BY CONOR MCPHERSON
As the evening settles on a rural Irish town, Jack and Jim shuffle into Brendan’s local pub. The news that a pretty woman from Dublin has moved to their town on her own becomes a topic of interest for the three bachelors. But whenFinbar, a former resident of the town, brings Valerie to the pub as the final stop on an introductory tour of the town, the mood in the bar slowly begins to change.
With pints in hand and intentions to impress, the townies one by one compete for her attentions with stories of the town’s folklore and its ghosts, which begin to metamorphose into increasingly personal confessions of love, loss andloneliness. When it becomes time for Valerie to tell her story, its eerie and astonishing truth becomes the most moving tale of all. McPherson’s play is about the human need to connect through the stories we tell about ourselves, the potential trauma of loneliness when we can’t, and the sometimes antithetical but equally driving need for quiet and solitude.