Jim Norton regales Michelle Fairley while bartender Brian Coyle looks on in "The Weir"

There are certain stock elements to a good ghost story. Objects of domesticity subverted and turned ominous--beds, chairs, stairways. Common noises that signify a contact from sources unknown--a knocking, a ringing phone. There is usually someone dead, often a child. When these elements are tied together in just the right way, and the appropriate details thrown in--a barking dog chasing a car, a fire burned down to its last ember--and the tale is told on a dark and windswept night, the blood chills, and the story creeps darkly into your mind like a shadow growing slowly on your bedroom wall.

And it helps when the story is told with an Irish accent.

In "The Weir", a drama by Irish playwright Conor McPherson now playing at the Walter Kerr Theater, four men and one woman gather at a pub in rural Ireland and swap ghost stories. The woman, a relatively young and attractive lass named Valerie (Michelle Fairley), has just moved down from Dublin, and her presence at the pub finds the men competing to impress through rounds of verbal peacockery. Five stories in all are told, one by the prosperous Finbar (Dermot Crowley) who sold Valerie her new house, one by the mild and unassuming Jim (Kieran Ahern), two by the older bachelor Jack (Jim Norton), and one by Valerie herself. Only the bartender Brendan (Brendan Coyle) goes without a story. I guess as a bartender, it's his job to listen.

Of the five stories, four are ghost stories, growing in creepiness until we get to Valerie's, which is ostensibly the hardest of the lot in that it is the most personal. Still, I found Jim's to be the most unsettling, in that it had a dark sexual element which added a nice twist of terrestrial aberration to a traditional story of the supernatural. Of course, all of these stories build upon each other, and Jim's tale is particularly horrifying in the light of Valerie's, which comes later . . .

"The Weir" is all talk, all in this one pub. Much of the incidental dialogue slipped past me--talk of sheep, and land, and sisters--but once the stories got started, and the lights went down just a bit, I was riveted. And as the night wears on, and Brendan tops off Valerie's white wine, the cumulative affect of all the ghosts and blarney is a powerful one.

That would be a goosebump-covered thumbs up from me on "The Weir".