True West
De-Jah Vou Productions
By Jack Helbig
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Shepard approaches each work with a fresh eye, an open heart, and a willingness to try anything if it helps him find his play. The result is that even his most conventional work retains a wild eccentricity at its heart that keeps it from becoming just another kitchen-sink drama about fighting lovers or unhappy families or bickering brothers. In the second act of True West, for example, he builds to a surreal climax in which a dozen or so toasters are all making toast at the same time, an olfactory trick designed to pull us back, as Shepard’s characters have been pulled back, to childhood. At the same time, it reminds us of the unresolved conflicts that keep popping up between the protagonists.
It takes a special kind of actor to make Shepard’s scripts fly, an actor willing to give himself over completely to the play, the way John Malkovich and Gary Sinise did many years ago in Steppenwolf’s legendary production of True West. Drew Affeld and Jim Carlson do the same in this debut by the Accidental Theater Ensemble, but they don’t make the mistake so many other young actors make in True West: they don’t overdo the violence and ignore the genuine emotional connection between the brothers. Affeld almost frighteningly inhabits the coyotelike Lee, half animal, half trickster. And Carlson as Austin, the good but weak brother with a stable life, has got Lee’s alter ego down cold. Both actors speak Shepard’s lines with an authority that raises the stakes in every encounter between the brothers, even in the early comic scenes in which Lee tries to trick Austin into loaning him his car. And when these performers square off in the second act, you really think they’re going to kill each other–as Shepard strongly hints they may do eventually.
In this De-Jah Vou debut production, Alex Ferrill and Maria Venegas wisely focus on the intimacy of Slim and Cavale’s relationship, because the ups and downs of that relationship–the fights, romps, quiet conversations, and periods of intense creativity–form the work’s real substance. At times this production is so quiet it feels like cinema verite, documenting the mundane lives of two ill-matched lovers. And like Affeld and Carlson in True West, Ferrill and Venegas commit so fully to their characters that they seem to become them. Venegas in particular puts her own urban Latina spin on the role, taking it over completely: two minutes into the play, all thoughts of Patti Smith disappear.
