REVIEW of True West at the Vortex

"There’s going to be a general lack of toast in the neighborhood this morning!" This line, announced as younger brother Austin of Sam Shepard's True West carries a slew of stolen toasters through the front door, is what The Vortex chose to pitch its production of the play which closed yesterday. And while director Leanne Santillanes's delight—echoed by that of unsuspecting audience—in carrying out the playwright's decree to litter the stage with toasters and beer cans was palpable, it only underscored the lack of attention paid the more important of Shepard's words: his characters'. For all the visual antics laid out in the script, we may need reminding that True West is, first and foremost, a story of brothers.

At times, these brothers represent the Old and the New, the Real and the Fake, the Suburbs and the Wilderness—even pen and typewriter—but none of these binary oppositions have any chance of mattering without the immutable, if only biological, bond the two men on stage share as brothers. Thane Kenny and Richard Boehler, as Lee and Austin, respectively, lack this bond from the start. While they quickly establish that they fail to get along, it is a failure in the way of strangers, perhaps coworkers, people without the inside track on getting each others' goat—a track best laid by growing up under the same roof. Shepard's opening dialogue invites actors to engage in a set of coded rituals that ever-so-craftily get under each other's skin. Under Santillanes direction, there is too much indifference to their chiding; nothing simmering, nothing safeguarded, nothing to lose—and, ultimately, gain with the eruption of rage and decimation of egos later in the play.

We also fail to see that however little they may actually dislike each other, the brothers Austin and Lee do love each other. They don't, of course, want to admit it (nor do we wish them to, lest the play devolve into a Sunday afternoon Hallmark special.) Luckily, we need not fear this, thanks to the text. The relentless, shameless way in which the brothers go at each other on paper is all the more reason for the bodies on stage to go at each other with more than words, more than bickering, more than disapproval. The words are the binds that keep the characters within their understood roles—and the play is precisely about breaking out of such roles.

The fact the play soon turns its energies to the quest of writing a screenplay, for which the authority, Mr. Saul Kimmer, rules is better embodied by the bristling, untamed spirit of the barely literate Lee, demonstrates how words, even in writing, often get in the way of the truth. Daryl DeRoach gives a charming, if smarmy, turn as the insider Mr. Kimmer.

Shepard delights in turning clichés on their head throughout his work, and True West is no exception. While "brotherly love" appears next to walk the worn-out cliché plank, nowhere does the script imply that brotherly love is a joke. Shepard attacks this cliché with such reckless abandon not to render it laughable, but to get at the real questions and truths surrounding such accepted rhetoric, however impotent it may be. Unfortunately laughable seems to be the very thing the two actors wanted to be above all else in Act II. Boehler in particular seemed to want to bring the emergence of animalistic rage in a compliant showbiz proselyte to the level of burlesque. For the drunkenness this apparently required, the director seemed to think it was a good idea (or perhaps the actor thought it was a better idea) for Austin to: 1.) Act drunk; 2.) Not act drunk by acting like your trying not to act drunk—what most people will tell you looks the most, well, like being drunk; and 3.) Basically make light of everything the characters are going through by reducing the reason for Austin's outburst to mere intoxication. We can see he is drunk and see that he is mad, but the conclusion here is that he is mad because he is drunk. I think it’s much more powerful the other way around—he's drunk because he's mad. He just needed to get drunk to express it. Alcohol is only the messenger. Here alcohol was the show, getting in the way of what Austin needs to say instead of unleashing it.

Consequently, the denouement, in which Austin nearly strangles his brother to death, does not come across as a Moment of Truth—and render the roles of Unbridled Ascetic and Tailored Wordsmith arbitrary. On the contrary, we still believe these brothers are who they think they are, that they just had a bad night—got drunk, made a mess, and remained, as far as anyone could see, cranky. The desire of a Hollywood scribe to lose his trappings and secret longing of a vagrant thief for a loving, secure home hardly reach the surface.

With all that said, I find it most perplexing that Ms. Santillanes included in the program her own mini-essay on True West. It's hard to believe that the same person who wrote such an informed analysis directed this piece of theatre. If the director's staging were half as concise as her words, the play might have succeeded. As it was, whatever tension built up by the actors under the lights was habitually dulled by a series of lengthy blackouts along with a kitschy salvo of country standards. For a production which demands one setting the entire show, the stagehands seemed determined to indulge whatever trolling seconds in darkness they could to tip over chairs, add empty bottles to the kitchen counter, replace houseplants with deader ones and mint typewriters with dented ones. Such time-jump tricks may strike some as clever, nevertheless cleverness at the mercy of precious seconds in black. This is the stuff of film sets, of jumps in time unmediated by ever-revealing seconds in semi-darkness.

Before the final scene, the stagehands ventured out onto the set fully stocked for a thorough sprinkling of beer cans, trash—and yes, toasters. The fact we as an audience can see crew members ferrying racks of toasters and grocery bags of empties onto the stage clearly diffuses whatever punch line is intended by bringing lights up on the kitchen's state of disrepair. Besides, it would seem more natural for the kitchen to get dismantled scene by scene (during, not between them), beer by beer, page by page. (With the number of cans that suddenly appear, I have to ask who drank all the PBR--Austin's been out stealing toasters—guess Lee felt like emptying the recycling!) Such exaggeration does not serve the characters. A director needs to consider keeping her desired effects of her staging in balance with an audience's real-time experience, sitting in the dark. Too many productions make an audience out to be the kid on Christmas morning, cooing in surprise about Santa Claus when he saw mommy in her bathrobe wrapping the gifts the night before. Suspension of Disbelief, as the phrase goes, is not, I hope, willful, but must be charmed, cajoled, and when the obvious bit of tinkering is necessary, acknowledged as so.

It is possible for the reality of a play (for a play is more about reality than images) to continue in darkness, so that a scene of performance art like the toaster-strewn tableau at the end of True West is presented without guile, without disregard for the fact the audience just witnessed its construction. With this and other performance art-like-acts in Shepard’s plays comes a conviction that the audience’s eye ought to be drawn to more than just the illusion of narrative, to concrete things that might even seem absurd to the narrative—such as toasters. He seemed to sympathize with performance artists who sought to get away from the illusory nature of art and the accompanying belief that that illusion can be controlled. The audience’s perception can’t be controlled to the extent that we don’t know how the toasters got there, so I suggest that the act of getting them there be just as a part of the story as having them there. Act out their introduction to the playing space.

Who are the best people to act out such things? Actors.

The fact the production billed itself with the toast line seems fitting. In the end, the comic treatment of the scene comes as no surprise, especially considering the almost non-sequitur use of the quote as a hook. The production devoted itself more than anything else to following the letter of the law of Shepard’s prescribed set, taking advantage of the Vortex’s vast stock of furniture and dated décor. I see this as missing the point of putting on a play, especially this one. I hoped for more crisis, more immediacy, but remained too distracted by the inordinate number of beer cans suddenly at my feet. The least they could have done was let each of us drink one before adding it to the pile. -BCM