Programme note
The Weir
Director’s programme note by Terry Dodd, 2006.
2006 season · Programme note
- Production
- The Weir
- Director
- Terry Dodd
- Ran
- October 6 – November 4, 2006
The note, as printed
A bartender’s guide on how to make a drink called “The Weir”:
Take the loneliness of an Irish landscape, northwest corner to be sure (“if this isn’t the end of the world,” my dad used to say, “you can see it from here”). Add centuries of paganism and Catholicism. Let settle.
Add the town drunk (male), the town Republican (older male), the town bartender (younger male), and one cantankerous old b—— (male, of course). Now humanise.
To all of the above ingredients, most importantly, add one feminine soul. Lovely. Transplanted. Searching. Add fairies, Irish whiskey, ghosts, Irish whiskey, spirits, Irish whiskey, spirits and finally more spirits. Serve at room temperature. Cheers!
Why this survives
Written as a cocktail recipe, this is the shortest of the Denver Victorian’s five surviving programme notes and the only one that is a joke all the way through. One word has been lightly softened here; otherwise it is reproduced as printed.
McPherson’s play is five people in a bar telling ghost stories, so the conceit is doing real work: the note lists the ingredients in the order the play adds them. The production page carries the synopsis and the notice the staging drew from the city’s alt-weekly.
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.