True West
By Sam Shepard
Directed and Designed by Mike McShane and George Steven O'Brien
Acrosstown Repertory Theatre (Gainesville, Florida)
August - September 2014
Directed and Designed by Mike McShane and George Steven O'Brien
Acrosstown Repertory Theatre (Gainesville, Florida)
August - September 2014
Photos courtesy of Laura Gross.
Acrosstown’s ‘True West’ runs full gamut of emotions
By Ron Cunningham
Sun theater critic
Sam Shepard’s “True West,” with Mike McShane as Austin, and George Steven O’Brien as his brother, Lee, continues through Sept. 7 at the Acrosstown Repertory Theatre. (Photo by Carolyne Salt)
On a sweltering night in a cheesy house somewhere east of Los Angeles, two deeply-estranged brothers sit in front of an open refrigerator.
The alcohol has been flowing like water, and sibling inhibitions are lower then the desert humidity. It has been a long day of taunts, insults and sudden outbreaks of physical violence interspaced by odd flashes of boozy introspection.
But in the quiet moment of an inebriated truce, younger brother Austin tells Lee, the elder, a hilarious but pathetic story about their long-absent father.
I won’t give it away — suffice to say that teeth, Juarez and chop suey all come into play.
The story itself is priceless, but in the dim illumination of that fridge light — the shadows of long-nursed regrets and resentments held momentarily at bay — is revealed a brotherly bond that is, improbably, as unbreakable as it is brittle.
To call Sam Shepard’s “True West” a dark comedy is a bit misleading. Indeed, before the opening night performance at the Acrosstown Repertory Theatre began, cast member Carolyn Salt came out and advised the audience to laugh when they can because “it’s the only way not to get caught up and swept away” in this family tempest.
At the center of the storm are the brothers. Austin is a Hollywood screenwriter seemingly on the cusp of his first big break. Big brother Lee is a part-time thief and full-time loser.
One on his way up. One sinking lower still.
And it is a tribute to Shepard’s genius that, at the end of the day, viewers may be hard pressed to say which sibling is headed in which direction.
“You’ll probably wind up in the same desert sooner or later,” says their disgusted mother, nicely played by Salt with a weary maternal detachment that borders on indifference.
Seriously? Salt slaps Austin lightly on the back of his head and then walks away while he is trying to strangle the life out of Lee? Gee, guys, maybe mom’s been the problem all along.
The glue that holds this production together is the chemistry between these brothers. It is especially remarkable because George Steven O’Brien (Lee) and Mike McShane (Austin) bear not a wit of physical resemblance. Lee is tall, rangy and scraggly of beard and hair. Austin is short, pinched-faced and squinty. But blood is thicker than the lenses of Austin’s glasses, and in their quarrelsome exchanges and body language, these two fine actors totally sell their brother act.
O’Brien is excellent as the underachiever who long ago buried his innate intelligence and talents under an emotional desert. It can’t be easy to act well — and act well inebriated — for an entire production. But O’Brien pulls it off.
“Between you, the coyotes and the crickets a thought doesn’t have much of a chance,” a frustrated Lee snaps at his brother as he tries without success to get his beer-addled thoughts down on paper.
You see, Lee once dabbled in “art, or whatever you want to call it.” But he gave it up because “there’s no future in it. It was ahead of its time.”
And Mike McShane equally shines in the role of his brother’s emotional and physical punching bag. For all his outward success, Austin secretly pines to be Lee ... and maybe he is.
“He thinks we’re the same person,” Austin tells Lee, when a producer named Saul insinuates even more discord into their already combative relationship.
Ah, Saul. The sleazy Hollywood bottom-feeder who, on the whim of a golf bet, shatters Austin’s dreams of fame and elevates Lee from lowlife to luminary. Veteran character actor Shamrock McShane wears the role as neatly as Saul wears his cheap sport coat, tacky Hawaiian shirt and sandals. Shamrock does smarmy. He cackles, he glad-hands, he smoozes, he practically slithers.
Asked why he suddenly tossed Austin’s much-labored-over script for Lee’s half-baked movie concept, Shamrock McShane flashes a cherubic grin and says, “It has the ring of truth.”
