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by Sam Shepard, directed by Michael Semple

Ausable Theatre, The Black Lodge, London

April 11-21, 2001

“A Fine Shepard Launches Ausable’s Fourth Season”

The Ausable Theatre production of Sam Shepard's "True West" is an impressive beginning to the company's fourth season.  The production marks Ausable's metamorphosis from a summer theatre based in the tiny town of Lucan to an alternative theatre company based in London.  There is no doubt that London, whose Grand Theatre has of financial necessity become a purveyor of rather fluffy material, desperately needs alternative companies like Ausable to give the city artistic vibrancy. 

First performed in 1980, "True West", one of Shepard's most popular plays, only last year made its appearance on Broadway, probably because it is no way like a typical Broadway comedy.  It is possible to enjoy the play solely for its increasingly hilarious situations, but the play also demands that the audience think about what underlies the actions witnessed. 

The play begins with a silent stand-off between two brothers--Austin, who, after an Ivy League education has become a Hollywood screenwriter, and Lee, a drifter and thief, who has just spent three months lying low in the California desert.  Austin has left his wife and family to house-sit his mother's suburban home while she is away on a trip to Alaska.  In the first scenes Shepard builds up a strong, Pinteresque sense of menace as the loutish Lee seems to threaten more than just the solitude and concentration of his fastidious brother.  The turning point in the play comes when Lee manages to convince Austin's agent, Saul Kimmer, that he knows a true story for a modern Western that deserved to be filmed.  When Kimmer rejects the screenplay Austin has been working on for Lee's story outline, the brothers begin to take on each other's roles--Lee pulling himself together to try to write his own screenplay while Austin quite hilariously descends into alcoholism and theft.  All the while the pristine kitchen where the action occurs increasingly comes to resemble a trash heap of papers, beer cans and household utensils. 

Shepard has said that he wrote the play "to give a taste of what it feels like to be two-sided".  On one level, Austin and Lee can be seen as two sides of the same person.  Austin is neat and civilized, whose security comes from institutions, whether universities, marriage or writing contracts.  Lee is slovenly and uncivilized, educated by experience, getting sex when he needs it, stealing when he needs money.  Both brothers say explicitly that they long for the way of life of the other.  Yet both need each other to create anything worthwhile, even a screenplay.  Austin needs Lee's raw experience for material; Lee needs Austin's facility with language.

This duality can represent the paradox of writing--the more one writes the less one experiences life.  But, as is usual in Shepard, this duality can represent the paradox in the American psyche--on the one hand believing in untrammelled freedom, on the other upholding laws and institutions to rein in such freedom.  It is an insoluble problem and Shepard presents it as such.

The great merit of the Ausable production, designed and directed by Michael Semple, is that the subtext of the play shines through the funny, scary surface action with such clarity.  He does this by slackening the pace ever so slightly whenever one of the many speeches occurs that point to this subtext.  Still, he keeps the surface action on a firmly realistic plane even when the implications of the plot spiral into myth.  Semple wisely avoids the temptation I have seen in other productions to play up the surreal aspects of the play.  To do this destroys the tension between what we see and what the play means that Shepard is so keen to maintain.  Given this incisive direction, no attentive audience member should fail to notice the similarity between Lee's "true" Western story of two men pointlessly chasing each other and the action of the play.  Semple has also cleverly updated the action to the present.  The references to development as it encroaches on nature and makes familiar towns unrecognizable thus remain pointed.  As the play demonstrates the conflict of the two side of the American psyche turns paradise into a trash heap.

All of the performances are excellent.  Tim Culbert seems born to play Lee.  He gives us a real feeling of danger from this desperate, unpredictable character, and yet allows us to see him as a kind of comic tramp, once his guard is down.  At first I thought that Ray Bowen as Austin did not suggest enough suppressed annoyance with brother's intrusion to balance the menace emanating from Culbert.  But once Austin loses his grip on his tidy sense of reality, Bowen's performance blossoms into an uproarious portrayal of self-pity and self-justificatory cynicism.  Both are adept at carrying off the highly physical action whether violent or comic. 

In smaller roles, Mike Wilmot gives a fine portrait of Saul Kimmer as a man who can charm you with his mellifluous voice while planning to stab you in the back.  June Cole, as the brothers' mother, injects a note of prim disgust which reminds us the the brothers' parents are themselves a unreconciled opposites--she preferring suburban tidiness to wild nature, he living destitute in the desert.

Niki Kemeny has done a great job of co-ordinating properties for a play that is so dependant on them.  The kitchen set immediately locates us in a warm US climate, and, strange to say, the aural and visual nature of the mounting litter we see is in itself really quite funny.  Dean Harrison has accurately created the strange sounds the play calls for (e.g., coyotes attacking dogs).  Virginia Pratten has designed the costumes including a delightfully prudish outfit for the mother.

You don't often find a play that is both thought-provoking and laugh-out-loud funny.  Given Ausable Theatre's fine production, if you find yourself even vaguely near the London area, be sure to see it.

©Christopher Hoile

Photo: Tim Culbert at the Victoria Fringe. ©2006 Victoria Fringe.