Ciarán O’Reilly is a founding member of The Irish Repertory Theatre, the only company in North America dedicated to bringing Irish and Irish-American works to the stage. He is also the director of The Weir, the current production at the Irish Rep, concluding on August 23rd. The Weir is part ghost story, part human memory play; it’s one of celebrated Irish playwright’s Conor McPherson’s most-produced works. O’Reilly responded to some interview questions by email about his role with the production.

This is not the first time The Irish Repertory Theatre has put on a production of The Weir. What makes the material so appealing, and why keep coming back to it?

This is indeed our second mounting of this play. I suppose like any good tale, in bears repeating. When we closed the show in September of 2013, we were exploring moving it to another Off Broadway theatre. That move did not materialize and we always felt the production did not realize its full audience potential. The material seems to strike a chord -- perhaps people like to sit in a bar and hear a good story.

Is there something new you have discovered in The Weir throughout the process of this particular production?

The Weir is comprised of a thousand little moments where the characters discover things about themselves and others in the room. It is not a plot driven play -- the drama is in the discovery of each character in the course of a story revealing something about themselves for the first time. So yes, in rehearsals and performance, this intuitive cast all stumbled on nuances and truths that evaded them on the first go around.

The naturalistic, almost meandering dialogue in the play makes watching it feel voyeuristic - as if we as audience members are quiet patrons hiding in the back of the pub. Were any of your directorial decisions intended to enhance this voyeuristic quality of the play?

Fortunately for us, the physical intimacy of the DR2 theatre does a great deal of the work for us in bringing the audience right into the room. The natural flow of the language and the slice of life quality of the play also draws the audience into this eavesdropping mode. It’s a genius that Conor [McPherson] has for making it all so real.

Obviously, oral storytelling is a major theme of The Weir. Does the way Conor McPherson writes stories-within-a-story impact the way you approach they play as a director?

I don’t feel like I approach this play any different from any other. Whether a character is telling a story for the sheer enjoyment of spinning a yarn or another is telling it from a need to reveal something deeply personal, each actor must find his way to that moment and make it real. I grew up not far from where this play is set and know these people well. I suppose I have an acute antenna for a false note, but with this cast, I did not have to work too hard. My notes were minimal. They found it themselves.

Despite the bleak, sometimes tragic content of the play, this production feels comforting and almost uplifting at its end. And yet, the writing could easily be taken in a much darker, less hopeful direction. Was there an effort to guide this production to a more positive conclusion?

None whatsoever. I think that audiences do leave the theatre in a good mood because they have witnessed people who have gone through minor and major life tragedies and have lived to tell the tale. By telling their story they have perhaps turned a corner in the healing process and are the stronger for it. So are we who listened.