Two Opposite Animals: Structural Pairing in Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind

Two Opposite Animals: Structural Pairing in Sam Shepard's A Lie a/the Mind GREGORY W. LANIER Sam Shepard has said that his work' 'is all experimental. Experiment, by its very nature, has to do with risk. If there's no risk, there's no experiment. And every play's a risk.'" Although the dramatic risks that Shepard takes in A Lie ofthe Mind (1985) are not as flagrantly sensational as his pyrotechnic plotting in The Tooth of Crime (1972) or as his "fractured whole" characterization in Angel City (1976), Shepard here again challenges the audience to accept his transformation of conventional fanns into new dramatic structures.2 In A Lie of the Mind, Shepard uses structural pairing to transmute the conventions of realistic characterization and comic reconciliation into adrama that interweaves realism and mythic abstraction in order to expose the limits of category and genre. When Jonathan Cott asked Shepard to describe the "lightning bolt of inspiration" that sparked A Lie ofthe Mind, Shepard said it was "The incredible schism between a man and a woman, in which something is broken in a way that almost kills the thing that was causing them to be together. The devastating break - that was the lightning bolt. '" These images offragmentation pervade A Lie ofthe Mind, delineating the disintegration not only of the intimacy between men and women, but the structure ofthe family as well. Shepard's interest in the pathology of relationships might imply that A Lie ofthe Mind has that hallmark of "realistic" drama: psychologically believable characterization. When compared to the transfonnational or symbolic characters that populate Shepard's Cowboys #2, The Unseen Hand, or Angel City, the characterization in A Lie of the Mind seems realistic indeed. But even when Shepard endows his characters with logical motivations that point toward psychological plausibility, he undercuts the realism by emphasizing the symbolic core thatdetennines both the nature of the characters and the structure of the play. Lynda Hart has noticed that Jake and Frankie represent two sides ofa divided self: "Jake and Frankie resemble the split-self brothers Lee and Austin in True West, the fonner filled with brutal anger and violence, the latter open to sensitive (1991) 34 MODERN DRAMA 410 Structural Pairing in A Lie of the Mind 41I discussion and reasoned compromise.' '4 The comparison ofJake and Frankie to Lee and Austin is apt, but Hart fails to pursue the implications of her comment. Even though Shepard supplies enough information about Jake's past to build a psychologically plausible explanation of Jake's actions, and even though Shepard thereby builds a sense ofJake as a •'whole character," Shepard simultaneously introduces elements that emphasize the abstract function of Jake's character. The moment the audience recognizes that Jake and Frankie represent two sides of one complete being, that perception dislocates the mode ofcharacter representation away from realism and toward Shepard's idea of "fractured character" and invites the audience to consider Jake's character as part of a spatial composition not to be explained in terms of intelligible behavior. This process begins in the first scene ofthe play. The opening stage directions call for Jake and Frankie to be separated by the audience, with an "impression of huge dark space and distance between the two characters with each one isolated in his own pool oflight.", The theatrical distance between the brothers metonymically represents the physical distance between the location ofthe two callers (Jake is in "some state" in the north,probably Montana; Frankie ismuch further south, probably in Oklahoma). AdditionalJy, the theatrical distance suggests the psychic gulf dividing brother and brother (or violent self from sensitive self). That gulfbecomes the central metaphor of the play - a void that not only separates brother from brother, but which represents all the failed connections between thecharacters ofthe play and which constantly remindsthe audience that any character who believes that he or she can achieve a full and mutual connection with another engages in lies of the mind. Further, the awareness that Jake and Frankie represent a divided selfprompts the expectation that a comic reconciliation will bring the two selves together. ~ The plot of separated brothers (having two names, two bodies, but one identity...