The Weir By Conor McPherson Directed by Mark A. Rhea; At Keegan Theatre at Church Street to March 13 Basra Boy By Rosemary Jenkinson Directed by Abigail Isaac; At Keegan Theatre at Church Street to March 12 At Keegan Theatre, Irish at the pub and Northern Irish in the sand

In the first moments of The Weir, Brendan, a barman in Ireland’s rural northwest, tries to pull a draught of Guinness but is foiled by a faulty tap. So tonight it’ll be the indignity of bottled Guinness, and draught Harp, and lots of “small ones,” meaning whiskey shots, for his small, loyal group of off-season customers, who’ve known each other, and him, all their lives.

At the Sunday matinee performance I saw, the draught Harp situation wasn’t much better: Early in the show, Jon Townson, the tall, handsome actor who plays Brendan, served David Jourdan a Harp (or something beerlike) that was three-quarters head. I wondered what Jourdan would do. He probably knows which lines he’ll sip on, but he wouldn’t drink until the brew had settled, right? Wouldn’t any patron hand that glass-three-quarters-empty pint back to the barkeep and ask for a new one? Would a barman even serve one of his regulars a brew like that?

Jourdan went right ahead and drank from that too-frothy glass. Which is maybe just what his character, Jim, would do. Soulful but diffident and dim, he’s not what you’d call the assertive type.

Look, these kinds of plays live or die by their details. Set in one location in real time, The Weir is the kind of interior, Irish-to-its-chilly-bones piece at which Keegan Theatre excels. Scena, one of D.C.’s two other companies devoted wholly or in large part to Irish plays, will offer what it’s promoting as “a genuine Irish production” of The Weir next month, with genuine Irishmen imported from genuine Ireland for three roles. Presumably, they will still be actors working from a script.

Will that Weir be better? I don’t know. I like this one just fine. Oft-revived since its 1997 debut, the play recounts an evening at the pub, where the familiars are taking shelter from some stereotypically Irish weather. After the well-heeled hotelier and entrepreneur Finbar (Mick Tinder) comes around escorting Valerie, who’s just rented a country house from him—she comes from cosmopolitan Dublin, toothsome and younger than all present, save perhaps for Brendan—the men vie for her attention with tall tales of their encounters with the supernatural. Their obsequious braggadocio eventually warms her into a sharing a possible ghost story of her own that both satisfies their curiosity about her and humbles the toughest of them, the aging mechanic Jack, into a confessional humor. Suddenly he’s no longer trying to impress anybody.

Under the direction of Mark A. Rhea, the cast all scale their performances appropriately. The comfort and the contempt arising from their lives of small-town proximity registers. As Jack, Kevin Adams seems to resent both the enterprising Finbar’s success and the retiring Jim’s meekness in more or less equal measure, all of it a mask for his disappointment in himself. Townson is saddled with the least interesting part—and he’s the only one who doesn’t have a monologue—but he’s an affable presence, as bartenders should be. “Will you have one?” his patrons always ask when placing an order. “I’m debating whether to have one,” comes the inevitable reply. As Valerie, a still-young woman reeling from the kind of loss that ages you, Susan Marie Rhea manages to convey dual cravings for privacy and connection.

This is a story about the importance of stories, about how the ritual of narrative can make sadness and loneliness and disappointment bearable. In a world of mysterious happenings that beggar explanation, this is one inexplicable phenomena that turns out to be as reliable as the tides. Ultimately, it’s the stories that involve otherworldly encounters the least that haunt their tellers the most.

Basra Boy By Rosemary Jenkinson Directed by Abigail Isaac; At Keegan Theatre at Church Street to March 12

The only ghosts in Basra Boy are those of young men blown up or soon to be, in a sandy country far from their rainy home. Running in rep with The Weir, Rosemary Jenkinson’s world-premiere one-man show recalls a lot of other one- or two-hander dramas to emerge from Ireland or Northern Ireland since the late ’90s—Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs, Abbie Spallen’s Pumpgirl—in its explosive speech and amphetamine-stoked tempo, as well as in its chain of incident. This is another account of the young folk getting high and getting into fights and trying to get laid, trying to escape boredom—trying to end up like something other than sad fellows hanging around the bar in The Weir. Josh Sticklin vibrates like a hopped-up hummingbird as Speedy, a kid who decides to make the army his ticket out of Belfast. His pal Stig (also Sticklin, of course) can’t believe he’s falling for the government’s line, enticed by the promise of adventure and a cash bonus.

Basra Boy has the bad luck of opening just a few weeks after the National Theatre of Scotland’s universally praised production of Black Watch dropped in for a week at Harman Hall. That show, too, examined how the war in Iraq squanders the gifts of young men drawn to military service by their craving to belong, but on a much larger canvas with a blockbuster budget. Basra Boy is a shot-on-a-Flip-cam indie by comparison—its set is the bar from The Weir with a graffiti-scrawled curtain draped over the walls—but it’s got some game. And Sticklin is a charmer, charismatic and tireless.

It isn’t energy he wants for; just clarity and precision. The undifferentiated tempo allows moments of narrative dissonance, always a risk when a single performer inhabits multiple characters. When he’s Stig and when he’s Speedy isn’t always readily apparent. His physical and verbal stamina are impressive—he’s basically running and yapping full-tilt for 70 minutes—but Basra Boy could use a moment or two of quietude for the audience to locate itself in the continuity of the story. Perhaps Sticklin and director Abigail Isaac may yet sort this out; I’m very keen to see how this piece evolves. At the very least, it’s a suitable companion for The Weir. What the wasted Speedy and the waning sods of McPherson’s tale have in common is their sharklike approach to self-documetation: If they stop talking, they die.