Stage:

...Toward the end of the first act, both men indicate that each has envied the other for an imagined, a romanticized version of his life...

...In the play, it is the titular word "true" rather than "real" that is given a workout...

...On the surface, the image that Shepard gives us, the brothers standing amid the ruins of a suburban kitchen, is not at all the one that Lee evokes at the end of the first act...

...In this reading of the play, the brothers, each discovering himself in the other, are actually aspects of a single character in which the destructive impulse and the need to escape share space with the urge to order and the longing for shelter...

...I think we're split in a much more devastating way than psychology can ever reveal...

...The excellent production that has been brought to New York from Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater, at least in the performances of John Malkovich and Gary Sinise (who also directs), emphasizes the connection between the two brothers in terms of shared mannerisms that surface as the play progresses, particularly in Sinise's Austin, who both uses and mocks Lee's grossness as he descends into drunken release...

...By the end of the play, it is Lee whose story has been sold to the producer and a drunken Austin has filled the kitchen with toasters stolen from houses all over the neighborhood...

...As the light dies on stage, we realize that the scene has nothing to do with Lee's foolish variation on the stereotypical Western...

...I wanted to write a play about double nature," Shepard has said of True West (Village Voice, November 30,1982...

...Both men are afraid, Lee says, although, until this point, they have not had the substance to embody a human emotion...

...In an uncharacteristic moment of explicitness, Shepard allows Austin to say of the producer who wants him to write Lee's screenplay, "He thinks we're the same person...

...The comedy milks out of the situation as Lee's curtain speech takes on the tone of lyric menace that Shepard does so well...

...The two men in Lee's story have just abandoned their trucks and taken to their horses, the one in pursuit of the other...

...And the one who's chasin' doesn't know where the other one is taking him...

...True-to-life stuff...

...This is not standard sibling rivalry, but a reflection of shared attitudes, ambitions, longings, inclinations behind a facade of apparent differences...

...Shepard's use of "real" in the quotation above underlines another - and to me more interesting - theme of True West...

...An abstract set, insisting on meaning, might endanger the reality created by the action itself...

...Yet, as the light fades again, we recognize the continuity of the personal image...

...At the end of the play, after the presumably more gentle Austin has almost killed the overtly dangerous Lee, the two men stare at each other, "keeping a distance between them," as the published play says...

...When he repeats the line with a drunken giggle, it may be taken as the character's bemused reaction to his unexpected replacement by his brother, but if we are to take seriously Shepard's own statement about his play, the line expresses its central theme...

...True West, as the title says...

...Shepard's device in the play is a simple one, an exchange of personalities between the principals...

...In the end, this realistic kitchen, stylized to the extent that it is like so many other kitchens, in a suburban house near Los Angeles is the true West, the truer because it contains the amorphous chase of the brothers for whom, judging by the wreckage at the final curtain, this is "Tornado Country," which is where Lee set this story...

...It's a real thing...

...These contradictory phrases are only a joke at this point, but as Lee develops his Western there is a constant play of argument about whether or not Lee's plot is true...

...Shepard is not interested here in conventional role reversal, but in the fact that the changes are an externalization of qualities implicit in the characters...

...When the play begins, Lee, the older brother, a bum, a wanderer, a burglar, has just arrived at their mother's home where Austin, the educated brother, is house-sitting and trying to write a story that he expects to sell to the movies...

...Austin's long story about his bar-hopping evening with their father in which the old man loses the bag of Chinese food with his false teeth in it is a typical Shepard set piece, a tall tale which Austin finishes with "Now that's a true story...

...Full a' suspense...

...It is a range on which Sam Shepard is very much at home...

...True to life...

...In the printed play, Shepard insists on a realistic set, one that will not encroach on the dramatic situation...

...GERALD WEALESALD WEALES...

...Early in the play, Lee mentions ' 'projects" he thinks Austin's producer might be interested in: "Real commercial...

...Here, as in most of Shepard's plays, the dramatist has invented a marvelously theatrical image (the offering, the rejection, and the acceptance of the toast has some of the force of the husking of the corn in Buried Child) that is not realistic but, at a deeper aesthetic and psychological level, is certainly real...

...The confusion about true as verisimilar and as believable runs through the play, coloring the whole idea of what constitutes the true West...

...And the one who's being chased doesn't know where he's going...

...The two men, uncertain of destination, tied to one another in a chase that confuses pursuer and pursued, are Lee and Austin...