Ever since its 1997 debut in London (followed by a successful Broadway run two years later), Conor McPherson’s intimate drama The Weir has been hailed as a modern masterpiece. And rightly so. The play, now getting a pitch-perfect revival at the Irish Repertory Theatre under Ciarán O’Reilly’s direction, celebrates the elemental pleasures of storytelling.

The setting is a remote Irish pub (designed by Charlie Corcoran and dimly lit by Michael Gottlieb), where five people gather on an evening so blustery that the howl of the wind rises whenever the door is opened (sound design by Drew Levy). They come to drink, to take a break from a long day’s work, to stave off the loneliness of living in such an isolated location. But they also gather around the tavern’s metal-stove hearth to swap tales, mostly of a supernatural bent. There are fairy roads and freshly dug graves and ghostly knocks at the window panes.

The local mechanic, Jack (Dan Butler, perfecting the gift of the gab), and his sometime assistant, Jim (John Keating, hair as wild as his digressions), are the regulars—comfortable enough to go behind the bar and serve themselves when thirtysomething bartender Brendan (Johnny Hopkins, with a perpetual hangdog expression) steps out to his living quarters upstairs. While goading Brendan into finding a woman and settling down, Jack and Jim remain stubborn bachelors. “Who’d have me?” Jack says at one point. “A cantankerous old fuck like me.”

the-weir
John Keating, Sean Gormley, Johnny Hopkins, Dan Butler, and Sarah Street in ‘The Weir’ (Photo: Carol Rosegg)

The melancholy evening is disrupted by the arrival of Finbar (Sean Gormley, bringing just the right amount of pomposity), who’s left the sticks for the nearby town and made a name for himself as an entrepreneur, property owner, and real estate agent. And he’s brought a newcomer — a thirtysomething woman from Dublin named Valerie (Sarah Street) who has just purchased a nearby property. It’s the arrival of this outsider — both a true urbanite as well as a woman — that prompts the guys into a kind of Moth Radio Hour of ghost stories.

No sooner do the men begin to regret spooking their new neighbor than she surprises them with an unsettling story of personal loss that casts their own narratives into stark relief. Street makes her character’s anguish almost palpable, while also conveying how she finds comfort in the company of strangers and their unnerving yarns about the unknowable aspects of human life. Like all classic dramas, The Weir continues to cast its spell, offering flickers of narrative fire in the darkness of our collective isolation. ★★★★★

THE WEIR
Irish Repertory Theatre, Off Broadway
Running time: 90 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through August 31 for $60 to $125