Steven Dietz is, apparently, the eighth most performed playwright in the US, tied with Edward Albee and Tennessee Williams. Those last two are pretty well known over here. Dietz – not so much. Does that say anything about him? Or us?
Eh, I dunno. It’s possibly telling that the prolific writer’s work tends not to get performed in New York much either, but flawed as this play is, dismissing him as some sort of bumpkin not cut out for London or NYC feels a bit severe. ‘Last of the Boys’, from 2004, has huge numbers of things wrong with it: appalling female characters; a bizarre, unhelpful magical realist dimension; a wildly uneven tone that veers from amusing to out-and-out pompous.
But at its heart it’s a pretty good study of grief and guilt, following two Vietnam veterans as they continue to grapple with the emotional scars of their experiences three decades later. Sardonic, bearded, beer-guzzling Ben (Demetri Goritsas) is the last man standing at his isolated trailer park, refusing to take developers’ money to leave (like everyone else did). Jeeter (Todd Boyce) is a semi-burnt out hippy on a never-ending tour of Rolling Stones concerts – the revelation of his exact motive for this being the best joke of the play.
Director John Haidar coaxes fine performances out his two leads, and the greatest strength of Dietz’s script is in allowing you to clearly see how the trauma of Vietnam has shaped, defined and damaged these two men’s lives. They're not ruined men – but they are irreparably altered.
What it didn’t really need is a layer of portentous, semi mystical symbolism layered on – Zoë Tapper's manic pixie dream girlfriend with her daft allegorical tattoos; a frankly bewildering series of scenes in which Ben is literally haunted by the war.
It's fine, I guess. By not really enough to make you want to run out and wallow in the rest of the Diedz canon.