronies, the kinds of men who might not have become friends in an urban environment but who have long ago made a comfortable adjustment to one another's quirks and temperaments. There is Jack (Jim Norton), who runs a garage and is the oldest and most theatrically loquacious of the lot, and Jim (Kieran Ahern), a gentle, slightly slow-witted odd-jobs man who lives with his aged, ailing mother. Finbar (Dermot Crowley) is a splashy fellow who wears a pink shirt and flashes 20-pound notes and is a local success in real estate. The pub's owner and bartender is Brendan (Brendan Coyle), who is the most taciturn of the quartet, which by no means suggests that he is less eloquent. It should go without saying that a stranger is introduced into this company, someone whose very presence will change the course of the men's habitual conversation. One of Mr. McPherson's more cunning inspirations is to make this prototype a woman (played by Michelle Fairley), a trespasser of sorts in a masculine domain who automatically raises the level of self-consciousness in the room and turns each of the men into even more of a performer than he is 3 normally. Named Valerie, she is a newcomer to the region and has rented a house from Finbar. The Weir is built around five monologues delivered by four of the characters. All but one have a supernatural element, and each of them is effectively self-contained. The first, told by Jack with the flourish of a homespun Danny Kaye, is benignly spooky, a minor- key tale of fairies and spectral knocks on doors. But it ingeniously creates a foundation for everything that follows, opening the floodgates, or the weir (dam) of the title, for an accelerating rush of revelations that cut closer and closer to the bone. To say much more about these stories would be unfair. One can list a few of their elements without giving too much away; you learn, for instance, why Finbar quit smoking years ago and why Valerie has moved from city to country. Everything here, of course, is in the why, and though Finbar's tale may seem slight in comparison with Valerie's devastating chapter of autobiography, they are cut from the same cloth, a shimmering weave of the mundane and the ineffable. Each of the stories, in fact, deepens and expands the others. And the order in which they are arranged offers a master lesson in dramatic construction. A dimension of otherworldly menace is increasingly heightened in the succeeding monologues until the very last one, which like the first belongs to Jack. It is a plain story of lost love, with no ghostly shadows at all, yet it is absolutely of a piece with everything that has gone before. 4 It is to Mr. McPherson's credit that you are aware of these patterns only after the play is over, and that while you are watching it the monologues never register as discrete dramatic contrivances. Unlike the work of another bright light of the British theater, Patrick Marber (currently represented on Broadway by Closer), Mr. McPherson's doesn't call immediate attention to mechanics and symmetries. The stories of The Weir emerge out of an organic flow of conversation, partly the formulaic banter among long-time friends, partly prosaic exchanges on subjects like horse racing and the foreign visitors who invade the countryside in the summertime. Mr. Rickson and the performers are expert in conveying the idiosyncratic ritual among drinking buddies, and what happens when it is disrupted, as when Valerie asks for the unexpected: a glass of white wine. It's remarkable, when you think about it, how little of this talk is merely atmospheric filler. The play's lyricism is a matter of steady accumulation rather than bursts of flowery metaphors, a stealthy poetry reflected even in Paule Constable's exquisitely graded lighting. Every phrase has its purposeful place and reason, but the actors never make the mistake of letting on that they know this. All have appeared in previous incarnations of the play, and the ensemble work is so seamless that it seems unjust to single out one performance. You're always aware of the connections among the characters onstage, the ways in which they chafe, comfort and occasionally embarrass each other. A moment in which Jim sits down 5 stiffly by the newly arrived Valerie is turned into a gloriously subtle study in social awkwardness by Mr. Ahern and Ms. Fairley. And what Mr. Coyle does with the simple act of pouring a glass of wine is a sly comic marvel. Mr. Coyle, who won a Laurence Olivier Award (the London equivalent of the Tony) for his role in ''The Weir,'' is the only character who doesn't tell a proper story. Yet by the evening's end, you feel you know Brendan as intimately as any of the others on stage. It's hard to think of a recent performance in which the act of listening, by all of the performers, takes on such articulate dramatic weight. The monologues of The Weir are really dialogues between narrator and listeners, just as every play is a dialogue between itself and its audience. This fine, stirring and generous production reminds us of the priceless worth of that exchange. We may have begun the evening as eavesdroppers; by its end, we have fully and transportingly joined the conversation. The Seafarer A Devil of a Christmas Booth Theater 7 December 2007 6 Do you know how you behave when you’re drunk, I mean, really drunk? If the answer is yes, then you’ve never been that drunk, since the curse and kindness of vast quantities of alcohol is that they obliterate self-awareness. This physiological fact of life makes the gorgeous, vitally intelligent performances in The Seafarer, the new play by Conor McPherson that opened last night at the Booth Theater, all the more remarkable. Everyone in this dark and enthralling Christmas fable of despair and redemption descends at some point to oceanic depths of drunkenness, including a sinister fellow who is, shall we say, not of this world. Yet as written and directed, the five carefully shaped characters of The Seafarer are blessedly free of the blurry, slurry clichés of acting intoxicated that can drive a sensitive theatergoer to, well, drink. Directed by Mr. McPherson, one of the finest ensembles to grace a Broadway stage in years uncovers the soul-defining clarity within the drunkard’s haze.