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by Sam Shepard, directed by Nancy Palk

Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto

April 3-May 4, 2013

Lee to Austin: “He thinks we’re the same person”.

Soulpepper’s production of Sam Shepard’s 1980 play True West makes for a mildly entertaining evening.  Though the production features a great central performance from Stuart Hughes, miscasting and weak direction prevent the comedy from achieving its full impact.

About the play Shepard has said, “I wanted to write a play about double nature .... It's a real thing, double nature. I think we're split in a much more devastating way than psychology can ever reveal”.  To do this Shepard presents us with two brothers.  Austin, the younger brother has a degree from an Ivy League university and a wife and children.  He is in Los Angeles house-sitting his mother’s house keeping it as tidy as he can while she is on a trip to Alaska.  While there he is writing a screenplay for a romantic movie and has already interested a Hollywood producer in it.  The action begins when Austin’s older brother Lee arrives.  Looking like a wild man, the petty criminal and drifter Lee has been living in the desert and views the suburbs of L.A. as a place to relieve people of the valuables that they don’t need.  Together they embody two contradictory ideals of the American Dream.  Austin cherishes the stability of a home, wife and family while Lee cherishes his individual freedom above social conventions or law.       

It happens that Lee has a story to tell, a kind of modern Western in the mold of Kirk Douglas movie Lonely Are the Brave (1962), that he thinks Austin’s producer friend will like.  The producer not only likes Lee’s story but wants to drop Austin’s story and have Austin write the screenplay for Lee.  In Shepard’s typical style that pushes realism into the realm of surrealism, during the course of the action the two brothers begin to change places – with Lee settling down to write and Austin trying to see if he can outdo Lee in petty theft.

At least, this is what we ought to see.  Director Nancy Palk doesn’t seem to find this in the play.  What she emphasizes instead is how Lee’s influence causes Austin to give up the security he has held onto for so long and to become just like his brother.  Palk ends the play with both brothers growling at each other like coyotes. 

In doing this, her production contradicts all previous productions I’ve seen of the play by de-emphasizing the role-reversal of both characters and the humour that it entails.  De-emphasizing the double role reversal also contradicts Shepard’s own summary of the play: “... the conflict between the brothers creates a heated situation in which their roles as successful family man and nomadic drifter are somehow reversed”.  As we discover not only does Austin say he has always envied Lee’s way of life, but Lee says he has always envied Austin’s.  To miss that part is to miss half the equation.  There is a reason why Lee says of the producer, “He thinks we’re the same person”.  Since the two brothers are two sides of the American Dream, this is true.  The double role-reversal happens to illustrate this point and to demonstrate that a person cannot live out both sides of the dream at the same time since they are contradictory.

Palk’s view of the play leads to errors in casting and direction.  Stuart Hughes who plays Lee and Mike Ross who plays Austin are supposed to be brothers, but Hughes is 53 and Ross is 38, but looks much younger.  Yes, it’s possible for brothers to be fifteen years apart, but not likely.  In this play, the two should be as close in perceived age as possible so that their ways of life, not the difference in age is what distinguishes them.  I have enjoyed Ross’s performances enormously in the past but set up against Hughes, who is fully in his element of playing dangerous, shady characters, Ross is not on an equal footing.  A balance between the two is an absolute essential for this play.  That’s why at the famous Broadway revival in 2000, Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly (only two years apart in age) could periodically switch roles during the run.  The present casting of the Soulpepper production would never allow that. 

Palk may demonstrate the double nature of Austin, but not in Lee.  The result is that Hughes as Lee begins as the dominant character of the play and remains so throughout while Ross as Austin merely deteriorates under Lee’s influence.  Because of this a large part of the dynamism and the symbolism of the play is lost.  So is much of the humour.  In other productions the reversal of both personalities is underlined by changes in costume.  Austin preppy-style at the start but looks like a hobo by the end, while Lee trades in the lived-in-for-years look of his shabby outfit for a spiffier style to go with the promise of a big advance on his screenplay. 

In Palk’s production, however, Lee stays in the same scruffy jeans and duct-taped shoes through and even degenerates from wearing shirts to shirtlessness, while Austin change of character is marked only by his unbuttoned shirt at the end.  Designer Ken MacDonald certainly could have done much more with the costuming if he had been asked to.  His highly detailed, heavily mementoed but prim kitchen handily summons up the presence of an absent elderly woman.  His most brilliant idea is to give the kitchen entrance swinging saloon doors to show the complete gentrification of the Old West that is part of Shepard’s theme. 

Ari Cohen is excellent as the subtly slimy producer Saul Kimmer, while Patricia Hamilton is wasted in the tiny role as the brothers’ Mom.  She doesn’t quite seem to know how to play the mother’s obliviousness to her sons’ chaos as comic.

Those who have never seen True West before will find the show amusing, but will be hard pressed to understand why Shepard is considered an important playwright or this play one of his masterpieces.  Under Palk’s direction, it seems rather like an innocuous sitcom.  The production is devoid of a real sense of tension or menace between the brothers, much less of highlighted allusions to the dual nature of the artist or the incompatible halves of the American Dream that elevate the play to more serious consideration.

              

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Stuart Hughes and Mike Ross. ©2013 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www.soulpepper.com.