Direction : Grant Shepherd

Cast

Lee - Grant Shepherd
Austin - Tim Seconde
Saul Kimmer - Gonçalo da Graça Pereira
Mom - Joan Foster da Silva

Where is the true west? Is it the wide lands where real men, gun-toting men, ride off into the sunset, or is it the claustrophobic ‘paradise’ of the Southern California suburb where this play is set?
This play, written by Sam Shepard in 1980, poses this question, but it also suggests the duality that the characters have within them – the poet and the man of action, the criminal and the family man, the realist and the fantasist, the manipulator and the manipulated, the artist and the philistine.
Two brothers, Austin and Lee, played by Tim Seconde and Grant Shepherd respectively, progeny of a highly dysfunctional family, are house-sitting for their mother while she’s on a trip to Alaska. A sonic background of crickets and the howling of coyotes remind us that though the frontiers of the Wild West have been pushed back, it’s still out there somewhere. Mild mannered screen-writer Austin and edgy criminal psychopath Lee are seen gradually and convincingly taking on the characteristics and behaviour of the other as the action proceeds. Austin ends up drunk, sweating and violent; no-hoper Lee has perhaps, amazingly, made it in the world that Austin aspires to inhabit by presenting a scenario for a trashy contemporary Western. This touches on another aspect of the play: it is also a critique of the compromise and corruption involved in working in the movie industry. ( ….it’s a movie, not a film, says Lee, films is what they make in France).
Both Tim Seconde and Grant Shepherd (who also directed) manage to convince both in their separate depiction of the two brothers and also, crucially, in the relationship they have with each other. There are one or two moments in the play where, in a piece that is basically realistic rather than symbolic, one has to strain a bit to suspend one’s disbelief, but these moments I feel are flaws in the writing rather than in the performances. Both actors succeed in bringing us into their fragile and dangerous world, where the banal jostles with the threatening, where the wrong word, the wrong inflexion can bring on a rush of terror. There are also some very funny moments.
Though dominated by the brothers, there are short appearances by the film producer, Saul, and by their mother, who arrives unexpectedly from Alaska when things are really starting to fall apart. These two cameos are ably undertaken by Gonçalo da Graça Pereira (although as a non-native English speaker I felt that his foreigner-in-California status could have been more fully explored) and Joan Foster da Silva who gave us a suitably dotty and bemused mom.
A challenging, thought-provoking and accessible production.

Jonathan Weightman