City Coyotes Prowling the Brain

By T.E. Kalem

If phrenology were in vogue, Sam Shepard would be the most prized anatomical medicine man among U.S. playwrights. He knows how to feel every bump on or under the American skull. He views the U.S. mind as a nest of conflicted vision --the lost but lingering vernal dream of hope and purity vying with the corruptive greed of technological gimcrackery.

Shepard is most rewarding when he transforms his special war into myth. In his latest play, True West, he reworks the ancient tale of Cain and Abel. In the course of the drama, two brothers exchange identities, summoning up Baudelaire's line, "Mon semblable--mon frere!" or put somewhat differently: Am I my brother's murderer?

At first glance, Austin (Tommy Lee Jones) and Lee (Peter Boyle) seem like the remotest of kin. The atmosphere is one of Pinteresque comic menace, but actually the tension of reunion is in the air.

Austin, a gilded hack writer, has taken a mini-sabbatical from his wife and children to sweat out a movie script. Since his mother has gone to Alaska -- symbolic remnant of the last frontier -- he has holed up in her home in suburban Los Angeles. Like an anchorite, Lee spends time communing with the desert, but he certainly knows his way around town when it comes to filching TV sets for ready cash As he puts it, he and his brother are both "city coyotes." Lee is also enough of a raconteur and Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, etc., golfer to con Austin's movie producer, Saul Kimmer (Louis Zorich), into buying his unwritten cornpone saga of the "true West." Saul is one of those monstrous Hollywood moths who skirt the flames of venality, yet never get torched. All three men are the progeny of Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man, that emetically funny moral jeremiad hurled with lethal precision at the cynic American psyche.

Toward the end of the play, Austin strangles Lee to death. After a long, seemingly terminal pause, Lee rises. But is he alive, or is he the essence of "agen-bite of inwit," James Joyce's phrase for the nagging remorse of a sinfully burdened conscience? To murder a brother is to create a relentless scourge.

Sam Shepard has repudiated this production at off-Broadway's Public Theater and launched a steamy vendetta against Producer Joseph Papp. Certain errors of perception and direction are quite evident, but enough of the true Shepard is here to do him honor. Papp has certainly retained Shepard's singular gift for lunging simultaneously at the jugular and the funny bone. --By T.E. Kalem

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