| TRUE WEST - today - SPOILERS | |
| Last Edit: singleticket 07:51 pm EST 01/27/19 | |
| Posted by: singleticket 07:36 pm EST 01/27/19 | |
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| Sam Shepard's most accessible play nearly survives The Roundabout effect. I'd say it was worth seeing if only for Ethan Hawke's performance of Lee, a part Hawke was born to play. But Hawke is paired with Paul Dano as Austin who, at least at this stage of his career, completely lacks the skill set or heft to make the sparring brothers an even match. And the play is about a creature with two heads, if one of them is missing then the play is missing. James Macdonald's direction is as always first rate. Yet he stages the boisterous action on yet another one of his shallow shadow boxes that feels like it's hovering slightly above the stage and is framed with a brightly lit square. This is the third or fourth Macdonald production I've seen with this design and it's beginning to feel like an Ivoism. It's particuarly missuited to the play's stage fighting which results in flying objects getting projected out of the frame either on to the stage apron or into the audience. You can also see the actors working to negotiate this shallow space when they need to be at their most animalistic. That said, Mcdonald gets so much right about the play and its characters that it's doubly disappointing to see this production not quite work. I've seen Mcdonald do absolutely brilliant work in bringing older plays into the present. His WAY OF THE WORLD at the Donmar introduced Congreve to the 21st century world of diversity and identity politics and vice versa. But here there doesn't seem to be an interest in translating Shepard's 1980 tale of violence underneath the American skin to the present tense. I can't blame him, it might feel like gilding the lily since that emergent violence is all too present now. I love Marylouise Burke, a delight on and off stage, but her casting here feels like too much of a default choice. She is essentially a comic actress and though "Mom" is sufficiently dotty, she's also the final piece of the puzzle of a family story that Shepard is telling. Burke never gets to the layers of tragedy inherent in her very short scene at the end. Finally, the wildness of the story and the characters never truly feel unleashed. That 1960s through '70s Joseph Chaikin physicality never shows up and it's what has attracted actors to the piece and what will attract them to it in the future. The play? It is a bit dated, particularly the comic elements which feel a bit like stoner humor of the 1970's, but it retains its masterful blend of beat poetics and traditional dramatic structure; a blend that brilliantly resonates through the story and the characters themselves. |
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