2/4/2019
True
West is a dance between two
wildly dysfunctional brothers who are purportedly adults. It takes place in the
Hollywood home of the boys’ mother, who is vacationing and has left it in the
keeping of Austin (Paul Dano), an
aspiring screenwriter, who is getting precious little work done in the wake of
a visit from redneck brother Lee (Ethan
Hawke). (The play never quite explains how one brother can be an articulate
urbanite while the other is a backwoods good ol’ boy,
but the audience never sees fit to question it either). Austin’s life gets
further turned around when he makes the perhaps totally unavoidable mistake of
introducing Lee to Saul Kimmer (Gary
Wilmes), the movie producer he’s been courting for months. A perpetually
shifting balance of power, ebbing and flowing with ever escalating mind and
macho games between the brothers, leads to a final confrontation that will be
played out in front of their bewildered mother (Marylouie Burke), who returns to her devastated home early and
finds herself ready to leave as quickly…
What’s on offer at the American Airlines Theatre
(by way of the Roundabout Theatre
Company) is entertaining enough if you factor in this much: It’s True West. Period. It is perhaps
the pinnacle of Sam Shepard fare, but it is still less of a fully realized play
than a great, and highly distinctive, excuse for two actors to wail—as artists
and on each other. Nothing you do to the piece makes it transcend itself—especially
as so much of it hinges on tame, dated stuff (wired telephones, tube TVs, a
world before common household use of the VCR, manual typewriters and manuscript
paper)—the best you can hope is that you tap successfully into its capacity for
volatile thrill.
And in that regard director James Macdonald hasn’t done badly. This is a somewhat less ragged True West than NYC has seen before,
which is perhaps inevitable, being the first on a Broadway proscenium in a
large house, requiring somewhat neater definition of its characters and
trajectory. Paul Dano (who I liked especially) as the writing brother goes all
the way with the intellectual nerd trope, Ethan Hawke goes all the way with the
beer-guzzling time-bomb trope, and that makes the collision as they cross paths
toward opposite extremes for which they are manifestly unsuited all the more
amusing.
That said, an unfortunate consequence of the play
being 38 years old is that what seemed, in its time, like an elliptical, raw,
anarchic style, encouraged by a rebellious era, has become kind of foursquarely
clear and quaint; the structure of the play even comes off as a bit schematic—and
I say this having seen the legendary
off-Broadway production of ’82 (preserved for TV by PBS), with Malkovich and
Sinise, plus the revival of 2000, and remembering both well, I’m not denying
what it was once and what it still
had a few visceral ties to after. And
unlike the 2011 Broadway revival of Jason Miller’s 1972 play That Championship Season, a
genre-renovating play for which I’ve been on the other side of the argument,
nobody here has lost touch with Shepard’s sensibility. Paradoxically, the
fiercely loving approach to True West makes
its quaintness (geez, not a word you’d ever
predict using toward Shepard’s work) even more exposed.
Proving, if anything, that some American classics are less classic than
others…
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