LIKE FATHER, LIKE RUM Petersen makes another excuse to Wiesner.

Photo: Michael Brosilow

Among Conor McPherson’s dark plays that make you nearly want to kill yourself—an anthology known colloquially as “the Conor McPherson plays”—there exists a shared ethereal quality that inspires producers to keep mounting them and audiences returning for more. His plays, such as The Weir and Shining City, rarely feature more than haunted characters telling their stories in an attempt to parse through their demons. Yet the ceaselessly bleak Irish dramatist composes underscores that don’t just hum beneath the surface. They linger in your head after the curtain call.

Dublin Carol, now in a tidy, conservative and affecting Steppenwolf production, is no exception. Petersen plays John, a perpetually if casually drunk funeral director who’s kept his life low maintenance by abandoning his wife and kids and anesthetizing his soul on a slow bourbon drip. When his adult daughter (Wiesner) shows up with the news that his dying, cancer-ridden wife would like him to handle her funeral, he’s forced to pay the emotional piper.

Directed by actor Amy Morton, apparently on a very productive lunch break between the Broadway and London productions of August: Osage County, Dublin boasts none of the spiritual uplift one might expect from a show whose title invokes the rare happy Dickens story (and McPherson’s forced Scrooge analogy doesn’t work anyway). But at its heart it has the crackling warmth of a winter hearth.

McPherson’s heavily narrative plays could be as effectively experienced over the radio as viewed for $70 a seat, but Morton has gotten Kevin Depinet to design the handsomest set yet seen in the proscenium renovation of Steppenwolf’s upstairs space. The supporting work of Grush as John’s young layabout assistant and especially the quietly weathered Wiesner is unsurprisingly expert. But most audiences are surely interested in CSI’s Petersen. Though I’m neither old enough to remember his storied North Side storefront work dating back to the ’70s nor free enough from live theater on Thursdays to appreciate his television work, seeing his humble self-containment and deft nuance in a non-showboat role helps me understand why his presence causes local frenzy.