On Stage
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage ACTS OF INSANITY BY LEO SAUVAGE LEAVING ASIDE the popularity Sam Shepard has gained from his other activities, strictly as a playwright he seems to have achieved a status near the top in...
...A Lie of the Mind presents two families unhappily entangled by the marriage of Beth (Amanda Plummer) and Jake (Harvey Keitel...
...The San Francisco trial involved a gross display of clownery by psychiatric "experts...
...Thus stage left we see his bedroom in California and stage right hers in Montana...
...But apparently not content with that, the playwright, in serving as director of the New York production, seemed to add a dose of ideology...
...Jake's brother Frankie (Aidan Quinn) loves Beth, but tries to hide his feelings out of decency...
...Then he hits the highway, freeing Beth and Frankie for a Shepardian "happy ending...
...The trial confirmed these facts...
...On Stage ACTS OF INSANITY BY LEO SAUVAGE LEAVING ASIDE the popularity Sam Shepard has gained from his other activities, strictly as a playwright he seems to have achieved a status near the top in American theater...
...In Montana, the suggestion of a bond of incest (a favorite Shepard theme) is unmistakable...
...Understandably, and justifiably, Mann's play condemns the California courts...
...Completing the California side is daughter Sally (Karen Young), who appears relatively normal because she wants to escape her home and family...
...I don't even remember seeing this character in Louisville, so that at the minimum Sister Boom Boom was less repugnant under Jon Joris' direction...
...We will surely see its magnificent dancers and no less superb musicians here again...
...More probably, the troubling presence of a rival in the family had triggered the attack...
...He is shot in the leg by Baylor, who claims to have mistaken him for a deer, while permitting us to believe the wound was inflicted deliberately...
...If Fool for Love (a recent stage drama also made into a film) had been his first play, I might have said its brute tension—despite unnecessary overtones of incest in the violent relations of its loving, fighting couple—shows a promising young author whose next work is worth watching for...
...Some of the dancers have been practicing their art for many years...
...His only interest lies in hunting deer...
...They fold the flag methodically in military fashion, starting over several times to get it right (a triangle with the stars on top) and taking care not to let it touch the ground...
...But it is not yet midnight...
...Frankie trawls to Montana to determine Beth's condition...
...In Curse of the Starving Class—unveiled 10 years ago and produced several times since—the main attraction is a lamb that is first brought on alive, then "butchered" and thrown toward the audience as a bloody carcass...
...Yet Foolfor Love was not Shepard's first, or fifth, or tenth effort...
...later it served as a cloak for Jake before his final exit...
...the empty space between is the distance— more precisely, the highway—that connects as well as separates husband and wife...
...Released from bondage, Jake confesses that he loves her "more than this earth...
...Neither was True West, which ran simultaneously Off-Broadway...
...It was initially used by Mike to gag his captive...
...There he pumped four shots into Moscone—the last two in the head, while bending over the prostrate body...
...When I first saw it three years ago, at the Louisville Actors Theater, I wondered whether Jon Joris, whose animating spirit has made the Louisville company one of the best in the United States, was switching from good plays to big productions...
...But young people who grew up on rock and roll have been no less fascinated by this show...
...The story is well known...
...Reloading, White proceeded to the office of Supervisor Harvey Milk, elected as a champion of the sizable local homosexual community, and killed him as well...
...he suffers but resists, knowing he must not covet his brother's wife...
...It lasted just one week, and many New Yorkers lost the battle to secure seats...
...The story has two epilogues: White was paroled in 1984...
...One of the most nostalgic yet enchanting musical shows of the season, Tango Argentino, has interrupted its far-from-exhausted triumphant run at Broadway's Marc Hellinger Theater for a national tour...
...The wayward husband is tormented by his guilt for the death of his father (an alcoholic he helped intoxicate and subsequently abandoned on a highway, where a truck ran over him), and for trying to kill his wife (whom he thinks he actually has killed...
...Meanwhile, Mike goes hunting after Jake and eventually drags him, tightly trussed, before his wife...
...Critics have called it "exciting," "exhilarating," even "a boon to the theater year...
...The frantic obsession of Beth's brother Mike (Will Patton) with avenging her injury cannot be attributed purely to family pride, especially since in her more awake moments Beth insists she still loves Jake...
...Frankie is lying there on the couch, enduring Beth's unfathomable gaze, when Mike returns from hunting deer and drops a carcass on the stage—less bloody than the lamb in Starving Class albeit heavier...
...I do not know why...
...A Lie of the Mind certainly has quite a few inventive sequences, the cast is good, and the music—performed by a country band, "The Red City Ramblers"—is pleasant...