And you know this guy wouldn’t recognize truth if it ran him down on Sunset Strip.
But here’s the thing. The ART’s production of “True West” is worth seeing precisely because it does have the ring of truth. Like family life itself, it is by turns, funny, sad, disturbing and redeeming.
“This isn’t champagne anymore,” a bitter Austin muses as though contemplating the death of his ambitions. “The days of champagne are long gone.”
Maybe, but by the final scene of “True West,” the faint scent of salvation lingers still in the wreckage of the kitchen that is the familial battleground.
And it smells like toast.
Sun theater critic
Sam Shepard’s “True West,” with Mike McShane as Austin, and George Steven O’Brien as his brother, Lee, continues through Sept. 7 at the Acrosstown Repertory Theatre. (Photo by Carolyne Salt)
On a sweltering night in a cheesy house somewhere east of Los Angeles, two deeply-estranged brothers sit in front of an open refrigerator.
The alcohol has been flowing like water, and sibling inhibitions are lower then the desert humidity. It has been a long day of taunts, insults and sudden outbreaks of physical violence interspaced by odd flashes of boozy introspection.
But in the quiet moment of an inebriated truce, younger brother Austin tells Lee, the elder, a hilarious but pathetic story about their long-absent father.
I won’t give it away — suffice to say that teeth, Juarez and chop suey all come into play.
The story itself is priceless, but in the dim illumination of that fridge light — the shadows of long-nursed regrets and resentments held momentarily at bay — is revealed a brotherly bond that is, improbably, as unbreakable as it is brittle.
To call Sam Shepard’s “True West” a dark comedy is a bit misleading. Indeed, before the opening night performance at the Acrosstown Repertory Theatre began, cast member Carolyn Salt came out and advised the audience to laugh when they can because “it’s the only way not to get caught up and swept away” in this family tempest.
At the center of the storm are the brothers. Austin is a Hollywood screenwriter seemingly on the cusp of his first big break. Big brother Lee is a part-time thief and full-time loser.
One on his way up. One sinking lower still.
And it is a tribute to Shepard’s genius that, at the end of the day, viewers may be hard pressed to say which sibling is headed in which direction.
“You’ll probably wind up in the same desert sooner or later,” says their disgusted mother, nicely played by Salt with a weary maternal detachment that borders on indifference.
Seriously? Salt slaps Austin lightly on the back of his head and then walks away while he is trying to strangle the life out of Lee? Gee, guys, maybe mom’s been the problem all along.
The glue that holds this production together is the chemistry between these brothers. It is especially remarkable because George Steven O’Brien (Lee) and Mike McShane (Austin) bear not a wit of physical resemblance. Lee is tall, rangy and scraggly of beard and hair. Austin is short, pinched-faced and squinty. But blood is thicker than the lenses of Austin’s glasses, and in their quarrelsome exchanges and body language, these two fine actors totally sell their brother act.
O’Brien is excellent as the underachiever who long ago buried his innate intelligence and talents under an emotional desert. It can’t be easy to act well — and act well inebriated — for an entire production. But O’Brien pulls it off.
“Between you, the coyotes and the crickets a thought doesn’t have much of a chance,” a frustrated Lee snaps at his brother as he tries without success to get his beer-addled thoughts down on paper.
You see, Lee once dabbled in “art, or whatever you want to call it.” But he gave it up because “there’s no future in it. It was ahead of its time.”
And Mike McShane equally shines in the role of his brother’s emotional and physical punching bag. For all his outward success, Austin secretly pines to be Lee ... and maybe he is.
“He thinks we’re the same person,” Austin tells Lee, when a producer named Saul insinuates even more discord into their already combative relationship.
Ah, Saul. The sleazy Hollywood bottom-feeder who, on the whim of a golf bet, shatters Austin’s dreams of fame and elevates Lee from lowlife to luminary. Veteran character actor Shamrock McShane wears the role as neatly as Saul wears his cheap sport coat, tacky Hawaiian shirt and sandals. Shamrock does smarmy. He cackles, he glad-hands, he smoozes, he practically slithers.
