For eight years, Americans have been on a long, collective journey away from the overwhelming horror of Sept. 11. Are we there yet?
Are we ready to let the nation’s worst mass murder settle into a historic place in our collective memories?
Not even close. Mass e-mails are sent every day, claiming that 9/11 was an inside job. More than 100,000 people belong to a Facebook group called “Remember Sept. 11.” Osama bin Laden is still on the loose. Consider the storm that has raged over “Julie & Julia” author Julie Powell’s complaint that 9/11 victims have given her compassion fatigue.”Saying we’re over 9/11 is like saying we’re over Pearl Harbor,” said Louis Tyrrell, producing director at Florida Stage and a leading advocate of new plays.
But our feelings do evolve.
“When things like this happen, we continue to learn from them year after year, decade after decade. And we’re only beginning to scratch the surface of what we can take away from 9/11,” he said.
But that doesn’t mean TV, films and plays always treat national tragedies with the same reverence and sobriety that good taste initially demands. Safe to say no one who saw “The Deer Hunter” in 1978 could have foreseen Vietnam as the future setting for a brilliantly silly blockbuster comedy like last year’s “Tropic Thunder.”
Initial attempts to examine the 9/11 attacks on the stage or screen produced waves of stories depicting heartland Americans crippled by rage or fear. On TV, fearmongering doomsday terrorism series like “24” and “Jericho” proliferated.
But historically, even the worst tragedies eventually arrive at a place in popular culture where we can start to look at what can be learned from them in less angry, less political and, dare we say, more entertaining ways.
That’s the natural cultural progression for an audience that, over time, moves from a need to vent, to a need to know, to a need to understand. And, depending on the nature of the event, a need to laugh.
Pretty much like the progression of Steven Dietz’s “Yankee Tavern,” a new play steeped in 9/11 conspiracy theories that opened Saturday at Curious Theatre.
“The first couple drafts could not have been angrier,” said Dietz. “It was nothing but a humorless George Bush diatribe. And I’m telling you, it was a terrible play. It wasn’t fun for anybody.”
Thing is, a diatribe doesn’t require an audience. An Agatha Christie mystery does.
Even if his was the most brilliant screed ever written on 9/11, Dietz knows that audiences would rather see “The Mousetrap” any day, “because they want to be complicit in the process.” It’s simply better theater.
But over time, the culture started to change, coinciding with President Barack Obama’s election and, Dietz said, “My play was changing, too.”
The diatribe he initially wrote began to morph into a fun, popcorn thriller — one in which 9/11 is but a character in a larger mystery about vast conspiracy theories.
A man walks into a bar — a whack job, or so he seems. And he’s spewing all kinds of nonsensical barroom banter about Starbucks cups, Rolling Rock beer labels, even Kleenex. He rants about a man- made spore that created sniffles. “What did Kleenex know,” he demands, “and when did they know it?”
But every basic fact presented in his play, Dietz swears, was vetted by multiple sources. “So whatever you think about this,” he said, “it’s real.”
Dietz wanted to keep his yarn a comedy and a thriller for as long as he could. But eventually, of course, this conspiracy theorist must come around to the biggie: 9/11.
“He points out all the things that were happening on that particular day and never happened again,” Dietz said. Like the way the stock market behaved that day. How the Air Force was carrying out the largest pretend training- exercise attack in its history that very day. That Larry Silverstein, owner of the World Trade Center, had taken out a $3.5 billion insurance policy on the towers just two months before 9/11. All true, he says.
The conspiracy, Dietz suggests, is not that the U.S. was complicit in the attacks, but that someone, somewhere, knew it was coming, and still we were incapable of stopping it.
“Otherwise, you have to believe that everything was a coincidence,” Dietz said. “The moment one thing is not a coincidence, there’s some level of complicity.”
Conspiracy theories are the one thing that can elongate our collective period of mourning into perpetuity. It’s what’s kept JFK’s death from ever receding from our consciousness.
“Absolutely,” said Dietz. “There’s a line in the play that the real conspiracy behind the Kennedy assassination was actually the conspiracy theory itself. Meaning from that moment on, this was a country that no longer believed what it saw with its own eyes.”
There always had to be something more they weren’t showing you.
Conspiracy theories are catnip for a playwright, but they’re also fun fodder for an audience, and that’s what gave Dietz the permission he felt he needed to write his 9/11 play this way.
It’s an evolution we’ve seen before, when writers begin to find new and sometimes indirect contexts for national tragedies, like when the Korean War became the subject of the popular TV sitcom “M*A*S*H.” And when Michael Moore used the Columbine massacre as a basis for his political attack on the gun industry, “Bowling for Columbine.”
Florida Stage’s Tyrrell, who was the first to stage “Yankee Tavern,” calls it the start of a “second wave” of 9/11 plays. Less righteous. Less fearful. More fun. The timing, he said, is right.
