The Yeats Game – a farce of improbable darkness

The Yeats Game is a farce about middle-age choices and their ridiculous consequences. At a funeral, as two frisky couples contemplate a friend’s fatal, love-nest heart attack, they flash back to their own recent snowed-in weekend at a mountain cabin. There, a board game designed for age-hating Boomers leads to tangled romance as the old friends explore love, lust, marriage and mischief. Just as guilt prompts confession, and all things point to reform, maturity and reluctant virtue, the play’s close tells us that virtue is a weak motivator, immaturity has its advantages – and that the corpse is perhaps not so dead.

A comical, brainy look at the pre-geezer years, The Yeats Game was inspired by the poet’s famous line: “Only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood – sex and the dead.” The Yeats Game, which played to standing room only audiences at its World Premiere in Boston, is a booze-, Viagra-, dice-driven romp.