Annie Grier and Matt Dougherty in Scena’s production of Conor McPherson’s Dublin Carol.

Ghosts, demons, and various otherworldly entities populate the plays of Conor McPherson, but the only spirit at work in Dublin Carol, which Scena Theatre is currently presenting in its professional Washington premiere, comes in a bottle labeled “Jameson”. Of course, drink is also a staple of McPherson’s work: the playwright, a recovering alcoholic himself, has long been concerned with the place of the bottle in the Irish identity. John (Matt Dougherty), the undertaker at the center of Carol is just one of many well soused McPherson protagonists, men for whom there is nothing so terrible as a look at the bottom of an empty glass.

From the start of the play, when John and his new assistant, Mark (a fire-maned Joe Baker) return from conducting a Christmas Eve morning service, it seems as if John is always concerned about getting a kettle on the hotplate for tea, yet nothing ever ends up in his glass but whiskey; he polishes off at least a fifth in the eight hours of time the play depicts, amid claims that he used to be much worse.

“Worse” is hard to imagine, given that he starts the play hung over and is already back in the bottle well before noon, but his daughter Mary (Annie Grier) provides the evidence in the play’s second part. The first scene is filled with John reminiscing to his new charge about his glory days — all the while, Mark trying delicately and desperately to extricate himself from his boss’s nostalgia trip, until he seizes on a moment to turn the conversation from tales of drunken carousing to accounts of gruesome on-the-job cadavers. But after Mark leaves, Mary shows up, estranged from her father for a decade, to reveal that her mother, his wife, is dying of cancer. She’s come to retrieve him to pay his final respects, but her visit turns into a litany of the offenses of gross negligence and endangerment he committed against his family in his truly wild years. He’s rationalized all this away by treating family and love as a burden. “A woman’s love can be terribly constant,” he laments to Mark at one point. “It can last for years.”