There’s hardly a better escape from the city’s heat right now than the Irish Repertory Theater’s excellent staging of “The Weir,” its fourth since 2013. The company’s intimate Chelsea space is blissfully air-conditioned, and Conor McPherson’s eerie 1997 drama, set in a rural Ireland of near-empty pubs and howling winds, is appropriately chilly.
The production’s entire creative team, along with some of the cast, are return players, but there’s not a whiff of trotting out the same old. Instead, they render the play’s talkative yarns as heartily as a few rounds with old friends. That sense of familiarity (and the awareness that they are such close-knit revivers) even helps the play, which is essentially a hangout piece with a hazy supernatural charge.
Its tight 90 minutes track an evening at a pub owned by the 30-something Brendan (Johnny Hopkins), and frequented by the older Jack (Dan Butler) and Jim (John Keating). How regular are their visits? Jack’s first move onstage, one he often repeats, is to breeze behind the bar to pour himself a pint.
Unlike his also-unmarried patrons, and as played by Hopkins with homey charm, Brendan seems content with his mundane lot but is not yet resigned to it. There’s a kinship, then, with the recently arrived Valerie (Sarah Street), who’s being shown around town by Finbar (Sean Gormley), an older gent with a self-conscious Ian Fleming style.
The men’s hospitality, as they fill Valerie in on the area’s lore, gradually turns into a series of ghost tales. Through offhand conversational cues (“What was the story with…?” or “Where was that?”), McPherson is skilled at making reminiscences’ jump into communal folklore feel both inevitable and necessary.
It’s typical campfire fodder — frightened widows and apparitions — and each story can be waved away, chalked up to nerves or having had one too many. But neither McPherson, nor the director Ciarán O’Reilly, leans on obvious spooks, though the production’s lighting (by Michael Gottlieb) and sound design (by Drew Levy) supply the requisite dimming lights and stormy hums.
Instead “The Weir” tantalizes with a quiet grief for the loneliness it reveals in those who experienced, and pass down, each story. Ghosts or no ghosts, they’re the kind of tales you let land with a stiff, quiet drink before a tension-cutting laugh.
It’s in their telling that this type of solitude can be aired out, and how this group can connect. The sparsely populated pub (nicely appointed by Charlie Corcoran), effectively functions as the men’s clubhouse, where each of them are gathered by circumstance and a deep-seated sense of belonging.
I found myself thinking about how communities are sustained through myths and pride, and how newness can challenge or expand them. McPherson’s world is almost utopian, convivial and open, with arguments forgotten over a fresh pint. But he hints at the exclusion necessary to keep it afloat, with talk of outsiders trying to buy up the land, and running jabs at the German tourists who disturb its ecosystem every summer.
The impish Jack and debonair Finbar have an appealing camaraderie based on a (mostly) good-natured history of teasing. Taking it in, as reflected on Street’s warm, receptive face, is one of the work’s great comedic pleasures. There’s an assurance we can someday catch up to existing relationships. But it’s also one of its most fraught: Will we ever truly belong?
Butler, Gormley and Keating inhabit their roles and chemistries with keen understanding, each actor having played his part for the company at least twice before. They make perfect conduits into this realm, and epitomize the lovely production. They’ve told their stories before, and they’ll likely tell them again.
The Weir
Through Aug. 31 at Irish Repertory Theater, Manhattan; irishrep.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.
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