Preview: ACT Theatre to stage Steven Dietz's 'Yankee Tavern'

If there is such an animal, you could definitely classify Steven Dietz's "Yankee Tavern" as an all-American play.

Obviously, there's the very American title of the work, which opens its first Seattle engagement this week at ACT Theatre under Dietz's own direction.

But "Yankee Tavern" also reflects our national mindset in other ways — i.e., our penchant for plays set in barrooms, and for free-ranging conspiracy theories.

Remarkably, this is the first piece by the prolific, nationally successful Dietz (who has more than 20 produced plays to his credit) to take place in a saloon. This joint: a drab New York City watering hole on the ground floor of a dilapidated hotel slated for demolition.

It is the first Dietz work to directly explore the deadly 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, and the many conspiracy theories buzzing through virtual space about that cataclysmic act of terrorism.

Wry and genial, Deitz was interviewed in an ACT rehearsal hall recently about "Yankee Tavern," and asked about its iconic setting and provocative subject matter.

Did he have a theory why so many popular American attractions unfold in saloons — from the mid-19th-century temperance melodrama "Ten Nights in a Bar Room," to Eugene O'Neill's shattering "The Iceman Cometh" to modern films ("Cocktail") and TV sitcoms ("Cheers")?

"A bar can be a godsend for a writer," suggested Dietz, who, with playwright wife Allison Gregory and their two children, spends summers in Seattle and the academic year in Austin, Texas (where he teaches playwriting at University of Texas).

He pointed out that any character can believably stroll into a tavern "unexplained, but if they walk into a living room you have to justify it." And, he added, anyone in a bar can suddenly expose his darkest secrets to a group of total strangers.

"A bar is a public place where people can have private dramas. There's an illusion of conviviality, but it's also a setting where people can air their dirty laundry in public. So as a writer you can maximize their secrets, their sensitivities. And though a bar is a place of entertainment, the mood can turn very dark, very fast, in fascinating ways."

The gloom encroaching on the Yankee Tavern, the pub in Dietz's play, is part of the long shadow cast by the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The owner is Adam (played at ACT by Shawn Telford), a graduate student in international relations who inherited the establishment from his deceased father and is ambivalent about its demise.

As he prepares to shut the place down, Adam serves two last customers: Ray (Charles Leggett), an eccentric regular spouting an unending litany of political conspiracy theories, and Palmer (R. Hamilton Wright), the plot staple of bar dramas: a sinister stranger. His enigmatic appearance, and Adam's sudden disappearance on the eve of his wedding and after a meeting with a professor from the Middle East, fuels Ray's fears, as well as those of Adam's highly rational fiancee, Janet (played at ACT by Jennifer Lee Taylor) — and the audience's.

A bar on its last legs seemed a fitting locale for an exploration of lingering questions and concerns about what exactly transpired on Sept. 11, 2001 — a matter still unresolved in the minds of many.

"In the wake of the devastation, a lot of things crumbled for people in New York — relationships, hopes for the future, physical parts of the city," Dietz said.

"In the way that a bar enshrines memories, I was wondering, 'In what ways do we sit inside our memories and mourn them? When do we move on and start over?' "

If the atmospherics came easy to Dietz, the fears and potential conspiracies ignited by Adam's sudden disappearance were harder to formulate in the script, which was commissioned by New Jersey's McCarter Theatre and debuted in 2009 at South Florida's Florida Stage.

"This was not a play that came quickly to me," Dietz said. "I went down a lot of dead ends with it. I read the 9/11 Commission's report, and a lot of less mainstream stuff. But researching conspiracy theories online is like falling down a rabbit hole — you wind up with endless material."

The play in its early drafts, as Dietz describes it, was "too angry and overtly political, not enough of a thriller, and had little humor. But then I focused on, 'What are a few things about the attacks I can't explain away?' "

He continued, "I didn't want to posit some Machiavellian George Bush conspiracy, so I took all the politics out. But if you line up the dots and say, 'Is what happened with this or that really a coincidence?' And then you add in some humor. That's what I did."

The character of Ray is a man who obsessively breathes, drinks, walks and talks evil conspiracies, many of them absurd-sounding. But as outlandish and fringey-paranoid as Ray's claims get, Dietz assures us, "There isn't a fact about 9/11 presented in the play that is not true. I had the script vetted by people, and the facts are all from public sources, news accounts, transcripts."

And his own views on the events surrounding 9/11?

"I think an open democracy empowers us to simultaneously believe what we see on the news, and in things they're maybe not telling us. And in my life, starting with the Nixon era, we've had good reasons to be suspicious, and question things."

Though some reviewers have considered the subject dated nearly a decade after the attacks, "Yankee Tavern" has had numerous runs, Off Broadway and around the country.

The additional success of his much-produced comedy "Becky's New Car" (which premiered at ACT in 2008) has made this a bonanza year for this playwright in terms of royalties and recognition. And he has more local projects coming soon: a reprise of "Go, Dog, Go!"(a family show he co-adapted with his wife), and a new Dietz play, "Jackie and Me" (about baseball great Jackie Robinson), both coming to Seattle Children's Theatre.

He's also pleased that "Yankee Tavern" has sparked political debate in Milwaukee, Denver and other cities where it's appeared. "As a playwright," Dietz emphasizes, "you want to leave a discussion behind."

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com