Audio By Carbonatix
Yankee Tavern is a new play by Texan playwright Steven Dietz
that proposes a universe where Occam’s razor rubs backward, and a boring, factual
explanation of anything must be a lie. In Yankee Tavern, we
might all be controlled by Lizard People, things not run by Lizard
People are probably the provenance of the Illuminati, and the most
rational-sounding person onstage claims to have a moon rock from the
— please follow me carefully — invisible moon upon
which the Apollo astronauts actually landed. (The rock was given
to this person by “a shaman in Queens,” though where the shaman got it
remains unclear.) The deceit is so massive and pointless that it
must be true, because nobody would bother making up anything so
weird.
At bottom, this is what passes for logic in Tavern. Weirdness
alone seems to count as evidence of something, and where weirdness
doesn’t exist naturally, it is manufactured. Every crazy fact makes
another fact seem crazier; each strange coincidence supports the
portentousness of every other like the stones in an archway. In
Tavern, no one with news of a strange coincidence could possibly
be lying, for lies are the near-exclusive provenance of the mouthpieces
of officialdom — the empowered speakers with the podiums and the
courted press corps. This is the play’s underlying dramatic conceit:
Nothing is questionable but the facts.
And why not? Indulging in a little conspiracy-theory fantasy onstage
is a good, smart, and mostly harmless way to create atmosphere. Unless,
that is, your play happens to be about the conspiracy theories that
sprang up in the wake of September 11, 2001, in which case you may
have put your foot in it.
Yankee Tavern has probably put its foot in it. The play opens
in the titular tavern, which has been recently inherited by a young man
named Adam (Antonio Amadeo) — an earnest fellow with a hot
fiancée named Janet (Kim Morgan Dean) and a clientele that seems
composed exclusively of his deceased father’s dear friend, Ray (William
McNulty). Ray is a drunken, raving conspiracy nut whose paranoid
oratory about moon rocks and evil plots dominates and subdues the
tavern for much of the first act. Because of a lopsided script —
which gives Amadeo approximately one line for McNulty’s every ten, and
Dean far less — Ray, though affable in a gruff way, comes off as
a bully. Yet slowly, subtly, his arguments cohere. As the outside world
slips away and your workaday disbeliefs are suspended, you may find
yourself believing.
Not the moon-rock stuff. The 9/11 stuff. Perhaps we are primed for
this, thanks to all the Loose Change-type assertions that have
been put forth in recent years, which we ordinarily dismiss on sight
without knowing exactly why. Why, for example, did the towers fall even
though their steel cores should have melted only at 2,700 degrees while
jet fuel burns at a comparably cool 1,500? And why did Larry
Silverstein purchase a massive, multibillion-dollar insurance policy on
WTC 1 and 2 mere weeks before the attacks?
Certainly, these are queasy-making questions. In real life, they
would make an interesting launching point for a dialectic —
wherein a well-informed debate partner might point out that the twin
towers were not made of pure iron and therefore logically had a lower
melting point than 2,700 degrees; and that Silverstein had, quite
rationally, bought insurance because he’d just signed a 99-year lease
on the properties. Yankee Tavern, however, leaves no room for
intelligent discussion; it merely plays on our fears to prime us for
action. In the middle of act one, for what seems like the first time
ever, somebody besides Ray wanders into the bar. Palmer (Mark Zeisler)
is a grim and haunted-looking man who orders a Rolling Rock for himself
and another for a deceased drinking buddy. When he speaks at last
— and it takes him so long you just know he’s gonna say
something heavy — his words yank Ray’s bizarre claims right out
of the abstract and drag them, bleeding and ugly, into the bar. For
Palmer is no mere 9/11 conspiracy nut: He is a first-hand participant
in those conspiracies, and he is only here because Adam and Janet have
become unwitting participants as well. Soon, the plot picks up. Guns
are drawn, people disappear, and the theoretical becomes very real.
Now listen: Please understand that I respect the tremendous amount
of skill and verve it takes to pull off a play like Yankee
Tavern. I marveled at set designer Richard Crowell’s magnificently
dilapidated barroom; I applauded the subtly mounting anxieties peeking
through the friendly cool of Amadeo’s Adam. I’m also a reasonable
person, and I can look at the way act two explodes in a whirlwind of
paranoia and violence as art for art’s sake, even though it has a claim
on reality roughly approximate to that of the fairy contingent in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In these terms, Yankee
Tavern is one helluva show. You’ll be scared by the intimations of
act one. You’ll be moved by the awful events of act two. And when the
terrible day is discussed, you will hear the millennium’s fresh ghosts
rattling through the walls of the big theater at Florida Stage and feel
their unhappy gaze beaming from the tavern’s smudged, stained-glass
windows. But you’ll handle it. You too are a reasonable person.
Unfortunately, we are a slim majority, and while we can take Dietz’s
postulations with a few pillars of salt, I’m not so sure about everyone
else. Not too many people believe in Shakespeare’s fairies, but plenty
are willing to jump at the shadows that no longer fall across
Manhattan’s West Side Highway. A 2006 poll by Ohio University found
that fully one-third of Americans believe that the federal government
had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks. A good night at the theater is
worth a lot, but it is not worth increasing that number. By failing to
include any cogent alternatives to Ray’s theories and by giving us no
choice but to accept that the events of act two really are indicative
of a conspiracy to cover up the truth behind 9/11, Dietz may have
succeeded in selling a bill of goods that he never bought in the first
place.