“It’s not that we’ve lost our emotional connection to it, but we’ve taken enough of a deep breath at this point to be able to look at it analytically and keep the emotion more at arms’ length,” he said.
That change will be starkly evident when the Denver- born “The Laramie Project” returns next month to mark its 10th anniversary.
More than 140 theaters in every state will be staging “The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later,” a new epilogue written by the same Tectonic theater company that came to Laramie just five weeks after Matthew Shepard’s murder and spent a year examining the climate that spawned the killing. Recently, Tectonic returned to see what has — and hasn’t — changed there.
Tectonic executive director Greg Reiner said whereas the initial reporting done by the company was much more raw and immediate, the epilogue is more about reflection. “It doesn’t have that same kind of dramatic incident driving it,” he said, “and that made it much harder to write.”
Tyrrell understands. “At first, the wounds were all very fresh,” he said. “I think it’s very smart of them to revisit it because now they can really examine what have we learned, and what are the cycles of human behavior that will continue to repeat themselves in the face of that kind of event.”
But given time, it’s also OK to laugh in the face of tragedy, Tyrrell said, as long as the comedy is seriously represented.
“There are different kinds of laughs,” he said. There are very uncomfortable laughs. Nervous laughs. Inappropriate laughs. Laughs that illuminate from a very dramatic idea where it can catch right in your throat.
“Think of the range of emotion from a sob to a guffaw,” he said. “And yet there is a tremendous overlap in that emotional range, which is what makes us as humans so interesting.”
John Moore: 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com
“Yankee Tavern”
Thriller. Curious Theatre, 1080 Acoma St. Written by Steven Dietz. Directed by Chip Walton. Starring Karen Slack, Marcus Waterman, Leigh Miller and Anthony Powell. Through Oct. 24. 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. $18-$42. 303-623-0524;
Pop culture timeline
The evolution of pop culture’s response in the wake of a key national event often depends on whether that event was a national tragedy, a scandal or an outrage.
World War II (1939-45)
“Casablanca” (1942): A noble romance in which Humphrey Bogart must choose between his love for a woman and continuing the fight against the Nazis.
“South Pacific” (1949): Racial prejudice is seriously explored in this Broadway musical peppered with songs like “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair.”
“Schindler’s List” (1993): A German saves more than 1,000 Jews from the Holocaust.
Conclusion: The war was patriotic, so any anger is directed at stories of Nazi persecution. It’s ancient history now, so presenting it with anything from show tunes to pathos is appropriate.
Korean War (1950-53)
“Pork Chop Hill” (1959): Gregory Peck’s heroic re-enactment of a bitterly fierce battle.
“The Manchurian Candidate” (1962): Thriller about brainwashed U.S. Army POWs made into unknowing political assassins.
“M*A*S*H” (1972-83): The novel-turned-film-turned- TV series evolved from situation comedy into moralizing anti-Vietnam allegory.
Conclusion: “M*A*S*H” changed how TV looks at war, but the war was an old enough wound to generate as many chuckles as it did tears.
John F. Kennedy assassination (1963)
“JFK” (1991): Mixing fact with fiction, Oliver Stone calls the FBI’s official story into question.
“Love Field” (1991): Nostalgic look at a Texas housewife who feels Jackie Kennedy is a kindred soul and is determined to meet her on Nov. 22, 1963.
Conclusion: JFK films tend to center either on the enduring mystery of his killing or how the end of Camelot played out in American living rooms. As long as the mystery surrounding it is kept alive, dramatists will feed off of it in creative ways.
Vietnam (1959-75)
“The Deer Hunter” (1978): A damning, epic look at how the Vietnam war affected everyone in a small American industrial town.
“Good Morning, Vietnam” (1987): An irreverent deejay shakes things up when he is assigned to the Army radio station in Vietnam.
Conclusion: The arc from, say, “Apocalypse Now” (1979) to “Tropic Thunder” (2008) shows just how far we’ve come in terms of the gravitas we apply to Vietnam.
Watergate (1974)
“All the President’s Men” (1976): Serious thriller recounting how two journalists brought down a president.
“Dick” (1999): Comedy about two high school girls who wander off during a class trip to the White House, meet President Richard Nixon and become his secret advisors during the Watergate scandal.
Conclusion: In short order, Americans went from a need to know to a need to mock.
AIDS crisis (1980s-present)
“The Normal Heart” (1985): The first, fierce look at the rise of AIDS, 1981-84; it “starts off angry, soon gets furious and then skyrockets into sheer rage,” Frank Rich wrote of Larry Kramer’s play.
“Rent” (1996): The plight of impoverished artists struggling to survive in New York under the shadow of AIDS is turned into a joyous, cult-hit rock musical.
