Opinion: Searing 'True West'

This season CTC Theater Live has made a bold leap forward from golden oldies like "Arsenic and Old Lace" and assorted Agatha Christie entertainments to meatier, more contemporary fare.

Last fall the company produced Noel Coward's insightful tragicomedy about retired actresses, "Waiting in the Wings," following it in January with "Bury the Dead," Irwin Shaw's powerful antiwar drama. And now we have a searing Sam Shepard play, "True West," perhaps CTC's most dynamic production to date.

Written in 1981, the play sounds two of Mr. Shepard's recurring themes: a lament for the Old West of cattle ranches, badlands, and lone cowboys - his "True West" - and an indictment of the New West of agro-industry, suburban sprawl, and Hollywood hustlers - today's "True West."

Two Brothers

Centered on two embattled brothers, Austin (John Franklin Beuscher), a screenwriter, and Lee (Evan Thomas), a drifter, the play's theme has often been compared to the biblical story of Cain, "a tiller of the ground," and Abel, "a keeper of sheep."

In the Bible, Cain's offering of "the fruit of the ground" was disdained by the Lord, while Abel's gift of "the firstlings of his flock and the fat thereof" found favor with Him.

"And Cain was very wroth . . . [and] rose up against Abel his brother and slew him."

In championing cowboys over landowners, Mr. Shepard seems to be siding with the Lord, favoring the nomadic hunter-gatherers of the old true west over the settled agrarians of the new - but, of course, nothing in his plays is ever that simple.

Bad Penny

We're in a Southern California suburb, about 40 miles east of Los Angeles, in the kitchen of a house belonging to Lee and Austin's mother (Irene Stefanik), who's touring Alaska.

Austin, the screenwriter, is typing out a script and misting Mom's plants while she's away. Lee, who's suddenly turned up like a bad penny, drinks beer, gives Austin a hard time, and tries to borrow his car: He's a burglar when he has a getaway vehicle.

The affable, successful family man is contrasted with the seedy outlaw. Austin has prospered in Hollywood, and awaits the arrival of his studio head for a story conference.

Fight To The Death

Lee has lived for years in the Mojave Desert getting by with the prize money his pit bull won in dog fights. Now the dog's dead and he's broke, boosting TV sets for a living.

Austin is afraid of Lee, and at this point, it sure looks like the Lord is in Austin's corner.

Enter the studio head, Saul Kimmer (Hugh R. King, making a big comeback). Lee sets out to sabotage the story conference, and before you can say, "It ain't over til it's over," things have gone to hell in a handbasket. The Lord moves in mysterious ways indeed.

What follows is a classic brother-brother confrontation, a fight to the death with the faces of good and evil obscured by booze and greed.

Two Realities

Sam Shepard is famous for creating archetypal characters that in other hands would seem like cliches, but in his have a kind of monumental reality.

Through language, he makes them and their relationships stunningly authentic and compelling. Almost perversely, he then pushes them to the edge of credibility, into far-fetched situations that strain our contract with him to suspend willingly our disbelief.

It's extremely difficult to find a stage reality that embraces both these realities: the totally believable and the near-apocryphal. This CTC Theater Live production, under Serena Seacat's penetrating direction, has ably solved the problem.

The skill of the actors, and the intensity of the belief they bring to their characters, are what make us believe.

Role Reversals

Mr. Beuscher and Mr. Thomas must be rejoicing that fate has handed them parts they seem born to play; one can almost feel a kind of exaltation in the rightness and range of their performances.

John Franklin Beuscher and Evan Thomas, as the embattled brothers, must be rejoicing that fate has handed them parts they seem born to play.

Mr. Beuscher, the guy with the clean hair and the work ethic, suddenly gives us the most brilliantly controlled drunk scene imaginable, incorporating a hilarious saga about his father's Mexican dentist, a set of false teeth, and a lost doggy bag of chop suey.

Mr. Thomas, scrofulous in a low-cut T-shirt and perpetual bad hair, in a sentimental mode narrates a chase scene about two guys in trucks hauling their horses in trailers behind them - a riotous sendup of the sanctity of the man-horse bond in old Westerns.

Each, in his own way, is thrillingly unpredictable, and utterly believable.

Smashing

As the Hollywood wheeler-dealer, Mr. King is also wonderful, slick and fast-talking, wheels turning.

When Mom finally makes her entrance near the end of the play, Ms. Stefanik does her proud, too.

With Meg Cage's evocative suburban-kitchen set, Gary Hygom's fine lighting design, and Chas W. Roeder's inspired costumes (check out Mr. King's neckties), this "True West" is sure-footed, deeply felt, and a smashing achievement.

Don't miss it.