Fourteen years ago, I was fortunate enough to see Ethan Hawke in an Off-Broadway revival
of David Rabe’s dark Hurly Burly. In
the years since, I have only caught him here and there in a few of his film
roles.
But a few weeks ago, Hawke showed the fulfillment of
the talent he flashed then, this time in another darkly comic tale of desperate
men hoping for a Hollywood break: True West. Anyone who’s seen the production from the Roundabout Theatre Company—which closed a week ago—can only hope he
will be lured to the stage again.
Hawke was joined onstage by another actor best known
for his film roles: Paul Dano, star
of Little Miss Sunshine, There Will Be
Blood, and Wouldn’t It Be Nice? Under
the direction of James Macdonald, the duo extracted just about every measure of
hilarity and horror they could find in one of the finest plays by Sam Shepard.
The actors play brothers Lee and Austin, seemingly
as different as one can imagine. Austin, the younger, is holed up in the suburban
home 40 miles east of L.A. of his mother, who has vacated the premises for an
Alaska vacation. Into this quiet environment barges Lee, a drifter who has not
seen his brother in five years but immediately establishes an edgy, even
sinister, dynamic with his scruffy appearance; his penchant for petty thievery;
his anger at Austin's rejection of their no-account father; and his appropriation of Austin’s car keys on an errand, then taunting that he if he
wants them back he’ll need to take them from him.
The parents of Lee and Austin have gone to
geographical extremes (Alaska, for Mom; the desert, where their father went). But
the brothers, without family stability, find themselves at psychological
extremes.
All of this could not have come at a worse time for
Austin, who, after diligently plugging away on a screenplay, watches in horror
as his drifter brother turns into a first-class grifter, too: pitching a
cliché-ridden script idea to producer Saul Klimmer, who has come to visit
Austin about his project. The next day, Klimmer, having lost an early-morning
golf match to Lee, announces that he will option Lee’s project rather than
Austin’s. (Gary Wilmes makes the
most of his few minutes onstage as slick, shallow Saul, making patently plain
why Shepard came to regard Hollywood as a “sprawling, demented snake.”)
Fraternal enmity is as old as Cain and Abel. But in True West, Shepard took this theme into
another dimension: i.e., what would happen if angry Cain and mild-mannered Abel
switch roles after intermission, when the change in their fortunes pushes
Austin into a bender and Lee into a concentrated burst of energy at the
typewriter?
At the Roundabout’s American Airlines Theater, the
accent was all on deconstruction. Just as the apartment of the mother of Lee
and Austin is deconstructed by the end of the play, so are these two
characters. The duality in their natures comes in for unexpected exploration. (For
instance, it is funnier to watch Lee trying to be responsible and productive
than Austin emulating his brother’s drinking and thievery.)
In past productions, the mutability of their
identities took on a different aspect, as the two lead actors would sometimes
alternate roles—most notably in the 2000 Broadway revival starring Philip
Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly. This meant there was little if any age
difference between the two. But this time, the Roundabout has kept true to
Shepard’s original vision of a 10-year age difference between Lee and Austin. It
has shifted the dynamic, in an important way.
Before the play, I knew little of Shepard’s life
other than the following: that he won the Pulitzer for his 1978 drama Buried Child; that he was a member of
Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue; that he had several high-profile roles in
films, including The Right Stuff; and
that, in one of those movies, Frances,
he started a three-decade relationship with Jessica Lange.
But the post-show discussion, together with the
play, threw light on a number of themes in the playwright’s work, such as
troubled father-son relationships (e.g., Shepard’s relationship with his
alcoholic father), the need to maintain ties to the land (raised on a farm, the
dramatist bought a ranch once he had enough fame), and Hollywood as a source of
frustration to anyone who dreams of a creative outlet.
The discussion brought out that Hawke knew Shepard
well from their film work. (The dramatist was father to Hawke’s Hamlet in the
2000 version of Shakespeare’s drama.) The actor made good use of that knowledge
to get under the skin of his character. (For his part, Dano appeared in the
discussion not too far off from the initially intense and introspective
Austin.)
The Roundabout brought out all the darkly comic and
mysterious textures of True West, with all its violence and mayhem lurk in the
background, culminating in a fraternal faceoff in the desert. Don’t be fooled
by the typewriter (rather than laptop or tablet) on which pages are pounded
out; 40 years after its premiere, it remains a quintessential showcase for
actors taking on themes as old as the Scriptures: the way that dreams, like pages, are pounded and pulverized, and the burden that sons carry of their father's sins.
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