...For instance, a character called Sister Boom Boom— a transvestite dressed as a nun, whose parted robes revealed nylon-stockinged legs—emerged prominently as a political activist...
...Starving Class was done earlier this season at t he Promenade Theater (an Off-Broadway playhouse on Broadway, at 76th street), and has been followed there by Shepard's latest offering, A Lie oftheMind...
...He used a side window to avoid the metal detectors at the main door, and walked along the corridors to Mayor George Mos-cone's office...
...Tango Argentino finally had to leave town because of previous national commitments...
...One day, perhaps with his 49th or 50th play, he will give us a fully thought-out masterwork, untrammeled by the self-indulgent digressions that merely scatter his talent...
...Directed by the playwright, it has won instant acclaim...
...An American flag the size of a bedsheet has been left on stage...
...Yet I continue to find Shepard, for all that he has in many ways accomplished over the years, a promising playwright...
...The lesser crime carries a maximum prison term of under eight years in California...
...She has lucid intervals and at other times she wanders off, allowing Shepard to write lines for her composed of complete nonsense...
...No young non-Argentinian could move more gracefully, erotically or acrobatically than they do...
...It is easy to understand the enthusiasm of those who recall the emotions of the tango from their youth...
...But that unpleasant feeling was due more to an apparent shift in style than to a change in favored themes...
...Subtlety is not one of this writer's strengths...
...Although playwright Mann adhered closely to court transcripts, director Mann staged her material in a manner that made it seem the product of a rather cheap imagination...
...He is further stifled by a domineering mother who cares only for her other son...
...Most of the characters in Shepard's new play are more or less unbalanced, though only one has an acceptable excuse: Beth has been beaten by her husband so severely that her brain is damaged...
...Mann's play recalls a flagrant miscarriage of justice in the San Francisco courts in May 1979...
...Nonetheless, the jury found White guilty of "voluntary manslaughter," not of an unquestionably premeditated double murder...
...The first came as a surprise last summer, at the City Center Theater...
...Mother Meg (played by Geor-gine Hall that evening) may indeed be more intuitively aware than she appears, but her preoccupation is serving her lord and master so it is difficult to tell...
...Selective mother love...
...Is Shepard being patriotic or sarcastic here...
...I am prepared to stand in line for their third visit...
...After an episode of violence the couple live apart...
...A 12-piece nonpercussion on-stage orchestra provides the irrestible rhythm, using four masterfully-played bandon-ions—an extraordinary version of the traditional concertina...
...In October the company returned for a five-week engagement at the Mark Hellinger, and directors Claudio Segovia and Hector Orezzoli extended that to 24 weeks by popular demand...
...Their father, Baylor (James Gammon), is a gruff and dour old man who seems completely unconcerned about his family...
...That opens with a Pinteresque contrivance—two strangely acting brothers, but no caretaker— and slips into crude, indeed very low farce as it seeks (and regrettably obtains) laughs by introducing an utterly idiotic mother...
...Either as a gesture of appeasement to the feminists, or else to increase the play's quota of psychopaths, there is much talk of madness in her family...
...Although it is an interesting work—or at least far from boring—in my view Shepard still has not fulfilled his early promise...
...In November of the previous year, Dan White, a former member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, entered City Hall with a revolver and a pocketful of bullets...
...But the ladies all look lovely...
...Meg and Baylor are indignant at this sacrilegious treatment of the Stars and Stripes...
...Jake, however, is more deranged...
...The public must decide—though Baylor's urge to kiss his wife for the first time in 20 years may be a clue...
...As for her melodramatic procession of candlebearers who shuffled down the aisles to the darkened stage, it achieved its obvious intention of moving some members of the audience to tears...
...A Lie of the Mind is Shepard's longest work to date—almost four hours— and that leaves time for lots of things to happen...
...Beth dresses as a hooker and begins to strip for Frankie in an effort to seduce him...
...On a different level, the New York Execution failed to successfully handle a problem that confronts every "doeudrama"—that the truth can seem unbelievable...
...EMILY MANN'S Execution of Justice, which ran for 12 performances in New York at the Virginia Theater, deserves some words of comment if only because of its popularity with important regional groups...
...But Sally has such a small role that she is all too easily forgotten...
...he killed himself last year...
...Playwright Shepard does not spell this out in words, but as director he apparently intended the implication...
...Jake's assault on Beth was motivated by jealousy, avowedly because as an aspiring actress, she could be kissed and embraced by other men on stage...
...Lorraine (Salome Jens stood in for Geraldine Page the night I saw the show) assumes a sensual bearing toward son Jake that hints at incest...
...Unfortunately, it also tended to transform Emily Mann's play about political injustice into a hymn to Harvey Milk, the martyred champion...
Vol. 69 • March 1986 • No. 5
