Next winter Jarrott Productions will be venturing into the darkness once again to bring you a beautiful work about the unknown, the mysterious, and the supernatural.

Jarrott Productions’ Caroline Cearley, who took you on the spooky journey to Mirror Lake, will helm our production of Conor McPherson’s The Weir, a delicate balance of storytelling and meditations on loneliness, grief, and human connection.

First performed at the Royal Court Theatre in 1997, it’s a play that London Theatre Direct says “never shouts; it whispers and reminds us that stories are not just entertainment, but a way of making sense of what we can’t explain.”

Learn why Caroline is drawn to this play below!

My mother’s family comes from rural Virginia, and I was raised on their stories. The ones that stayed with me had no explanation. Footsteps in an empty house; a cat that accounced a death before it happened; a dog that walked a lost woman home and then vanished. Nobody ever tried to explain them, and nobody needed to. The telling was the point. To hear one was to be let into something, and to tell one was to say, I am a part of something I don’t understand. Is it possible you are too?

That question is the engine of The Weir. On a stormy night in a country pub, five people confide the stories they can’t account for. Above them hangs the weir itself, the dam that carried electricity into rural Ireland, the seam where the modern world arrived and the old one never fully left. McPherson’s characters live on that seam. So do we.

We have gotten very good at answers. Any question can be settled before the wonder of it has a chance to land. What we traded away is a certain closeness, the kind that comes only from sitting with another person in front of something neither of you can resolve. For one night, The Weir gives it back. A room, a drink, a storm, and the nerve to grapple with the mysteries we carry and what we leave behind.

I can’t wait for you to join us in the pub to meet Jack, Brendan, Jim, Finbar, and Valerie.

Caroline Cearley