It is a shame that smoking is not permitted in the Little Theater — the thick cloud wafting through the air was the only thing lacking in the otherwise perfect Irish pub created in the small black box theatre for Conor McPherson’s The Weir. Hardwood floors, shelves lined with bottles, old pictures on the walls and a stained glass window gave the room the unmistakable feel of a familiar bar full of good friends. I found myself just begging for a Guinness and a smoke.

The play is set in a rural village on the coast of Ireland where a group of local men meet regularly in their favorite pub. Their normal routine of joking, swapping and betting tips is interrupted by the arrival of a young woman from Dublin who has bought a house in the area with the help of an old regular at the pub, Finbar.

Finbar’s presence is enough to stir up the evening. He, unlike the others, has moved out of town, made money in the city and now has returned to flaunt his great success and pretty client. The men are anxious to show off for their new guest and hide their resentment towards Finbar as they begin a long evening of drinking and talk. After a pint or so, the history of the area comes up in conversation and soon the men are weaving tales of local folklore, conjuring images of faeries and ghosts in haunted houses. Jack, the charming but bitter old mechanic, is first to tell a story, and as he lowers his voice and leans into the bar, the audience settles into the evening, prepared for the tale to unfold.

Each character has a story to tell, each more vivid than the next, ranging from the benign ghost story to more terrifying encounters and pivotal moments in the characters’ lives. A final story, however, told by the younger mechanic Jim, finally provokes their female guest, Valery to tell a story of her own, and suddenly the evening changes to something entirely more grave.

The force of Valery’s account brings a deadening silence to the pub. The men search for ways to comfort this woman who has lost her daughter and is now haunted by the child’s spirit, but find themselves deeply disturbed and grasping for explanations. The stories, once unthreatening, are now revealed as testaments of each character’s pain and the feeling of fear and entrapment. Valery has brought to the pub what each of them has long feared but had not yet confronted.

In the end only Jack and Valery remain as Brendan tidies up his pub. The evening settles, and rather than finding some new hope for the future, the three seem content to remain uncertain, to find comfort in one another and to be sure to return again to the pub next week. It seems appropriate that no conclusion is reached, for while the characters never face up to their loss and fear, one feels certain that they will remain for each other as best they can.

Nothing extraordinary happens in this play, and it is all the richer because of this. The play is, as cast members lovingly characterize it, “a slice of life,” and the simple quality of an evening among friends never changes even as the stories become more powerful and dark.  Director Josh Luxenberg expresses the challenge of directing a play highly naturalistic and without a climatic change. “The play can be really static,” he admits, but adds that the stories bring an element to the play that is both challenging for the actors and engaging for the audience.

Learning to tell a story, rather than performing traditional dramatic dialogue, has proven to be a difficult task both for the director and the actors, but the members of the cast all agree that the vividness of the stories provide the necessary suspense.

“How do you make the language come to life?” Luxenberg asks, but truly, the language has a life of its own. Luxenberg has picked a marvelous script to work with. Conor McPherson has a great power with language and a beautiful understanding of the simple and poetic way in which we share stories and converse with loved ones. The actors have nearly captured this art for themselves, showing an impressive talent for the dialect and a beautiful ability to listen.

The play is certainly not without its challenges, especially considering that it requires creating older characters in order to truly capture the feeling of aging, worn out men who have little else but this pub they share their stories in. It is unfortunate that the actors never quite achieved this sense of age and loneliness. The male actors seemed entirely too youthful and too handsome, in fact, to appear as though they were quite worn down by life or long past their prime. Only the female lead, senior Jessica Bedwinek, was able to fully capture the sadness and pain of her character. Her performance was bold and intricate, yet matched the naturalness and sublety of the script. It could have only been stronger if her fellow actors had achieved the nuance and depth she accomplished. Without this strength of ensemble, the production often lacked the desperation and realism necessary for such a play.

To their credit, the cast succeeded in engaging the crowd, captivating the audience with each story told – though much of this is due in part to the quality of the script. The incredible power of the atmosphere made up for any lack of cohesion in the ensemble, and one did, by the end of the production, develop a real intimacy with the characters on stage, as though secretly allowed into their evening gathering. It is lovely to catch yourself laughing as though sitting beside the character, sharing in their amusement and also in their grief.

A weir is nothing more than a dam, built on a river to control the flow of water, but in the play it represents what Conor McPherson calls a “breakthrough.” Though no climatic change occurs in the play, the characters do form a connection while finding a way to confront loss and the past. Perhaps the breakthrough that occurs happens more between the audience and these characters, as we are brought into their lives and come to understand them in their loneliness, their simplicity and their tenderness. I, for one, was very glad to have spent an evening with such a charming and thoughtful production. Cheers, men...