Conclusion: AIDS plays tend to be righteously angry while championing victims who also happen to be fabulous.
Matthew Shepard murder (1998)
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The Laramie Project (1999): Just five weeks after the killing, New York’s Tectonic theater company began compiling interviews exploring the climate of Laramie, Wyo. (file photo at right shows Andy Paris in the original Denver Center Theatre Company production). A new look at long-term effects of the murder and how Laramie has changed will be performed in more than 140 theaters in all 50 states in October.
Conclusion: The killing both polarized and mobilized America. It remains too much of a political football for art to twist about.
Columbine (1999)
“Bowling for Columbine” (2003): Michael Moore uses the tragedy to go after the gun lobby with righteous and sometimes funny vengeance.
Elephant (2003): Film taking dangerous liberties re-enacting Columbine as if it happened in a Portland, Ore., high school.
Conclusion: Columbine will always be a source for those hoping, mostly fruitlessly, to explore the nature of evil — an eternal subject that dramatists will mine eternally.
Sept. 11 (2001)
“Omnium Gatherum” (2003): First major 9/11 play is a comic dinner party where guests tackle the war on terrorism, American imperialism and the Middle East as they dine somewhere between heaven and hell.
“United 93” (2006): Speculative look at what might have happened on board the only 9/11 target that did not reach its destination.
“24” (2001-present): Real-time terrorism series that debuted two months after 9/11 fueled Americans’ newfound fear of impending attack.
Conclusion: The response to 9/11 quickly morphed into anger at George Bush for the subsequent war with Iraq. But the subject remains an open wound — and dangerous territory for anyone who wants to turn it into pop culture.
Video: Cast member Marcus Waterman talks about ‘Yankee Tavern’
Ted Lange on Nickelson: ‘Denver is really going to miss his presence’
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Ted Lange (Isaac from “The Love Boat”) is also a playwright who has had several of his comedies (including “Four Queens, No Trump”) staged at the Shadow Theatre under Jeffrey Nickelson. We spoke to him last week about the death of the company’s founder. For excerpts,
Audio extras: Jeffrey Nickelson
In honor of the passing of Shadow Theatre founder Jeffrey Nickelson, we have reposted his 2006 Running Lines podcast interview with John Moore. He was speaking about the company’s production of “” with The Spirituals Project. To listen, just
Also: Listen to Jeffrey Nickelson read John Moore’s short story, “A Hard Place,” which he wrote In 2007 for Stories On Stage. Run time: 15 minutes.
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2009 Bonfils Theatre reunion in pictures
More than 200 people showed up for a Labor Day weekend reunion of Bonfils Theatre actors, crew and friends Sept. 5-6, 2009. The theater was Denver’s crown jewel from 1953 to 1986. Check out our photo gallery:
More than 200 people showed up for a Labor Day weekend reunion of Bonfils Theatre actors, crew and friends Sept. 5-6, 2009. The theater was Denver’s crown jewel from 1953 to 1986. Photos by David Bellucci, Sarah Lytle and Katie Rouzee. Courtesy Becky Manley.
This week’s theater openings
Opening Tuesday, Sept. 15, through Oct. 11: Arvada Center’s Miss Saigon”
Thursday, Sept. 17, through Sept. 18 only: Adams Mystery Playhouse’s “The Mariachi Murder”
Friday, Sept. 18, through Oct. 18: Town Hall Arts Center’s “Grease” Littleton
Friday, Sept. 18, through Oct. 11: Aurora Fox’s “The Good Body”
Friday, Sept. 18, through Sept. 27: Backstage’s “Parallel Lives” Breckenridge
Friday, Sept. 18, through Oct. 3: Longmont Theatre Company’s “Brigadoon”
Friday, Sept. 18, through Sept. 27: Arvada Festival Playhouse’s “Sex Please, We’re Sixty”
Saturday, Sept. 19, through Oct. 25: Bas Bleu’s “Collected Stories” Fort Collins
This week’s closings
Today, Sept. 13: Miners Alley Playhouse’s “Enchanted April” Golden
Thursday, Sept. 17: Creede Repertory Theatre’s “Kimberly Akimbo”
Friday: Creede Repertory Theatre’s “Swiss Family Robinson”
Saturday: Creede Repertory Theatre’s “The Imaginary Invalid”
Saturday: Modern Muse’s “Speed-The-Plow” (at the Bug Theatre)
Sept. 20: Vintage Theatre’s “Dial ‘M’ For Murder”
Sept. 20: Lake Dillon Theatre’s “Respect, The Musical”
Sept. 20: OpenStage’s “SceneWorks” Fort Collins
Complete theater listings
Go to our complete list of in Colorado, including summaries, run dates, addresses, phones and links to every company’s home page. Or check out our listings or
