Production archive
The Weir
2006 season · Production archive
In this tale of the supernatural, Conor McPherson demonstrates his remarkable skill as a riveting storyteller. In a bar in rural Ireland, the local men swap spooky stories in an attempt to impress a young woman from Dublin who has recently moved into a nearby “haunted” house. However, the tables are soon turned when she spins a yarn of her own.
The house billed it with a single question: When was the last time you were afraid?
- Written by
- Conor McPherson
- Directed by
- Terry Dodd
- Ran
- October 6 – November 4, 2006
About the production
The Weir is five people in a bar telling four ghost stories, and almost nothing else happens. It premiered at the Royal Court in 1997 and has since become one of the most widely produced Irish plays of its generation, part of a body of work whose national home is the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Its whole effect depends on the audience being close enough to feel the pauses.
A seventy-five-seat basement is therefore about the best room the play can have. It is also not lost on anyone that the Vic came with ghost stories of its own: actors who worked there told them freely, and the house never discouraged it. The director’s note, written as a recipe for a drink called The Weir, is kept in this archive.
What the press said
“The Denver Victorian Playhouse production of The Weir is the third I’ve seen in six years, and it’s easily the best and most moving…the play draws you inexorably in.”
Where it sat in the season
It was production 7 of 8 in the Vic’s 2006 season. It followed Lysistrata (Aug 18 – Sep 23, 2006) and was followed by Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge (Nov 17 – Dec 23, 2006). The full year is set out on the season calendars page, and every production the theatre staged between 2005 and 2011 is indexed in the production archive.
The house’s standard pattern was Friday and Saturday evenings at 7.30 with a Sunday matinee, over a run of six to eight weeks. With seventy-five seats, a full eight-week run put roughly 1,800 people through the room — which a 500-seat theatre does in four nights, and which is the single fact that explains most of what the Vic chose to programme.
Also in this section: the director’s programme note for this production.
This page is part of the production archive of the Denver Victorian Playhouse, a seventy-five-seat theatre in the basement of a northwest Denver house that staged its last performance in 2011. Details here are restored from the theatre’s own records as they were published at the time; press quotations are reproduced with their original attributions and nothing has been added to them.