by Richard Lord

Oscar Wilde, himself an Anglo-Irishman born in Dublin, once described the Irish thusly: “ … we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.” That quote could well serve as a capsule review of Conor McPherson’s play The Weir, with one slight adjustment: substituting ‘losers’ for ‘failures’. All five of the characters in the entrancing play can be seen as losers – though the nature of their losses differ significantly. And those differences give the piece its dramatic marrow.

Conor McPherson is considered one of the top Irish playwrights active today; The Weir was his fifth play to see a production, but it proved to his breakthrough play. The original London production garnered an armful of prestigious awards, including the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play of the 1999 theatre season.

McPherson set The Weir in 1997 in a cozy Irish pub in rural County Leitram. The owner and (seemingly) the only employee of the establishment is young Brendan. Brendan may be the only employee as such, but he allows regulars such as Jack and Jim to slip behind the bar and serve themselves. Of course, they dutifully scope out prices and pay the proper amount for anything they’ve helped themselves to.

Brendon’s pub is the haven in this rural region where regulars like Jack, Jim and others gather of an evening to partake in a bit of craic. (Craic is the popular Irish term for fun … entertainment … friendly conversation, and trading local news and gossip. It’s pronounced like ‘crack’.)
On an evening when the wind outside is out-bellowing the banshees in their bastions, Jack and Jim are spending another typical evening at Brendan’s when Finbar Mack, of late an irregular, drops in with a newcomer to the region: lovely Valerie.

Valerie has just moved to Leitram from Dublin and is hoping to fit in. The pub denizens give the lady a warm welcome and then start apprising her of the history of the area. With tongues loosened courtesy of the standard pub lubricants, the tales start spilling out at full flow. As this is the west of Ireland, the stories quickly gravitate to tales of the supernatural beings (such as fairies and ghosts) that share the region with the living. These accounts then lead to a deeply moving personal story from one of the five.

And that’s basically the whole package McPherson delivers in The Weir: five people sharing good cheer and dreary stories. What action there is can only be found in stories as they’re told. The appeal of The Weir comes from its well-drawn characters and the lushness of the language. Conor McPherson’s mastery of language is evidenced in the dialogue he spins out. The dialogue, enchanting in and of itself, clearly defines the characters in the play. In fact, because of its lack of a strong plot, The Weir seems to be the impressive work of a young playwright still learning his craft, displaying his skills at dialogue and character construction, but not quite ready to put these skills into a compelling story.

Fortunately, the cast and crew up in East Falls make everything in the play come alive well. Although the Old Academy Players is community theatre, this production has a certain professional polish to it. For instance, the set is a quite credible facsimile of a small pub in rural Ireland. (Although I doubt those folks would have that framed jersey reading ‘Ireland’ on the back wall.)

The set was designed by Christopher Wunder, who is also the director of this production. (The program informs us that Wunder had the help of over a dozen people, including two cast members, in constructing the set.) Wunder’s direction of this show deserves even more praise than his set.

Wunder guided the cast well. The pacing here is commendable, as is the blocking. Proper pacing and blocking are essential in making such a loquacious play successful, as otherwise the performance could eventually get tedious, even with such rich dialogue. Wunder and the cast see to it that this does not happen.

Director and cast also handle that dialogue well. It’s worth noting that this production apparently had no dialect coach, and yet the five actors served up credible Irish accents. More, the timing is spot on: lines are delivered in such a way that the humor in the script comes out nicely. Yes, despite the darkness in the work, there are also a good many laughs waiting to be drawn from the exchanges, lightening that darkness. This performance provides those laughs in an easy manner.   

As to the cast …Stephen Negro plays Jack, though he’s probably too young for the part. A little grey dusting of the hair would have been advisable. At the performance I caught, Negro was generally strong in his portrayal of this fellow, but his Irish accent did slip off several times during the performance, mainly in the early going. Nonetheless, Jack is a key character here, and Stephen Negro gave a solid rendition of this thorny character.

