Let us now praise Charles Leggett.

Back in February, he was a glowering, bullying giant of dashed dreams as Dave Moss in Glengarry Glen Ross.

This August he’s a paranoid conspiracy- theorist Falstaff in Steven Dietz’s Yankee Tavern at ACT (through August 29). Leggett’s rotund Ray schlumpfs and circles about the stage like he’s a heavyset, aging bee entranced by booze-laden petals, taking conspiracy theory to a rigorously abstract level, where the absence of conspiracy is in fact a conspiracy.

His brayed ravings–Dietz reaches inspired heights–encompass everything from the wedding industry and moon landings to assassinations and allergy medications. He talks to dead people upstairs in the rat-infested rooms of New York’s Yankee Hotel, where he, an “itinerant homesteader” has staked his claim. He’s a hopeless gasbag but a warm avuncular figure for Adam (Shawn Telford) and Janet (Jennifer Lee Taylor).

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He’s also a 9/11 skeptic. It’s 2006, and still too soon, even for the people who love him, for anyone to be worrying over the bones of the World Trade Center dead, noting how this or that doesn’t “add up.” In the first half of the play, Dietz accomplishes the not-so-minor miracle of bringing you around to Ray’s point of view–the program notes many of Ray’s claims are technically factual. It’s up to you whether this amounts to any one thing, or the inevitable result of chaos, post-disaster CYA, feuds for control of information for its own sake, and a willingness to “shape the narrative.”

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But Leggett also lets you see that Ray’s woundedness is what people are keeping at arm’s length, as much as anything. The revulsion people feel toward 9/11 conspiracy theorists is partly due to their own pain’s demands–they don’t have room for extra crazy. But how do you expect someone with a paranoiac bent to feel, post-9/11?

Dietz doesn’t give the young engaged couple, Adam and Janet, nearly the depth of character as Ray. Maybe they are Every Naive Young Couple. Telford grins and bears it or bristles, while Taylor has a plucky, inquisitive spark; Dietz labors to wrest control of the play back from his runaway character, and make Adam and Janet’s trust issues worth our concern. The mystery of Adam’s father feels a fairly naked bid for our attention, and while Taylor delivers a weird, achingly self-critical monologue about survivor’s acquaintance guilt, it’s not all that germane to the eventual purposes of the play.

By intermission, you still don’t know where the play will head. Will we dive deeper into Ray’s history, and find out what life post-Yankee Tavern holds in store for this troubled but charismatic man? (I’d sign up for that.) Or is that quiet man in the ball cap at the bar, Palmer (secret agent-bot R. Hamilton Wright), about to shake things up?

Dietz (who also directs) seems to want not only to mirror the macro and micro of deception and duplicity, but to find each and every intersection of the personal and political. That last is a lot to ask of an audience, especially if it turns out that your most fascinating character gets short shrift when the play changes gears to a “taut political thriller.” It’s not a particularly successful hybridization; you feel more like you’ve seen two one-acts with the same characters.

You can see Dietz’s intention: Naïveté will learn a lesson about too-sure dismissals of troubling questions. But there’s so much work to be done in the second half that situations feel piled on, rather than explored, and the ending rushes on as if late for its cue.

Aside from that, there is one glaring misstep with this production (no, not really, relax). The set (from Matthew Smucker), sound design (Brendan Patrick Hogan), and lighting (Rick Paulsen), all conspire to make you believe that’s an actual dimly lit, working bar down there, with bottles clinking as trains rumble past, car horns and conversations from the street filtering in through the door. By intermission, I sorely wanted to pull up a bar stool and have a drink myself.

It seemed clear that Telford and Taylor knew their way around a bar, so this felt like a missed opportunity to break the fourth wall, and pour me a pint. (I’m sure some liquor board rule forbids it, but if you go, you’ll see what I mean, rule or no rule. Pint of liberty, blood of tyrants, etc.)