SARASOTA — Maybe Florida in late July is not the right time and place to attempt a Sam Shepard play. It's too hot and the soggy air's too heavy to work up the nuanced emotional nitro that makes his characters tick. Or maybe in True West Banyan Theater Company simply bit off more than it could chew. Whatever the case, I believed scarcely a minute of what transpired on stage opening night in the Jane B. Cook Theater.
On its surface, this is not a difficult play. Its central action pits one brother, Austin, college-bright and on the verge of success as a screenwriter, against another, Lee, a near-feral loser and thief. The setting is their mother's home in the new suburban West, where Austin is doing some research and tending vacationing Mom's houseplants when Lee arrives unexpectedly and upsets the apple cart.
It gets complicated where the brothers begin to peel one another, with twisted gusto, down to bare bone. Neither brother is what he seems, and this is the critical point that the Banyan Theater production of True West seems to miss.
Lee is played with a Neanderthal's jutting jaw, a bully's swagger and little subtlety by R. Ward Duffy, who does capture some of his character's comic possibilities but glosses over Lee's real menace in favor of caricature. As Austin, Eric Hissom performs his character's disintegration at the hands of his maddening brother and a nasty turn of luck as if governed by a stopwatch.
As Saul Kimmer, the stereotypical Hollywood agent on whom Austin's hopes are pinned until Lee seduces him with his own absurd story line and a golf wager, J Bloomrosen sleepwalks through the role. That's okay, actually, since Kimmer is less a character than a plot device. Then there's batty Mom, whose sudden return to a house turned inside out as the boozing brothers escalate from emotional to physical violence cows Lee in an instant. The question is, Why? Her appearance, suitcases in her hands and the cracked notion that Picasso is visiting the local art museum in her head, needs to be a pause in the action, setting up Austin's near murder of his brother. Nina Hughes' barely there Mom does manage weakly to admonish her obstreperous sons to take their fight outside. But why her entrance so affects the drunken brawlers remains a mystery.
John Bancroft is a Sarasota writer specializing in food, wine and the arts. He may be reached at sirenian@earthlink.net.
Theater review | True West
The play runs through Aug. 2 in the Jane B. Cook Theater at the FSU Center for Performing Arts, 5555 N Tamiami Trail, Sarasota. $28.50. (941) 552-1032.
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