The role of Brendan, the pub proprietor, in some ways presents the biggest challenge to an actor in this play. In this edition, that challenge was handed to Norman Burnosky III. As the pub owner and barkeep, Brendan is the main provider of the craic, but as McPherson wrote him, he’s also the least emphatic of the five. As pub proprietor, Brendan needs to be a solid presence without being obtrusive. A tough assignment, but Burnosky managed to hit all the notes fittingly.

Vail Guiltieri plays Jim, the odd-job man who offers a creepy tale from his turn as a gravedigger. Guiltieri was convincing as this catch-as-catch-can character, but he did have some problems with his enunciation. Some of his lines were muffled, making them hard to pick up. Thankfully, his enunciation did improve as the play runs on.
One aspect of Guiltieri’s performance deserves unstinting praise: as the play is wending its way to an end, he delivered a perfect rendition of someone who’s mildly drunk – and that is one of the hardest bits to pull off convincingly. Actors often somehow miss this key fact: someone who’s mildly drunk usually wants to cover the fact that he’s inebriated. Guiltieri moves with just the right amount of awkwardness to let us know that he quaffed just a bit too much.

Ryan Kirchner gave the strongest performance of the five as Finbar Mack. When he’s pouring out his stories, Kirchner commands the space. His gestures impart a solid subtext to his lines, and he reveals the different phases of the character well. Kirchner also captures the right demeanor for Finbar whether the fellow is trying to be deferential to Valerie or when he swings into the still-one-of- the-boys mode.

As the only female and the only big-city (Dublin) refugee in the script, the role of Valerie is crucial, and Lauren Kirchner handled the part well. Early in her performance, she was convincing as the outsider gently adjusting to a new milieu. Less convincing were some of Kirchner’s reactions to the stories told by the others. A few of her gestures seemed overplayed. However, in the most important part of Valerie’s role – when Valerie finally relates her own story – Lauren Kirchner was not only convincing, but quite moving. That speech is at the heart of The Weir, and it was clearly the highlight of this production.

Another admirable feature of the five cast members: they’re all good listeners. In Acting 101 classes, it’s drilled into you that a successful actor is one who can listen well to the other actors. In a dialogue-heavy play such as The Weir, this skill is absolutely essential. The quintet of this production proved strong in this area, making their Weir that much better.

In addition to being the director and set designer, Christopher Wunder was also he sound and lighting designer, the latter duties shared with Annie Hnatko and Steve Hnatko. The lighting played a minor but important role in supplying mood and contrast to the production.

And to end where we began, let’s return to Oscar Wilde. Wilde had once noted that “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” Conor McPherson may have had that quote in mind as he was writing The Weir. It’s a play laden with complex and tainted truths. The Old Academy Players team proved quite able to bring those truths to light, and to make this production a worthwhile experience.

The Weir runs at the Old Academy Players theatre, 3544 Indian Creek Lane, (East Falls) Philadelphia this Friday, Saturday and Sunday, March 15, 16 and 17. Friday and Saturday performances are at 8:00 pm., Sunday’s at 2:00 p.m.



The Trivia Trail

In a poll run by London’s Royal National Theatre, The Weir finished at number 40 in the countdown of the 100 most significant plays of the 20th century. But that was but faint praise compared to how the highly respected British theatre critic Michael Billington assessed the play. He listed The Weir as one of the 101 greatest plays of all time in his 2015 book The 101 Greatest Plays: From Antiquity to the Present.

As to the characters’ fixation on the supernatural: it is a typical feature of that region. One side of my family has its roots in the nearby west Irish county of Mayo. (Both of my maternal great-grandparents were natives of Mayo.) Tales of ghostly visitations, apparitions, the keeling of the banshees – these were all a frequent part of my family lore. I could only nod knowingly as the characters in The Weir offered their tales.