Asked why he suddenly tossed Austin’s much-labored-over script for Lee’s half-baked movie concept, Shamrock McShane flashes a cherubic grin and says, “It has the ring of truth.”
And you know this guy wouldn’t recognize truth if it ran him down on Sunset Strip.
But here’s the thing. The ART’s production of “True West” is worth seeing precisely because it does have the ring of truth. Like family life itself, it is by turns, funny, sad, disturbing and redeeming.
“This isn’t champagne anymore,” a bitter Austin muses as though contemplating the death of his ambitions. “The days of champagne are long gone.”
Maybe, but by the final scene of “True West,” the faint scent of salvation lingers still in the wreckage of the kitchen that is the familial battleground.
And it smells like toast.
Sibling rivalry on display in Acrosstown’s ‘True West’
By Nathalie Dortonne
Correspondent
Prepare to watch two brothers duke it out onstage when a Hollywood screenwriter is visited by his drifter brother in Sam Shepard’s “True West,” which opens Friday at the Acrosstown Repertory Theatre.
Co-directed by Mike McShane and George Steven O’Brien, “True West” continues through Sept. 7. A preview performance, with tickets available at half price, begins at 8 tonight.
McShane, who also plays the younger brother, Austin, said the story is set in their vacationing mother’s quaint southern California home, where it follows the trials and tribulation of the quarreling brothers.
“Austin is a screenwriter (and) Lee is a drifter, who comes across his brother at his mom’s house where Austin is busy working on a screenplay that he is going to (share) with producer Saul Kimmer,” said McShane, whose father, Shamrock McShane, plays the Hollywood producer.
“The play is about the real west, which turns out to be the interior psychology of two brothers, Austin and Lee,” said Shamrock McShane. “I kind of picture Sam Shepard writing this play, dividing himself in half.”
“It has a lot of traditional Sam Shepard themes going on there ... the conquest of the West, and what the United States was really built on, and the kind of mythology that we use to gear ourselves up to face reality and turn it into Hollywood blockbusters,” he said. “I think that’s kind of what the play is all about ... trying to get to the bottom of what’s really inside this country and what’s really inside these characters,” said Shamrock McShane, who has who has been in more than 30 Acrosstown Repertory Theatre productions since 1983.
An Ivy League-educated screenwriter, Austin becomes infuriated with his brother when the producer abandons Austin’s project and buys into Lee’s story, Mike McShane added.
“Austin’s (screenplay) is a simple little love story ... compared to Lee’s screenplay, which is about two guys chasing each other across what he labels as the ‘panhandle of Texas through Tornado country,’ ” Mike McShane said. “We’ve got very interesting tricks that George is going to do in this play, to make it really seem like the audience is there in the house with the brothers. Over the course of the play, the two quarrelling brothers pretty much demolish the entire house.”
George Steven O’Brien, who plays Lee, the older brother, said toward the end of the play the set becomes a disaster area.
“A lot of chaos goes on throughout the play ... the tension builds. Outside the entire play you’re going to hear crickets and coyotes. As the play goes on they get more and more intense,” said O’Brien, who acted alongside the McShanes in [High Springs Playhouse’s] production of “Death of a Salesman.”
O’Brien added that he is also doing something taboo with Lee’s character in the production.
“I’m changing him a little bit. He is an aggressive type of bully, and pretty much an opportunist. I’m playing Lee more as a burnout ... he is unbalanced (and) lives in two worlds,” O’Brien said. “He is desperately trying to make his way in the real world but nothing makes sense to him. He just can’t stay within the boundaries of society.”
Carolyne Salt, who plays the mother, said people should come out and see “True West” because it is a rare, transformative play.
“If you like dark humor, this is the play for you; it’s hard not to laugh as everything is falling apart,” she said.
Salt said the audience could interpret “True West” in a number of different ways.
“I interpret the brothers as two sides of the creative process that are forever keeping each other in balance,” she said. “In some ways the mother is off in her own little world and in another way she is a driving force ... She doesn’t really understand art but she acknowledges her need to have it,” said Salt, who also is the marketing director at the Acrosstown Repertory Theatre.
Mike McShane said “True West” is becoming the most frequently produced show at the Acrosstown Repertory Theatre. The play has been produced twice before at the theater.
