Yankee Tavern's "rolling world premiere" kicked off recently at Florida Stage in Manalapan and continued at Shepherd University's Contemporary American Theater Festival (CATF). Several more productions are scheduled for 2010.This commentary provides a plot synopsis, information about the playwright, and a brief description of the CATF production.
Yankee Tavern: The Play
Ray, a deranged squatter who’s the buddy of the former owner of an old bar, spits out plots and subplots about government conspiracies. Adam, the current owner, and his fiancée Janet humor him for a while, but they draw the line when Ray starts talking about his conversations with the “people upstairs”—ghosts of former residents in the empty floors above the tavern. A mysterious stranger named Palmer shows up, always ordering two beers, one for himself and the other for a friend he lost in the 9/11 disaster.
While the setup of this play is fascinating, it is difficult to follow. A brief synopsis from Brandon K. Thorp's review of the play in the Broward Palm Beach (FL) New Times (May 29, 2009) may be helpful: “When [Palmer] 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.”
Yankee Tavern: The CATF Production
Shepherd University's Contemporary American Theater Festival (CATF) in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, is the second venue for Yankee Tavern. The bar set-up is attractive and inviting, almost too clean and sparkly for the bizarre goings on, but the sound and lighting gradually overwhelm the stage, undoing the inviting atmosphere and reminding us that the many floors above have been decrepit and abandoned for years.
Yankee Tavern runs two hours, with one 10-minute intermission.
Yankee Tavern: The Playwright
Steven Dietz’s thirty-plus plays and adaptations have been produced in regional theatres since 1983. In addition to North American productions, international productions have been mounted in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America. His widely produced plays include the Pulitzer-nominated Last of the Boys, Inventing van Gogh, Private Eyes, God’s Country, Halcyon Days, and The Nina Variations, which premiered at CATF in 1996. Mr. Dietz’s three most recent plays–Becky’s New Car, Yankee Tavern, and Shooting Star–are scheduled for numerous regional productions in the 2009–2010 season.
Dietz received the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays Award for Fiction, produced off-Broadway by the Roundabout Theatre Company; the PEN USA West Award in Drama for Lonely Planet; the Edgar Award for Best Mystery Play for Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure; and the Yomiuri Shimbun Award (the Japanese “Tony”) for his adaptation of Shusaku Endo’s novel, Silence.
A native of Denver, Colorado, Dietz and his family now divide their time between Seattle and Austin, where he teaches playwriting at the University of Texas.
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