“The Weir" at Riverside Theatre -- October 14 through 30.
Friday, October 14, through Sunday, October 30
Riverside Theatre, 119 East College Street, Iowa City IA
The 1999 winner of the United Kingdom's Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play, Conor McPherson's arresting and chilling drama The Weir enjoys an appropriate-for-Halloween run at Iowa City's Riverside Theatre from October 14 through 30, the work praised by the New York Times as “beautifully devious” and by the Evening Standard as “a modern masterpiece.”
Set in a small bar called The Weir, in a rural town in Ireland, McPherson's lauded stage piece finds three local men settling down for the night, enjoying good beer and company. Their normal routine is shaken up, however, when their friend Finland enters the bar and introduces them to Valerie, an attractive woman from Dublin who has just moved into an old haunted house in the town. As the night (and the amount of consumed liquor) progresses, each local from the bar starts to tell a tale of ghostly happenings in the town, and what starts as innocent braggadocio between the men turns into a genuine fright when Valerie reveals a real, haunted tale of her own from the past. Examining chances of missed opportunity and the loneliness that results in it, The Weir is a haunting play with its roots in Irish folklore, with The Guardian's Michael Billington including the title among all-time best in his book The 101 Greatest Plays: From Antiquity to the Present.
Directing McPherson's work for Riverside is the company's producing artistic director Adam Knight, whose recent directorial achievements have included Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale and Henry V, as well as the world-premiere presentation of Eden Prairie, 1971. Under the stage management of Maggie McClellan, the cost is composed of Tim Budd, Bob Mussett, Aaron Stonerook, Noel VanDenBosch, and Actor's Equity Association member Elliott Bales. And with Sara Ashbaugh as the production's assistant stage manager, additional members of Knight's creative team include scenic designer S. Benjamin Farrar; costume designer Abigail Mansfield Coleman; lighting designer Lauren Duffie; sound designer Bri Atwood; props designer Stephen Polchert; board operator Jeremy Richardson; and dialect coach Katy Hahn.
The Weir runs at the Iowa City Theatre October 14 through 30, with performances Thursdays through Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. Admission is $15-35, and more information and tickets are available by calling (319)259-7099 and visiting RiversideTheatre.org.
