‘The Weir’ Spooks Viewers With Its Frightening Tales
Play won Lawrence Olivier Award for Best New Play of 1998
The human need to be heard connects souls through story telling. It’s the proverbial dark and stormy night and four men are drinking and trading ghost stories in a rural Irish pub.
They toast one another with raised pints and delusions of grandeur until an enigmatic young woman named Valerie enters with a disturbing story of her own.
“It’s certainly the scariest and most chilling of all the stories, and it’s told in a very unexpected manner,”
director Matt Sanford said.
Winner of the Lawrence Olivier Award for Best New Play of 1998, Conor McPherson’s “The Weir” opens at Santa Fe Playhouse at 7:30 p.m. Friday. The play runs Thursdays through Sundays through Dec. 23. It stars Carey Cox, Garth Fitzpatrick, Justin Golding,
Kerry Kehoe and Liam Lockhart.
“The Weir” revolves around lyrical reminiscence and the kind of banter that only occurs among barflies with a shared upbringing.
The stories unfold with a supernatural slant, a popular preoccupation among Irish folklore: ghosts, fairies and mysterious happenings.
At first, it’s just small talk about little more than the wind and a tractor. But then the gossip turns to the mysterious new girl in town. Sparks of sexual attraction flicker with rivalry and a sprinkling of roguish comments until she speaks.
“The Weir” premiered off-Broadway in 1998. McPherson won a Critics’ Circle Award as the most promising playwright of 1998.
Sanford accidentally stumbled upon the piece while visiting an actor friend in New York. He was attracted to its unique structure, which he found challenging. The play contains no real plot beyond the transforming effects of the spoken word.
“It’s written without an intermission or scene breaks,” he said. “There’s no direct action in terms of the arc of a story. The action and dynamics are created through the structure (produced) by building this sense of family between the four men. It’s very tender and very complex.”
That familial sense gives Valerie the feeling of safety she craves to explain the reason she left Dublin. Melancholy and transparent, “The Weir” features a supernatural twist echoing the earlier tales. The men are shocked into softer, kinder and more honest friends as each in turn tells his own eloquent and revealing story. Small mysteries evolve into astonishments and braggadocio soars into confessions of love and loss. There are hints of salvation and the soul of an old, repressed Ireland.
Ghost stories serve as the foundation of the things that really scare us –– “feelings of loneliness and doubt and isolation and loss that we experience in our daily lives,” Sanford said.
Sanford works as technician at the Lensic Performing Arts Center. He’s been involved in theater since his childhood. The Santa Fe High School graduate was among the first group of local theater students to be invited to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2004. “The Weir” marks his directing debut.
“It’s a magical script,” Sanford said. “It’s going to be a very atmospheric piece.”