‘True West’ @ The Classics Theatre Project
Promotional photos Kate Voskova
—Jan Farrington
Watching two brothers (old enough to know better) wrassle each other to the floor? Sounds entertaining, and The Classics Theatre Project cranks up both the comedy and the the awfulness of Sam Shepard’s early-‘80s classic True West until our ears ring and we flinch from the blows—to the face, to the body, to the typewriter.
And all of it in Mom’s little kitchen with the yellow vinyl table. Tsk.
Shepard grew up on military bases around the world, eventually landing in the scrubby half-desert suburbs of LA, where an imaginative boy’s dreams swung between old cowboy movies and get-rich Hollywood glamor. He used it all, creating his own odd world of young men (mostly) with small days and big dreams, looking for a bigger, “authentic” life and not having much luck finding it.
It was all so simple when John Wayne was doing it, right? Not so much for this pair of bros, who’ve been happy not seeing one another for the past five years. Now Mom’s visiting Alaska, Dad’s drying out nearby, and they’re alone in the house of their childhoods.
Joey Folsom begins as the cool, buttoned-down “good settler” of this modern Western, younger brother Austin. He’s a smug, semi-successful screenwriter with a wife and kids somewhere “up north.” Older brother Lee (Clay Slocum) is a hot-wired, bull-headed drifter, a con man, and a house burglar when he runs out of better ideas. He’s playing the angles every minute of the day, asking for Austin’s car keys right away (you can tell he’s wrecked Austin’s ride once or twice), and clearly resentful that little bro has, among other things, a house and an Ivy League degree.
Director Terry Martin has a good handle on Shepard’s tight colloquial language; if I have a hesitation, it’s that Slocum as Lee might need a more varied vocal style. He bellows a lot (initially exciting), but there’s more than one way to be menacing—to say “I’m big and bad.”
Austin is working on a screenplay that he’s almost sold to slick, smiling movie producer Saul (Martin Miller). Saul’s the type who smiles nonstop, right up to the moment he cuts you loose. Austin is furious to see that Lee is nosing around his big deal—even horning in on a meeting Austin has asked him to stay away from. Lee woos Saul, who’s a sucker for Western “authenticity” (there’s that word again), rustling up a story full of horses and guns on the spot…and Saul is enchanted.
Are the tables turning? Austin is shocked, and it takes him a few blinks to understand just how well brother Lee is working the room (er, Saul). Lee chats him up about golf (Lee can’t play) and Hollywood doings, and even seems to know something about “percentages” and movie/TV financing. In the horse race of their lives, Lee is gaining on Austin.
Good thing the Old Stone Cottage in Addison leaves the actors room to move—fratricidal moments call for wide-open space. Set designer Folsom’s tidy, plain-vanilla kitchen fills up with stolen toasters and rage (Austin is drinking and prowling the neighborhood), and Louis Shopen’s lights are nicely precise at the play’s important blackout moments. (Hello, Allyn Carrell!).
True West is often placed as part of a Shepard trilogy that premiered Off-Broadway in NYC from 1979-1980—Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child, and True West.
I don’t often quote another critic about a playwright, but I’ve always been bowled over by what Harold Clurman (in The Nation) wrote about Shephard’s language in the early ‘80s:
"What strikes the ear and eye is comic, occasionally hilarious behavior and speech at which one laughs while remaining slightly puzzled and dismayed…, and perhaps indefinably saddened. Yet there is a swing to it all, a vagrant freedom, a tattered song.”
WHEN: July 8-August 24, 2024
WHERE: Old Stone Cottage, 15650 Addison Rd., Addison TX
WEB: theclassicstheatreproject.com
