Steven Dietz has been ACT Theatre’s patron playwright for the past several years, and a highly prolific one. The theater has produced 10 of his plays in the past two decades, many of them marital dramas about trust and deceit (Fiction, Trust, Becky’s New Car), two of Dietz’s regular themes.
But good things happen when Dietz turns his eyes beyond the four walls of domesticity and writes about individuals paddling through large tides of politics and history. His best plays, such as God’s Country and Lonely Planet, have set their characters in the context of white-supremacy movements and the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, respectively. Now with Yankee Tavern, he’s facing up to 9/11, conspiracies, and spooks.
He’s set himself an interesting challenge: to write a spy thriller for the stage, set entirely in the confines of a broken-down bar, meaning all the action has to happen in the dialogue. (Or most of it anyway; every broken-down bar has its gun hiding behind the counter.) Yankee Tavern largely succeeds, partly because of the script and largely because of the performances—particularly that of Charles Leggett, who commands the first act as Ray, a conspiracy-spouting curmudgeon with a stentorian voice and infinite confidence who splits his life between the barroom and the ratty, mostly abandoned apartments upstairs. Ray storms up and down and around the bar, haranguing call-in radio shows and the bar’s baby-faced and mildly exasperated owner, Adam (Shawn Telford), whose father founded the place. Now Adam is finishing his thesis, getting married, and ready to leave the Yankee Tavern (and his old, paranoid family friend) behind.
But stuff happens, as it must, including the arrival of a steely stranger who always orders two Rolling Rocks but drinks only one (R. Hamilton Wright) and Adam’s mysterious professor, who might be tangled up in the same shadowy government conspiracies that both terrify and fascinate Ray.
The play tromps along enjoyably before revealing its secret teeth. Ray, like all red-blooded American conspiracy theorists, has a special fondness for the oddities surrounding the 9/11 attacks. And all the details he recites are part of the real-life public record: that the towers were designed to withstand airplane impacts; that jet fuel does not burn hot enough to melt steel; that the towers should not have collapsed so quickly, completely, or neatly into their footprints; that a passport, allegedly belonging to one of the hijackers, was discovered in immaculate condition in a pile of rubble, having passed unharmed through the explosion and collapsed building; and so on.
Dietz doesn’t let Ray go so far as to claim that 9/11 was an inside job. But he drills down on things about the attacks that are difficult to explain or ignore. Yankee Tavern holds its mysteries close in a pleasurable and unsettling embrace. 
People who believe this nonsense help perpetuate the ridiculous notion that militant Islam is not a true threat. Sometimes these same individuals ponder how it was the West’s fault that Al-Qaeda and the Taliban exist…
They drove planes into those buildings because we don’t shoot women for reading, or chop the heads off of school teachers, oh don’t forget how its rare for a woman to get acid thrown in her face for not having it covered here, in the West…
Funny how it seems the only true ‘liberals’ that are fighting for actual human rights, and not just vapidly bitching after reading Mother Jones…are our redneck Bible thumping soldiers who, as I type, are putting bullets into the bodies of those who would destroy the values of the Enlightenment… ‘Cheers’ boys and may your aim be accurate!
What is your point mcDamon? Bad people do bad things… No one is claiming that ‘militant’ ideologues are not dangerous. The use of the adjective militant implies such. Yes, yes! Pump those militant radicals full of lead. Although, you may not have to travel all the may to the mideast to find one of these radicals. You might just be staring at him next time you look in the mirror, mcDamon. Quick git yer gun!
@1: As with most wars, the wrong people get shot.
“with most wars, wrong people get shot?” So you would rather speak German and become a Muslim? What an idiot. You’re the kind of gun-hating worm who would scorn the soldiers sent to protect you, then wind up hiding under a table begging someone to do something to save your ass!
I think it’s perrectly fine that a play includes conspiracy theories around 9/11, but why does the reviewer have to include a paragraph about the so-called oddities–most of which have been publicly explained? Unless he also believes that conspiracy crap and using this review as a forum to keep those ideas alive.