By KEVIN NANCE
Contributing Writer

Irish playwright Conor McPherson’s “The Weir” begins with a series of ghost stories. Set in a tiny pub in an Irish village on a cold night with the wind howling about the building like a wolf, five lonely souls gather to share a glass or two and, by the way, the stories that have been sitting on their hearts. By nature a superstitious lot, four fellows spin strange tales salted with supernatural elements including the famous fairy road, said to form a path for the sprites and leprechauns of Irish folklore. Then Valerie, a woman who’s just moved to town, tells her own ghost story, much more recent and closer to home, which chills the men — and the audience — to the bone.

Director Joe Ferrell’s new staging of the play, opening Friday at Antagonist Productions, promises plenty of chills. The veteran cast features Joe Gatton and Tim Hull as two of the men, Jack and Finbar, whose sometimes troubled history with each other dates back to their childhoods; Walter Tunis as Brendan, who runs the pub in a spare room of his home; Jesse Hungerford as Jim, a regular customer; and Holly Brady as Valerie, whose presence in this typically all-male environment makes this chatty bunch even more loquacious than usual.

Undermain recently caught up with Ferrell and Gatton for a rollicking interview at Lexington’s West Sixth Brewing. Over a couple of wee pints and a fair amount of good-natured back-and-forth, these two local theater luminaries — each with plenty of Irish blood in his veins — ended up telling, among other things, their own ghost stories.

Kevin Nance: When I saw the original Broadway production of “The Weir” way back in 1999 with my friend Fenton Johnson, he described it as “an ocean of words.” I think what he meant was that seeing the play is very much a verbal/aural experience — it’s about the pleasure of talking, to some extent, and listening to these people talk, the musicality of the language. For American audiences, I think, it’s also wonderful to hear, when they’re done well, Irish accents.

Joe Ferrell: Oh yes, it is.

Joe Gatton: It’s also the culture — all the different ways you can call somebody an idiot, for example. The “idget” —

Joe Ferrell: The beloved idget, yes. But we’re also not doing the Lucky Charms accent.

KN: Oh, I know. In preparation for this interview I looked at some YouTube clips of some American productions of the play, and a lot of the comments seemed to be from Irish people commenting on how poor the accents were.

JG: [Heaves a sigh] It’s always going to be that way.

KN: Is that a scary thing when you produce the play?

JG: For an actor it is, yeah. And it’s a double-edged sword. Like Joe said, you don’t want to do Lucky Charms, but you also have to be aware that you can’t be so bang-on-the-line, as somebody says in the play, that nobody in an American audience can understand you.

KN: Certainly the play invites you to luxuriate in rural Irishness. It’s a classic setting: They’re sitting around the fire on a stormy night in a pub.

JF: A rural pub.

JG: Which is really just a room set aside in someone’s house.

KN: And it’s dark and windy and cold.

JG: But they make light of the cold by saying, “It’s balmy enough.” [Laughs.]

KN: So the scene is conducive to telling ghost stories, or at least stories with some aspect of the weird — by the way, do you think it’s an accident that the word weir is so close to weird?

JF: I really don’t think so. There is a connection, however subtle.

JG: When I first started looking at the play, I thought maybe weir referred to something supernatural —

KN: Like werewolf —

JG: But no, a weir is a dam.

JF: But that ends up being fairly important. It’s a dam —

JG: A blockage, yes. The center of all these stories is this house, which is a weir in the sense that it’s a blockage that’s in the way. Just like the weir is in the way of the water, that house is in the way of the fairy road.

JF: And some of the ghost stories are in the way of some of the individuals who have carried those stories. And by telling those stories, you end up removing the blockage —

JG: It’s a catharsis, yeah.

KN: So they all tell stories, and each one has a ghostly quality. The story of the fairy road, for example.

JG: The fairy road is not really a road, but it’s a row of things, like mile markers, for the fairies. A fairy fort is a circle of trees. In a superstitious culture — the Irish are very superstitious — there was an incident where they were widening a road and messed up some of the trees. And then they set a record for how many awful automobile accidents happened on that stretch of road. So it’s like, see, we told you!

KN: Don’t mess with the fairies!

JG: And in this instance, the house is in the way of the fairies trying to get to where they bathe. So that’s an issue.

KN: And that turns out to be the house that Valerie is now renting. And then comes the point where the rubber meets the fairy road: when she tells her story —

JG: Oh my God.

KN: We’re not going to spill the beans on that, except to say that her story is different from the others in that it’s obviously real, and it’s the one in which something genuinely supernatural may well have happened. It shakes them all up.

JF: I will say that the stories that the guys tell all have a profound effect on them. That’s one of the things we see happening at this gathering for all the characters.

JG: Each story gets progressively more personal.

JF: We’re beginning to discover in rehearsal that what really is going on — which we’re trying to find without hitting people over the head — is a subtext in which each of these people is made to face some of the things that they’ve been carrying with them for a long time.

JG: Yeah. There’s so much in this about loneliness.

KN: And they live in this isolated place —

JG: That’s been bypassed by the main road, yes.

KN: So they’re all vulnerable in a way. You know, “The Weir” came out around the same time that another Irish playwright, Martin McDonagh, was coming along — I think his play “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” was playing simultaneously on Broadway. But to me, McDonagh is much, much darker than McPherson, who has a kind of humanity and positivity in his work that is not much in evidence in McDonagh.

JG: There’s some hope, yeah.

KN: And there’s a movement in this play from the initial awkwardness of the characters to a sort of intimacy and shared support.

JF: Yes, there’s some rancor between Jack and Finbar that could have led to a very ugly ending, but it doesn’t, because they have a lot in common. They’re both very attached to the land, to one another, to their stories. Finbar makes a point, at the end, to shake everybody’s hand.

JG: Have you ever had an incident where you were absolutely scared out of your wits for no reason, where you were sure that what you were afraid of was there?

KN: Yeah, I have.

JG: I think we’ve all had a moment like that. I was home by myself one time, got high and started thinking there was a ghost. It was weird —

JF: There’s that word again. [Laughs.]

JG: And that’s the vulnerability of these people when they tell their stories. Finbar thinks they’re all going to think he’s nuts, but it’s very real when you’re in the moment.

JF: Joe and I are both dyed-in-the-wool Irish, you know. My whole dad’s side of the family is all —

JG: Mine’s tainted with some Greek and German and so on, but yeah.

JF: I remember when I was a kid, a freshman in high school, and for some reason, I became attached to a rock. I carried it around with me —

JG: Oh lord dear God.

JF: It was a part of me for the longest time.

JG: You had a pet rock before they had pet rocks!

JF: Yes, and at times it was scary. I tried to throw it away three times. The last time worked, but is this not weird? And I keep wondering, was that the Irish in me?

KN: It was like Frodo and the Ring! That rock was your Precious.

JF: [Laughs] You got it.

KN: When you’re of Irish descent and you’re talking about death — if you’ve experienced the loss of a close family member, as Valerie has — a lot of people have felt as if they’ve had contact with the dead. I’m sure you’re familiar with James Joyce’s story, “The Dead,” in which you get the feeling that the idea of death is central to Irish culture. To some extent, Irish culture is death culture. But the sense of talking to the dead, or being contacted by the dead, is something that probably most people have had a whiff of.

JF: I think that’s true.