Review: True West by Weird Rodeo
by David Glen Robinson

The question one could ask is why a brand-new theatre company would challenge a play as complex and difficult as Sam Shepard’s True West for its premier production. And the question contains the answer—because it is a challenge, and all who see it can measure the company’s skill in their upward progress climbing the monument. That's the first reason to shout “Bravo!” at this show, one of the few.

Weird Rodeo wisely short-circuits some of the difficulties by assembling a highly talented cast and crew. The first stand-out is David Boss as Lee. He is superbly costumed and styled by Lindsay McKenna for his role, and he's an actor who has shown us he can easily learn and spout thousands of lines while physically stomping through any number of flaming sets. His role clearly drives the dialogues and action of the play, and Boss is easily capable of doing this in True West. But here is a note for director Jerry Fugit: Boss and all the actors need clear pause points for reactions and heightened intensity. Boss can fire daggers and poniards from his eyes, but he needs a few more opportunities in this play to do so. It’s not all machine-gun mouth and phone cords. The weaponry metaphors are apt.

Bob Jones as the movie producer Saul Kimmer matches his subtlety to Boss’s power. Lee addresses Saul with the predatory look of a coyote eyeing a rabbit. But Saul’s instincts are those of a rattlesnake, not a rabbit, and he correctly sees the brothers Austin (Chris Hejl) and Lee for who and what they are. Saul slithers through the story with complete control, a fact we notice only later. Bob Jones does excellent work, making his reactions and taking his silences as needed to flesh out his character.

The story of True West is well-known: after years of separation family members come back together with the intensity of hypergolic solid rocket fuel, a trope perhaps invented by Sam Shepard. The biblical Prodigal Son parable it ain’t. The father is absent, said by Saul to be “destitute” which the entire audience takes to mean “insane.” Dad fled to the Desert, and here we see the first layerings of meaning on Shepard’s conception of Desert. The meanings Shepard gives it are largely chthonic, steeped in desolation and darkness. Mom (Bobbie Oliver) is in thefar north touring Alaska, a desert of another sort. The criminal but romantic seeker Lee sees the Desert as a refuge from authority and control, while Austin, educated and tame, fears it. Between scenes coyote voices on the soundtrack howl songs of death.

The Desert underlies the more surficial titular theme of the West. And here's where Weird Rodeo succeeds in the task it set for itself. We see clearly the distinction between brother Austin’s real West (freeways, palm trees and golf courses) and Lee’s unstated but described True West. All is made plain by Lee’s verbal homage to Kirk Douglas as the last cowboy on earth in the movie Lonely Are the Brave. Lee would have given his life to have worked in that film in any capacity, but Austin, the Ivy League screenwriter, has never seen the movie. The production ultimately accomplishes its theatrical and literary goals by making the West distinctions clear and dealing with their implications.

One of the pitfalls in producing a Shepard play is his trademark piled-up, chaotic set for action that builds in intensity throughout the play. Chris Hejl designed the set and presented it in the Off-Center space as a thrust stage. Hejl also finished it laudably as a period 1970s kitchen and dining area in collaboration with prop designer Jess Decelle. The set is worthy of Ia Ensterä (cited in the Special Thanks list). It is strongly articulating and required to vomit forth all the detritus demanded by the play. The design is not entirely equal to the task. Scene changes were loud and fast, lit by necessarily too-bright work lights. Cabinets were backless, so when their doors opened, they were open to the backstage where one could almost see stagehands shoveling scripted trash through the cabinet spaces into the playing area. Although note: there were no stagehands to change the set; the actors themselves changed the set onstage. Also, two typewriters had to be traded out for story purposes, representing one typewriter damaged in the course of the story. In later scenes, a character opened cabinet doors in a desperate search, and in one of them sat the undamaged typewriter in sat in full view, traded out, in a kitchen cabinet where office equipment would not be stored. Small bits of exposed artifice such as these build up gradually and erode the illusion of a kitchen in the 1970s.

The competent lighting design by Reagan Tankersley had a few issues that dovetailed with those of the set. Even if a few glaring lighting jumps must be blamed on unruly electrons, the lighting structure itself was too exposed. At the end of one scene where night turns to day, the lights grow subtly on the outside. But one large instrument high in the dusty rafters of the Off Center sprang to orange! and attracted every eye in the audience before anyone noticed rosy-fingered dawn playing upon the kitchen curtains.

It may be that the thrust approach of the space placed too many demands on the production and left too many elements exposed. Last year, Breaking String Theatre’s Three, or the Sound of the Great Existential Nothingness played in the round in the Off Center, brilliantly so. But the key point here is that the company didn't place a lot of operational demands placed on that set other than accommodating the actors performing on it. True West’s set is intended to be a convulsing fellow character in the show. Draw curtains, a fuller build-out, or even black-garbed stagehands for scene changes would have assisted its magical transformations. Additional resources allocated to it would have made a difference.

Toward the end of the play I thought that True West could have been subtitled “Carnage Nightly.” Mom came home from Alaska to that Sam Shepard set in its extreme disorder. Ms Oliver did not heighten the sense of desolation , either what she saw before her or of that apparently within her character. At the very end, we understood Mom’s detachment to be deeply irrational. She watched and did nothing as her sons pulled the Desert over themselves like a blanket.

At the curtain call, the actors were covered with sweat and beer, and so was the audience. First productions rarely provide such theatrical adventure. I would like to see Weird Rodeo revisit True West as its fourth or fifth production, with vastly more resources. This production team, true to True West, is talented and well capable of climbing higher on the monument next time around. Shepard fans should definitely check out Weird Rodeo’s new edition of True West.

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True West
by Sam Shepard
Weird Rodeo

Weird Rodeo’s True West by Sam Shepard plays through January 25th. Tickets are available at buyplaytex.com.