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New York Times
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘The Weir' Review: A Few Pints to Help the Ghost Stories Go Down Easy
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. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In ‘Irishtown' and ‘The Black Wolfe Tone,' Where Are the Rolling Hills?
In the rehearsal room of the Irishtown Players, the posters on the walls are a sampler of the company's performance history: 20th-century classics, almost all. Brian Friel's 'Dancing at Lughnasa' is up there, of course, and Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot.' Martin McDonagh's 'The Beauty Queen of Leenane,' too, and Conor McPherson's 'The Weir.' The only unfamiliar title, 'The Happy Leper of Larne,' almost winks from its frame, suggesting a maudlin-cheery cousin to 'The Cripple of Inishmaan.' For the Irishtown Players — the fictional Dublin troupe at the center of Ciara Elizabeth Smyth's new backstage comedy, 'Irishtown' — 'The Happy Leper' was a hit. Now some producers are bringing the company to Broadway in the author's follow-up play. But with mere weeks until they leave for New York, the playwright, Aisling (Brenda Meaney), has gone rogue. Her just-delivered script is a contemporary legal drama about sexual assault, set in England. To Constance (a flawlessly funny Kate Burton), the ranking company member, such a play is not Irish at all. Poppy (Angela Reed), the play's British director, points out that by definition it is, because Aisling is. 'Yes,' Constance allows, her voice rising theatrically, 'but where are the rolling hills, where is the bar, why is everyone alive?' The line gets a healthy laugh at Irish Repertory Theater, whose audience is steeped in the Irish canon, and whose perennial subject is identity and culture, even when those topics aren't overt in a play. In 'Irishtown,' they are central; the title, too, nods to them. Dublin's suburban Irishtown has its roots in the 15th century, when the English forbade the Irish from living inside the city. Directed by Nicola Murphy Dubey on a set by Colm McNally, 'Irishtown' is a play about both escaping creative ghettoization and exploiting it as a shortcut to popularity. Constance and her cast mate Quin (Kevin Oliver Lynch), certainly, would much prefer to be going to Broadway in a play that let them do the kinds of Irish accents that Americans lap up. Not that Quin has many of those in his repertoire. Told in rehearsal to use a Derry accent, he mangles it so egregiously that their Derry cast mate, Siofra (Saoirse-Monica Jackson of 'Derry Girls,' making her New York stage debut), rises from her chair chest out, as if she is about to fight him. The ideal form for 'Irishtown' is probably leaner, and Aisling as written could benefit from a bit more definition. But Burton, whose last performance is on Sunday, is fascinating; Constance has all the soft malice of a tea cozy laced with poison. And when she, Siofra and Quin unleash their collective knowledge of Irish plays to devise an alternative to Aisling's script, there is riffing galore. One of Smyth's own recent plays, 'Lie Low,' by the way, is a contemporary piece about the trauma and pervasiveness of sexual assault. With 'Irishtown,' she slyly makes the point that cultural identity can be used as a constraint, no matter its relationship to reality. Downstairs, through a corridor lined with old Irish Rep show posters, Dubey has directed another world premiere on the small second stage: 'The Black Wolfe Tone,' a solo show written and performed by Kwaku Fortune. In pajama pants, slippers and a hooded robe, he plays Kevin, a young man who notices the audience almost immediately and rationalizes our existence in a way that makes sense to his unwell mind. 'I created you,' he says, his eyes bright. 'Yup.' Kevin unspools his past aloud in this smoking area of concrete and tile, where a tree in the corner shows no signs of life. (Set and costume are by Maree Kearns.) The doors to one side lead back into the psychiatric hospital. Kevin, who has bipolar disorder, is a patient. Developed and presented by Irish Rep and the Dublin company Fishamble, the show came from their joint Transatlantic Commissions Program. The son of a West African mother and an Irish father, Kevin speaks Irish, sings Irish rebel songs when he's feeling boisterous, channels Irish heroes in the midst of a manic episode: 'I'm Fionn MacCumhaill, I'm Michael Collins, I'm Theobald Wolfe Tone,' he tells himself. This is a play about mental illness, and profoundly about identity — the inheritance of it; the fracturing of it; the ugly, racist questioning of it. Like Kevin, it is as Irish as can be.
