Reviews 2004
Reviews 2004
✭✭✩✩✩
by Sam Shepard, directed by Paul Hardy
Alumnae Theatre, Toronto
January 23-February 7, 2004
Three hours long, with eight characters and live music, A Lie of the Mind may be one of Sam Shepard’s most ambitious plays but is not his most successful. Though Shepard fans will not want to miss the rare chance to see it, the Alumnae Theatre production tends to emphasize the play’s flaws rather than make sense of them.
Jake (Zachary Bennett), who seems to be a paranoid schizophrenic, has beaten his wife Beth (Larissa Bangay) again, but this time thinks he’s killed her. His younger brother Frankie (Jason Gautreau) travels to Montana to find out. Beth is alive but has suffered brain damage and thinks Frankie is Jake purged of evil. It’s as if Shepard had put the plots of his best known plays in a blender and tried to out-Goth his own brand of Western Gothic. Shepard asks why what is absent affects us more than what is present while his usual themes of men and women as different species, of a frontier-less nation turning in on itself, of male rivalry as the engine of destruction, play out in a more bloated form. When in the final third Shepard shifts to examine the parents not the children, the play loses focus.
Paul Hardy doesn’t have the clear insight to guide us through the play’s meanderings or to keep it balanced on the edge between realism and the absurd. Both Bennett and Bangay mistake shouting for intensity, but Bangay skillfully charts Beth’s gradual return to normality. Gautreau, Byron Rouse and Andrea Wasserman are excellent as Jake’s and Beth’s siblings trying to cope with the fallout of the couple’s breakup.
The production’s most positive feature is the live music of the Hogtown Harmony Machine, whose smooth new country instrumentals sooth between Shepard’s overlong scenes.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2004-02-05.
Photo: Zachary Bennett. ©2011 Shaun Benson.
2004-02-05
A Lie of the Mind