The last time Steven Dietz’s name was on a Milwaukee playbill, the characters onstage were none other than Sherlock Holmes and the trusty Dr. Watson. So it’s appropriate that his new play, Yankee Tavern, which opened at the Rep’s Powerhouse Theater this weekend, should have a kind of anti-Holmes at its center. Ray is a conspiracy theorist whose logic is more expansive than deductive. Think something is improbable or even outlandish? That’s all the more reason to feel it’s true. A chatty habitué of talk radio who squats in the abandoned apartment building above the tavern, Ray will enlighten your world view with theories of faked moon landings, Yoko Ono’s role in the Bay of Pigs debacle, and a mysterious man-made spore/organism that keeps the world sniffling around the clock: “What did Kleenex know? And when did they know it!”
As played by veteran Chicago actor Will Zahrn, Ray is a man who is definitely a piece of work (and not in the Shakespearean sense). He’s a roiling ball of socia
l unrest, but he delivers doomsday scenarios with a cynical smile and just the slightest edge of sensible sanity. For Dietz, a playwright who loves to play games with perception and reality, he’s a perfect leading knave, a fool with a devilish twinkle who seems to grow wiser as the play moves forward.
It doesn’t take long for the twinkle to grow dark, as Dietz takes his trademark snappy dialogue into more serious territory – conspiracy theories behind the 9/11 attacks. For as we learn more about Ray’s compatriots at the Yankee Tavern, things are not all that they seem. Adam, the bar’s owner (Brian Vaughn) is interested in 9/11 himself, though he thinks about it through the more respectable lens of a Master’s thesis. His fiancé, Janet (Marti Gobel), has some theories of her own about her bethrothed, which don’t involve hijacked planes. And the mysterious Palmer (Torrey Hanson), who seems to have an imaginary, Rolling Rock-loving friend, is definitely in the right place at the right time, having a few hypotheses of his own.
Along the way, Dietz makes some canny observations about the nature of truth, both personal and political, and weaves an elaborate thriller-style web that keeps us guessing right down to the last phone call. Sean Graney, a Chicago fixture known for his work with the innovative company The Hypocrites, manages the tone – from light to film-noir dark – with a deft hand, never letting things stray into hyperbole or melodrama.
As the show breezes by, we realize that Dietz has put us in an interesting place as observers of this fictional world. As I listened to the plot unfold, and heard about various 9/11 anomalies – mysterious passports left in the wreckage, unexplainable building collapses – I kept wondering what was true and what was fiction. With the brave new world of journalism and media upon us, where the strangest “facts” can go viral and the Ray’s of the world can create movements that rival those seen in Civil Rights or Vietnam War days, Yankee Tavern is a canny and discomfiting description of our uneasy place in the 21st-century world.
Conspiring Minds
The last time Steven Dietz’s name was on a Milwaukee playbill, the characters onstage were none other than Sherlock Holmes and the trusty Dr. Watson. So it’s appropriate that his new play, Yankee Tavern, which opened at the Rep’s Powerhouse Theater this weekend, should have a kind of anti-Holmes at its center. Ray is a conspiracy theorist whose logic is more expansive than deductive. Think something is improbable or even outlandish? That’s all the more reason to feel it’s true. A chatty habitué of talk radio who squats in the abandoned apartment building above the tavern, Ray will enlighten your…
