True West

Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun Times

Highly Recommended - "Consider this delicious little twist of Chicago theatrical history: At the very moment that Sam Shepard's "True West" -- the play that set the young John Malkovich on the road to celebrity -- is being revived in high style by the Hypocrites, the youthful company that injects fresh life into the 20th century dramatic rep, Malkovich himself is over on the Steppenwolf Mainstage.

And there he is portraying a middle-aged European aristocrat who sips fine Hungarian wine -- a continent and a generation away from his days as the sweaty, typewriter-bashing, toast-eating, beer-swilling, semipsychotic brother in Shepard's play.

As for the "new boys" -- and "True West" is all about the relationship between a pair of brothers -- they don't miss a beat. Nor does director Geoff Button (also an excellent actor, as he demonstrated in the recent "Equus"), who makes sure his cast hits every crucial beat -- capturing the tense rhythms of the play's menacing dialogue and edgy moves.

At once pitch black and deadly comic, "True West" may not be a great play, but it is a hugely entertaining, wildly actable one. And just as the fabled 1980s version lodged in the minds of all those lucky enough to have seen it (remember Malkovich wielding his golf club on that typewriter?), the Hypocrites' revival is sure to bring fresh converts (and toaster jokes).

It all unfolds in the spotless southern California kitchen of a middle-class home straight out of a Sears catalog. It is there that Austin (Brad Harbaugh), an insecure but established screenwriter, is putting the finishing touches on his latest screenplay while house-sitting for his mother, who is on vacation in Alaska. And it is there that he is seriously interrupted by his feral loser of a brother, Lee (Paul Noble), who just drops in after weeks of living in the desert.

Austin is the successful brother -- Ivy League education, wife, kids, house, good salary, discipline. Lee is the volcanic failure -- bitter, full of rage, desperate, uninhibited, dangerous. And push comes to shove when Saul Kimmer (Gregory Hardigan), a slick and malleable Hollywood producer, stops by for a meeting with Austin. With less than nothing to lose, Lee pitches his own story idea -- a crazy updated Western far more commercial, and far more rooted in "real life" and primal emotions, than anything the all-too-civilized Austin could devise.

War is declared, and well before it's over the two brothers -- each profoundly envious of the other --begin to subtly shift places. (It is worth remembering that in the recent Off-Broadway revival of the show, actors Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly alternated roles during the show's run.)

Looming large in the background, yet unseen -- as is often the case in Shepard's plays -- is the brothers' father, a broken alcoholic who also lives on the desert in a state of advanced decay. The fear -- or the inevitable fate -- of the sons turning into their father hangs heavily in the air. And with that fear comes guilt and anger.

The Old Testment-style clash of brothers is key. But so are notions of creativity: Is it rooted in an adventurous, instinctive, chaotic mind, Shepard wonders, or a more cerebral, disciplined one? The playwright's obsession with questions of art vs. commerce -- and just what the movies should be about -- are in full flower here. And he captures the phenomenon of the celebrity artist to bizarre and tragicomic effect in the speech by the boys' mom (a perfectly shell-shocked Kay Schmitt) about a Picasso exhibit coming to town.

And about those brothers: Harbaugh and Noble are a marvelous match. Noble (in the Malkovich role) has the showier part as Lee, the scruffy, bearded home-demolition expert who thrives on being outrageous yet secretly yearns for the good life. He is a wonderful mix of the unpredictably homicidal and the laconically charming. And Harbaugh -- as the brother who has opted for the safe life but craves a taste of raw authenticity -- is a big surprise as he morphs, entirely believably, into what may be Austin's truer self.

Sean Graney, the Hypocrites' artistic director, has designed a superb set, a genteel, stone-walled bungalow with patio where the drip, drip, drip of water -- along with the hum of crickets and the snap of pop-top beer cans -- creates a perfect din" -