Amanda Quaid
Photo: Irish RepFour months into the coronavirus pandemic, the short-term prospects for theater in America have become clear—up to a point. With a handful of exceptions, every important company in the U.S. has canceled or rescheduled its shows through the end of 2020 and hopes to reopen at some point in the first half of 2021. And what will they do until then? A fast-growing number of companies say they’ll fill in the gap with webcasts, though few have described their plans in any detail. To date, the webcasts I’ve reviewed in this space were mostly taped prior to the lockdown, but several companies have also streamed newly produced Zoom-based performances and play readings, some of them “staged” with striking resourcefulness.
The Weir
Irish Repertory Theatre, New York
Viewable online through July 25, free
To see the performance schedule and register for viewing, go to irishrep.org. For more information, call 212-727-2737
Of these, the best was the New York-based Irish Repertory Theatre’s “performance on screen” (as the company billed it) of Brian Friel’s “Molly Sweeney,” a three-character play whose interconnected monologues were ideally suited to the narrow limitations of Zoom. Now the Irish Rep has topped itself with an even more technically ambitious revival of Conor McPherson’s “The Weir,” a five-actor play that the company produced to great acclaim in 2013 and remounted two years later. Despite certain minor failings, it is by far the most impressive socially distanced theater webcast I have seen, one to which other companies would do well to look for inspiration as they try to figure out how best to reconnect with their audiences.
First seen in this country on Broadway in 1999, “The Weir” is, like so many of Mr. McPherson’s plays, an exercise in storytelling. It centers on four ghost stories told by a quartet of Irish drinkers (Dan Butler, Sean Gormley, John Keating and Amanda Quaid) who are forced by a storm to hole up in a village pub (the fifth person, played by Tim Ruddy, is the bartender). The common theme that binds together their homely tales is the loneliness at the heart of the human condition, and each tale is progressively more unsettling—and more believable. As one of the men remarks in passing at evening’s end: “The future was all ahead of me. Years and years of it. I could feel it coming. All those things you’ve got to face on your own. All by yourself.”
Dan Butler
Photo: Irish RepThis revival is directed, as were its predecessors, by Ciarán O’Reilly, and he is working with an ensemble of Irish Rep vets: Messrs. Butler, Gormley and Keating appeared in the 2013 production of “The Weir,” and Ms. Quaid replaced Tessa Klein in the 2015 remounting. Their performances are unexaggerated and quietly compelling, and it is a revelation to see them all, Ms. Quaid in particular, in tight head-and-shoulders closeups that charge the tiniest of facial expressions with the muzzle velocity of a point-blank gunshot.
Tim Ruddy
Photo: Irish RepWhile it would have been perfectly feasible to “stage” “The Weir” as a Zoom reading, Mr. O’Reilly’s revival is not that but a full-fledged small-scale performance. The five actors, who were taped at separate locations in five different states, are costumed and use hand props (among them glasses of foaming stout). They are shown not in Zoom boxes but in full-screen shots, and they are all electronically superimposed in front of backdrops that look to me like high-resolution photographs of the set designed by Charlie Corcoran on which “The Weir” was performed in New York in 2013 and 2015, lighted so carefully that you often forget that they aren’t real.
John Keating
Photo: Irish RepThe actors mostly perform standing, moving around the virtual stage with unexpected physical freedom. Even though only one of them can be shown on screen at any given moment, Mr. O’Reilly has staged their individual performances in such a way as to subtly suggest direct physical interaction, and M. Florian Staab’s dark-and-stormy-night sound design heightens the verisimilitude still further. Some of the actor-to-actor cutting in the conversational scenes is a bit hectic, and longer reaction shots would have helped smooth it out (you don’t always need to see who’s talking at any given moment). For the most part, though, Mr. O’Reilly and his colleagues have gone a long way toward creating the illusion of an actual onstage performance.
Sean Gormley
Photo: Irish RepIf, like me, you find Zoom-based theater webcasts to be visually constricting, you will be dazzled by the varied ways in which “The Weir” circumvents their now-familiar limitations. The total effect is nicely described in a program note by Mr. O’Reilly and Charlotte Moore, the company’s artistic director, who says that as each character “tells his/her story, we are reminded of the power of the word and how real empathy and self-forgiveness happens when people gather and listen. In the larger picture, this is what live theater should do. We hope that this hybrid form offers something of this ancient rite.” So it does—decidedly and movingly—and as a result, the Irish Rep is now way out in front of every other company in America when it comes to marrying technical innovation with artistic quality.
—Mr. Teachout is the Journal’s drama critic.
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