February 4, 2019 Issue

Sarah Larson, in her excellent “Home on the Range,” in this week’s issue, reviews a revival of Sam Shepard’s 1980 True West, a play I’ve always wanted to see ever since I read John Lahr’s memorable review of it in the March 27, 2000, New Yorker (included in his great 2015 collection, Joy Ride). Lahr called it “a droll tale of sibling rivalry.” That 2000 production starred Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly. (Reilly is one of my favorite actors; his performance in The Sisters Brothers is, for me, one of 2018’s movie highlights.) What made Lahr’s piece memorable was his description of the play’s action. For example:

When the lights come up on the two brothers in the next scene, Austin is burnishing one of a dozen newly acquired toasters (“There’s gonna’ be a general lack of toast in the neighborhood this morning,” he says); meanwhile, in the foreground, Lee is taking out his writer’s block on the typewriter, smashing it to smithereens with a nine iron. Here Shepard is at his best: loose, intuitive, his dialogue rippling with subtle shifts of mood and ideas. In this impeccably staged piece of slapstick, while Reilly tears up the dining alcove looking for a pencil, Hoffman pads behind him, priming his toasters with white bread and talking about going back to the desert with Lee. “There’s nothing real down here, Lee! Least of all me!” he says. The frenzy builds to a sidesplitting, infantile epiphany. Lee knocks the toast out of Austin’s hand, then as Austin drops to his hands and knees to pick it up, grinds each slice into the floor.

That is a marvelous passage, and what makes it marvelous is its specificity – the burnishing of the toaster, the smashing of the typewriter with a nine iron, the grinding of each slice of toast into the floor.

Edward Sorel, illustration for John Lahr's "True West"

Larson’s piece contains vivid passages, too:

This could be your grandmother’s kitchen. Cherry-print wallpaper, sunny yellows, lush houseplants, decorations approaching kitsch without succumbing to it—everything conveys haimish order and care. There’s love in this room, and it’s about to get torn apart.

Hawke, in a scuzzy trenchcoat, looking convincingly greasy, enjoys himself, at times nearly singing his lines, waving his hands in teasing disdain. But he doesn’t overdo it. 

The plot whirls along, heading inevitably toward collaborative writing, drunken mayhem, brandished golf clubs, existential crises, flying toast. 

Josh Cochran, illustration for Sarah Larson's "Home on the  Range"

Comparing the two pieces, I think I still like Lahr’s the best. But Larson makes a valid point when she says, “Shepard’s writing and his vision are as powerful as ever, but American masculinity has evolved since he wrote ‘True West’; what’s true for one generation may not be true for the next.”