“The writing is excellent. The acting is dynamite, and it’s one of the more gritty shows of this season at the Acrosstown ... People who don’t usually come to the theater might really be into it because it isn’t high brow,” said Mike McShane. “Sam Shepard writes in a way where his middle class is struggling either to barely get by or see who can get ahead. The content is accessible to a wide range of audiences.”
Correspondent
Prepare to watch two brothers duke it out onstage when a Hollywood screenwriter is visited by his drifter brother in Sam Shepard’s “True West,” which opens Friday at the Acrosstown Repertory Theatre.
Co-directed by Mike McShane and George Steven O’Brien, “True West” continues through Sept. 7. A preview performance, with tickets available at half price, begins at 8 tonight.
McShane, who also plays the younger brother, Austin, said the story is set in their vacationing mother’s quaint southern California home, where it follows the trials and tribulation of the quarreling brothers.
“Austin is a screenwriter (and) Lee is a drifter, who comes across his brother at his mom’s house where Austin is busy working on a screenplay that he is going to (share) with producer Saul Kimmer,” said McShane, whose father, Shamrock McShane, plays the Hollywood producer.
“The play is about the real west, which turns out to be the interior psychology of two brothers, Austin and Lee,” said Shamrock McShane. “I kind of picture Sam Shepard writing this play, dividing himself in half.”
“It has a lot of traditional Sam Shepard themes going on there ... the conquest of the West, and what the United States was really built on, and the kind of mythology that we use to gear ourselves up to face reality and turn it into Hollywood blockbusters,” he said. “I think that’s kind of what the play is all about ... trying to get to the bottom of what’s really inside this country and what’s really inside these characters,” said Shamrock McShane, who has who has been in more than 30 Acrosstown Repertory Theatre productions since 1983.
An Ivy League-educated screenwriter, Austin becomes infuriated with his brother when the producer abandons Austin’s project and buys into Lee’s story, Mike McShane added.
“Austin’s (screenplay) is a simple little love story ... compared to Lee’s screenplay, which is about two guys chasing each other across what he labels as the ‘panhandle of Texas through Tornado country,’ ” Mike McShane said. “We’ve got very interesting tricks that George is going to do in this play, to make it really seem like the audience is there in the house with the brothers. Over the course of the play, the two quarrelling brothers pretty much demolish the entire house.”
George Steven O’Brien, who plays Lee, the older brother, said toward the end of the play the set becomes a disaster area.
“A lot of chaos goes on throughout the play ... the tension builds. Outside the entire play you’re going to hear crickets and coyotes. As the play goes on they get more and more intense,” said O’Brien, who acted alongside the McShanes in [High Springs Playhouse’s] production of “Death of a Salesman.”
O’Brien added that he is also doing something taboo with Lee’s character in the production.
“I’m changing him a little bit. He is an aggressive type of bully, and pretty much an opportunist. I’m playing Lee more as a burnout ... he is unbalanced (and) lives in two worlds,” O’Brien said. “He is desperately trying to make his way in the real world but nothing makes sense to him. He just can’t stay within the boundaries of society.”
Carolyne Salt, who plays the mother, said people should come out and see “True West” because it is a rare, transformative play.
“If you like dark humor, this is the play for you; it’s hard not to laugh as everything is falling apart,” she said.
Salt said the audience could interpret “True West” in a number of different ways.
“I interpret the brothers as two sides of the creative process that are forever keeping each other in balance,” she said. “In some ways the mother is off in her own little world and in another way she is a driving force ... She doesn’t really understand art but she acknowledges her need to have it,” said Salt, who also is the marketing director at the Acrosstown Repertory Theatre.
Mike McShane said “True West” is becoming the most frequently produced show at the Acrosstown Repertory Theatre. The play has been produced twice before at the theater.
“The writing is excellent. The acting is dynamite, and it’s one of the more gritty shows of this season at the Acrosstown ... People who don’t usually come to the theater might really be into it because it isn’t high brow,” said Mike McShane. “Sam Shepard writes in a way where his middle class is struggling either to barely get by or see who can get ahead. The content is accessible to a wide range of audiences.”