In 1995 Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people and injured over 500 more with a truck bomb in the deadliest act of homegrown terrorism ever committed in the United States. A veteran of the first Gulf War, McVeigh had been a survivalist, a "gun nut," and a conspiracy theory believer, but had no previous criminal record. Yet, outraged by what he considered to be tyrannical acts by the US Government, notably the killing of members of the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, TX two years earlier, McVeigh, assisted by just one co-conspirator, took revenge by blowing up a federal office building in Oklahoma City, killing, among many others, a number of children from an onsite daycare center.
McVeigh never expressed remorse or fully explained his motivations. But he did pique the interest of writer Gore Vidal, who believed McVeigh should be taken seriously and not dismissed as a crackpot. Impressed by Vidal's articles about him, McVeigh wrote to the writer, and a correspondence ensued.
The letters haven't been published, and the two never met. But what if they had? What if Vidal had visited and interviewed McVeigh on death row, Truman Capote style? This is the conceit of Edmund White's play Terre Haute, currently receiving its New York premiere at the 59E59 Theaters.
The writer, here named James and loosely based on Vidal and on Mr. White himself, is a Europe-dwelling American septuagenarian who is granted a series of short interviews with the condemned man days before his execution. Playing James is the marvelous Peter Eyre, reprising his London performance. The play would be worth seeing just for Eyre's masterful portrayal of the witty, mordant writer coming rapidly to terms with his own mortality. Simultaneously cool and raw, he walks anxiously about the prisoner's screened-in cage, approaching, backing up, sitting, standing, making literal the journalist's search for an "angle" as he tries to coax the bomber - here named Harrison, and played with explosive rigor by the excellent Nick Westrate - to come clean about how the bombing really went down.
Article comments