Lee and Austin are brothers. Austin, a screenwriter and family man, is housesitting his Mom’s L.A.-area home while she’s in Alaska. He’s trying to get some writing done when Lee, a homeless petty burglar, shows up and starts drinking beer after beer and passive-aggressively interrupting and tormenting his younger brother, heavy on the aggressive.
Thus begins True West, Sam Shepard’s 1980 kitchen-sink classic of sibling rivalry at a nuclear level. Lee insinuates himself into Austin’s Hollywood connections, successfully pitching a mythic western narrative to Austin’s producer friend. Incensed at the usurpation, Austin decides to embrace his own larcenous desert outlaw side. Identities and advantages are swapped and re-swapped; the tension and bitter rage between the two men escalates.
Zack Fine plays Lee with shucking-and-jiving footwork and a sense that he’s always on the edge of exploding. His voice modulates unpredictably from Woody Harrelson laconic to a sort of Bobcat Goldthwait bray, sometimes within the same sentence. Rhett Guter plays Austin, initially, as repressed nearly to the point of facelessness; when anger and envy send him over the edge it’s almost liberating. Two capable supporting players appear briefly, Geoffrey Wade and Amelia White, just to remind us that the rest of the world exists, but at its core, the play is a duet of splenetic fury, and Fine and Guter play it with scary and riotous intensity.
As with several of Shepard’s longer works, a slight sense of strain sets in, in the homestretch; the flailing invective seems to go around in circles, possibly in part for the purpose of getting the play to full length. But these actors keep the bristling poetry of the language energized.
Jenn Thompson’s direction keeps the leads on their feet, pacing and stalking and invading each other’s personal space, and she brings an iconic flourish to the play’s final moment. Along with Angela Steiner’s flavorful original music, the sound design by Ken Travis sets the tone with Ennio Morricone spaghetti western standards. Alexander Dodge’s set flawlessly evokes the late-’70s/early ’80s decor of the true suburban west, and Lee and Austin make a spectacular mess of it.
True West continues through June 9 at Tempe Center for the Arts; go to atc.org for tickets and details.
