True West
Maybe it’s time to retire Sam Shepard for a while. Or at least put his plays on a restricted borrowing list so that everyone won’t be able to get their mitts on them. That way he won’t run the risk of becoming the Neil Simon of young adults, his works so overdone that their merit will be entirely forgotten. Every month or so it seems there’s another fledgling Chicago theater company spawning another bare-bones production of Geography of a Horse Dreamer or Suicide in B-Flat or something else that popped out of Sam’s Smith-Corona in the 70s or 80s that might launch the troupe into cult status.
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None of this diminishes Shepard’s talent or his contribution to contemporary theater. Fool for Love and True West are two of the funniest, most entertaining, most menacing American comedies written in the second half of this century. His script for the film Paris, Texas is an incredibly chilling depiction of men’s desolation and inability to communicate. I even dig Shepard’s weirder work, when he eerily evokes voodoo ritual in Back Bog Beast Bait or waxes humorous and philosophical in the wry, meandering monologue he penned for the Bob Dylan song “Brownsville Girl.”
The truth of the matter lies somewhere between these extremes. To be sure, Shepard’s fable of two very different brothers who gradually switch places and become locked in eternal mortal combat is as old as dirt. But the verbal and physical interchanges between Austin, the whiny, pampered screenwriter, and Lee, his scheming, terrifying thief of a brother, are so vigorous and so inventively comic that the creaky, shopworn situation hardly matters.
The young Eucalyptus Theatre seems to have paid more attention to picking out the right musical interludes for Shepard’s Action than to assimilating the work itself. Their staging reveals a certain desperation in attempting to penetrate a very murky play: strange, disembodied moments in Shepard’s 1975 absurdist exercise are interrupted by blasts of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Jimi Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner,” and that Dr. Demento radio-show staple “Fish heads, fish heads, roly-poly fish heads.”
