American Drama in the Age of Film

8. Lamebrains across Texas

8 Lamebrains across Texas One story’s as good as another. It’s all in the way you tell it. That’s what counts. That’s what makes the difference. —Sam Shepard, Seduced The Broadway revival of True West in 2000 sparked renewed critical praise for Sam Shepard’s 1980 play. Jack Kroll heralded the show as a pinnacle of theatrical form by saying that “you are forcibly reminded of the ineffable power of theatre, despite all the noise made by the unlive arts—movies, TV, cyberia” (“Wild Wild West”). These words offer powerful praise indeed, but they shroud the virtues of theater in general, and Shepard’s play in particular, with gauzy prose that doesn’t really convey much substantive argument. To define “the ineffable power of theatre” by showing how Shepard’s dramatic text translates into a transcendent theatrical production, I will refrain from aggrandizing theater as a “live” event, but instead probe stress points in the text, those cracks subject to the pressure of inquiry which divulge ambivalence and ambiguity, and try to fill the empty spaces with imaginative possibilities. Paradoxically, and wonderfully , these stress points in Shepard’s well-built play reveal its enduring theatricality and artistic strength. Written in California, True West premiered at San Francisco’s tiny Magic Theatre before heading east for a now-infamous production at Joseph Papp’s Public Theatre in December 1980. Shepard and his director, Robert Woodruff, wanted the West Coast actors to appear in the New York premiere as well, but Papp insisted upon Peter Boyle and Tommy Lee Jones. Woodruff later resigned in protest , Papp took over, and Shepard disavowed the entire production. T wo years later, two unknown actors made the play, their theater, and themselves famous. The Steppenwolf Theatre’s production of True West in 1982 launched John Malkovich as a major star and garnered great press for professional theater in Chicago . When that same production moved to Greenwich Village in New York, director Gary Sinise stepped into the other leading role. Many people take this ballyhooed revival for the original, but that mistake can be excused because the production, revered in its own right, was also filmed for television at the Cherry Lane Theatre and broadcast on PBS in 1984. This film version, which still 104 / Chapter 8 fetches a good price on eBay, more or less documents a live stage performance. Its shortcomings begin with an admission that it fails to adapt the play for cinematic purposes, a claim I’ll return to later when I try to clinch my argument about the power of the play. Casting also provided the novel attraction for the most recent commercial stage production in which the lead actors, Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly, alternated playing the brothers, Austin and Lee. At one point in the play, Lee says to his brother, “I always wondered what’d be like to be you” (Seven Plays 26). Since role reversal is the dominant structural device in the play, the decision for the actors to switch roles reinforced what was already explicit in the text. Kroll insisted that the casting decision was no gimmick: “Swapping the roles unlocks the heart of Shepard’s much-revived play, one of his sharpest, funniest examinations of his favorite theme, the divided nature of the American soul” (“Wild Wild West”). Among wildly positive reviews, two Johns (Lahr and Simon) cast dissenting opinions, the former with a backhanded compliment (“minor play brilliantly cast” [121]) and the latter with a dismissive pun (“nice production of a good Shepard” [“Switch-hitters”]). Unlike Lahr and Simon, who favored the production over the play, Ben Brantley, writing in the New York Times, felt that the casting decision of the production demonstrated the richness of the dramatic text: “this production makes a persuasive case for True West as a great American play, arguably Mr. Shepard’s finest. The contrast of the two versions , which are similarly staged but quite different in tone, also shows the incredible variety that can be harvested from a work this fertile without betraying its essential nature” (1). How does one conjoin “essential nature” and “incredible variety”? It would be tempting to view the essential nature of Shepard’s play as a muddle that clever directors could shape any way they see fit to satisfy their individual imaginations. True West remains, though, Shepard’s most well crafted, tightly structured, and traditional in form work. Diverse opinions regarding its artistic value all agree that...