The Tank Theatre is the Los Angeles venue for Randolph Driblette’s production of The Courier’s Tragedy, and a place where Oedipa Maas encounters one of the mystery’s most consequential clues. The theatre’s performance joins questions of textual interpretation to the material history of Pierce Inverarity’s estate: Driblette speaks lines naming Trystero, while Oedipa later discovers that Inverarity owned the theatre itself.

The Production and Its Clues

Oedipa sees Driblette’s production at the Tank Theatre and later insists that it was not pornographic. Emory Bortz agrees, describing it as typically virtuous and calling Driblette a peculiarly moral man. In Bortz’s account, Driblette felt little responsibility toward the words alone but was intensely faithful to the invisible field, or spirit, surrounding a play. He was, Bortz suggests, unusually close to the historical author and to the imaginative world that had surrounded Wharfinger’s mind.

That account matters because the production is not simply a neutral rendering of a stable text. Bortz says the Vatican book is an obscene parody and that the final line of the disputed couplet was added by the printer of the 1687 Quarto; he also calls the “Whitechapel” version corrupt. In the text he personally accepts, that line is suppressed, and Driblette had therefore done best by leaving the doubtful passage out. Oedipa counters that she heard him use the Vatican lines and say the word Trystero. Bortz answers that the choice was Driblette’s as both director and actor. The theatre thus becomes the setting for a conflict between textual evidence and a performance whose meaning may depend on the performer’s judgment.

Driblette’s Death and the Aftermath

When Oedipa later visits Bortz, she learns that Driblette has walked into the Pacific and is dead. The news comes at a wake: a young woman says he went into the water two nights earlier in his Gennaro suit. Bortz places the timing just after the set of The Courier’s Tragedy was struck. Oedipa remembers that she had tried to call Driblette that morning; instead of asking why he died, she falls silent, waiting for illumination.

His death removes the person who might have explained why the production included the lines naming Trystero. Oedipa experiences the loss as part of a larger unraveling: her psychiatrist has gone mad, her husband is withdrawing under LSD, and another lover has left with a fifteen-year-old. Driblette had been her best guide back to the Tristero, so his absence turns the Tank Theatre’s performance into evidence that can no longer be tested against his own account.

Ownership and the Inverarity Connection

The theatre acquires another significance when Oedipa checks Inverarity’s asset list. After Genghis Cohen shows her an addendum in a Scott stamp catalogue listing a “Tristero Rapid Post, San Francisco, California” stamp, Oedipa returns to San Narciso and finds that Inverarity owned the shopping center containing Zapf’s Used Books and Tremaine’s surplus shop. She also discovers that he owned the Tank Theatre.

The discovery sharpens rather than resolves the mystery. Oedipa sees that every access route to the Tristero might also be traced to Inverarity’s estate; even Bortz teaches at San Narciso College, heavily endowed by the dead man. She wonders whether the people and clues she has encountered were Inverarity’s agents, bought or freely participating in an elaborate practical joke. The theatre’s ownership therefore links a concrete location to Oedipa’s central uncertainty: whether the Tristero is an independent hidden network or part of a pattern arranged around the inheritance she was appointed to administer.