GHOST STORIES : 'The Weir' & 'Civil War'.

Once upon a time, on a dark and stormy night, there was a story. And because there was a story, there were also listeners, because everyone loves a story. The constant bombardment of zippy visual advertising images may have caused our listening skills to atrophy; our attention spans may rarely stretch beyond the sound byte; we may be dazzled by Hollywood special effects. But we still love a story. Some of our favorite activities-following a sports team, or reading a newspaper, or collecting stamps, bottlecaps, or Art Deco cocktail shakers-are delightful or soothing because they give us a sense that our lives are twined around stories. Experience bordered by stories seems more whole, more meaningful, less random.

The good old-fashioned energy of stories-ghost stories, in this instance-spins the wheels of The Weir, Conor McPherson's endearing and unusual five-actor entertainment, now playing on Broadway. Contemporary Irish playwrights like the twenty-seven-year-old McPherson are hot, hot, hot in the theater world these days, and have been for over a year. Giving McPherson a run for his money, for example, is twenty-nine-year- old Martin McDonagh, whose recent Broadway triumph The Beauty Queen of Leenane is slated to run at several theaters across the country in the coming months, and whose new drama, The Lonesome West, landed on the Great White Way in April. British plays and productions-The Blue Room, The Iceman Cometh-are all the rage, too, and U.S. thespians are frantically trying to calculate whether the trend points to some deficiency in American playwriting, or a sort of "Masterpiece Theatre" snobbism combined with an inferiority complex, on the part of the public.

Of all the Anglo-Irish conquistadors, McPherson is the one most focused on story and storytelling. (For whatever it is worth, he commented to the Irish Voice, "I think a strong storytelling tradition comes out of Ireland...because of the weight of Catholicism-telling people that they're bad people, and that you have to redeem yourself, and that it's very easy to offend God.") His genre of choice has, until now, been the monologue (his theater-critic-meets-vampire fantasy, Saint Nicholas, hit New York last year), and the multicharacter Weir is really an extended sketch enclosing four tales.

Aside from narrative, the main ingredient is local color-the comfortable, timeworn jokes and habits of a contemporary rural Irish town, seen through the lens of a tiny bar on a night when it is deserted except for five people. As the establishment's two most loyal patrons- the voluble mechanic Jack (Jim Norton), and the more reserved middle- aged Jim (Kieran Ahern), who still lives with his mother-and the owner/bartender (Brendan Coyle) gradually warm to an outsider brought into their midst by the self-important Finbar (Dermot Crowley), they find themselves telling her ghost stories, from regional lore and from their own experience. Each anecdote whets the eerie edge of the evening, until the outsider (Michelle Fairley), recalling her own heartbreaking encounter with the uncanny, supplies the barroom encounter with an emotional focus and a mild climax.

Disappointingly, at the play's end, McPherson passes up the opportunity to knit the tales together, and one leaves The Weir feeling somewhat frustrated by the lack of closure and by the sense that the stories' plot lines (involving classically spooky elements like strange knockings, a Ouija board, a cemetery, etc.) have been selected somewhat arbitrarily. Nevertheless, the yarns themselves are twenty-four-carat- unnerving, but subtle enough to avoid melodrama. Audience members not wholly charmed by the storytelling may succumb to the finely gauged performances of the ensemble (directed by Ian Rickson) who play the Irish characters' habits and eccentricities to the hilt. When the outsider has the audacity to ask for a glass of white wine, instead of Guinness, for example, the bartender has to go seek a dusty bottle in his home refrigerator; a dead silence reigns in the bar on his return as he employs a corkscrew for what is probably the first time in years, and his regulars watch in appalled fascination.

With such instances of familiar behavior-drinking, flirting, observing social niceties-McPherson paves the way for forays into the supernatural. Gradually, as the play unfolds, we begin to discern another reality. Story turns the shabby bar into a juncture between ordinary life and another level of existence-just as the local weir, whose photo hangs on the barroom wall, forms a juncture between two levels of water. By means of story, McPherson's characters, and his audiences, briefly see beyond the cluttered contingencies of everyday life to something more elemental.

Literary critics and essayists (such as A.S. Byatt, recently, in the New York Times Magazine) have noted that we tell stories as a way of explaining ourselves to ourselves, of redeeming meaning from time. Such observations seem particularly well-suited to historical stories. A playwright who sets out to retell the Civil War, for example, would appear to have scope to explore some truths about American values and our approach to history.

Theatergoers should not expect a jot of serious reflection from Frank Wildhorn's new pop musical, The Civil War, however. The show, written by Gregory Boyd, Jack Murphy, and Wildhorn, who penned the score, is not so much a play or a dramatized story, as a sort of staged theme park. Every blatantly insincere aspect of the production has been carefully calculated to wring feel-good sentiment from the audience. Facile ironies descend with sledgehammer subtlety. At one point, for example, white women in filmy dresses with parasols waltz across the stage past slaves on an auction block, while a photograph of a slave's scarred back is projected onto a backdrop. The moment shamelessly invites viewers to congratulate themselves for knowing that slavery was bad.

Director Jerry Zaks and his creative team have roped in every conceivable theatrical cliche-red spotlights, strobe lights, projected photo montages, voiceovers, incessant atmospheric fog-that might coax spectators to emote. Battle names and casualty figures scroll in lights across a scrim. Soldiers fight and die in slow motion, or flourish their weapons like baton-twirlers at a parade. Occasionally individual characters stroll into focus-the two brothers who enlist on opposing sides, or the wife who in her husband's absence learns to fix the roof- but they have no personality, only situation. Instead of supplying story or prompting thought, Wildhorn and his collaborators turn America's bloodiest conflict into warbling kitsch.

Despite this kind of theatrical sabotage-or, possibly, because of it- Wildhorn is now the only American composer of the last twenty years to have three shows on Broadway at the same time. Jekyll & Hyde and The Scarlet Pimpernel were lambasted by the critics when they landed in New York in 1997, but the public paid no attention. To measure these productions' artistic value, your best bet is negative numbers, but the marketing has been brilliant: no less than three Civil War soundtracks are being released-the cast album, a country music version, and a set of songs interpreted by celebrities like Hootie & the Blowfish, with interspersed dramatic readings of Civil War documents (Maya Angelou reading Sojourner Truth, for example). Successful marketers live happily ever after.