City Coyotes Prowling the Brain

TRUE WEST by Sam Shepard

If phrenology were in vogue, Sam Shepard would be the most prized anatomical medicine man among the U.S. playwrights. He knows how to feel every bump on or under the American skull. He views the U.S. mind as a nest of conflicted vision--the lost but lingering vernal dream of hope and purity vying with the corruptive greed of technological gimcrackery.

Shepard is most rewarding when he transforms his special war into myth. In his latest play, True West, he reworks the ancient tale of Cain and Abel. In the course of the drama, two brothers exchange identities, summoning up Baudelaire's line, "Mon semblable--mon frere!" or put somewhat differently: Am I my brother's murderer?

At first glance, Austin (Tommy Lee Jones) and Lee (Peter Boyle) seem like the remotest of kin. The atmosphere is one of Pinteresque comic menace, but actually the tension of reunion is in the air.

Austin, a gilded hack writer, has taken a mini-sabbatical from his wife and children to sweat out a movie script. Since his mother has gone to Alaska--symbolic remnant of the last frontier--he has holed up in her home in suburban Los Angeles. Like an anchorite, Lee spends time communing with the desert, but he certainly knows his way around town when it comes to filching TV sets for ready cash. As he puts it, he and his brother are both "city coyotes." Lee is also enough of a raconteur and Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, etc., golfer to con Austin's movie producer, Saul Kimmer (Louis Zorich), into buying his unwritten cornpone saga of the "True West." Saul is one of those monstrous Hollywood moths who skirt the flames of venality, yet never get torched. All three men are the progeny of Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man, that emetically funny moral jeremiad hurled with lethal precision of the cynic American psyche.

Toward the end of the play, Austin strangles Lee to death. After a long, seemingly terminal pause, Lee rises. But is he alive, or is he the essence of "agenbite of inwit," James Joyce's phrase for the nagging remorse of a sinfully burdened conscience? To murder a brother is to create a relentless scourge.

Sam Shepard has repudiated this production at off-Broadway's Public Theater and launched a steamy vendetta against Producer Joseph Papp. Certain errors of perception and direction are quite evident, but enough of the true Shepard is here to do him honor. Papp has certainly retained Shepard's singular gift for lunging simultaneously at the jugular and the funny bone.

-- By T.E. Kalem

BEST OF 1980

The Lady from Dubuque. Edward Albee's latest work is his best since Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In a typical Albee setting--the living room--three couples trade laceratingly funny insults and wait for the Lady from D., i.e., the angel of death.

A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine. A saucy, stylish musical that spoofs the golden age of the silver screen. All Marxophiles will adore the Ukrainian resurrection of Groucho, Chico, and Harpo.

Home. In a picaresque odyssey, a black Southern farmer is exiled from his bucolic birthright to a Northern city of torrid lures and abject nightmares. Guiding him safely back home is Playwright Samm-Art Williams, an imagistic poet of prose wedded to infectious humor.

Mecca. Conflicting cultures and conflictive lives detonate in the oppressive heat of a Marrakesh tourist resort. If one wants guidelines to the rich cross-cultural resonances in this drama, ample hints may be found in E.M. Forster's A Passage to India, and the works of Paul Bowles and Graham Greene. E.A. Whitehead's play was the most neglected of the year and, conceivably, the finest.

Mass Appeal. Bill C. Davis' drama sets an ardent seminarian on fire for the Lord against his mentor; a burnt-out, aging priest who has lost his vocation in complacency. Milo O'Shea etched the old priest on the canvas of indelible theatrical memories.

The American Clock. If ever there was an apt laureate for the Great Depression, the role belongs to Arthur Miller. Here he dissects that national trauma by relating it, directly and most movingly, to his personal family history. Miller's sister, Joan Copeland, an actress of uncommon integrity, played the mother and gave the evening a transfusion of emotional vibrancy.

A Life. Ireland's Hugh Leonard translates a man's anguishing pain into poetry and the lilt of mocking laughter.

Coming Attractions. Laughing all the way to and through the bunkum, Playwright Ted Tally has written a sizzling satire about how media peddlers can translate punk killers into instant goldbug celebrities.

Amadeus. Was Mozart poisoned by a rival? Britain's Peter Shaffer draws a cunning eternal triangle with God at the apex, music in the air and Byzantine intrigue everywhere. There are sumptuous performances by Ian McKellen, Tim Curry, Jane Seymour and Nicholas Kepros.

True West. Sam Shepard's best play since Tooth of Crime (see above).