Ever attended a play where a major plot device involves bread toasting in multiple toasters, stolen overnight by a main character trying to prove his machismo? As the bread-heavenly scent wafts through the audience, the testosterone-driven tension between estranged brothers escalates with atomic results: a fully-baked frittata of a performance, attaining satisfying, piquant climax after serving up luscious layers of explosive, tasty beats.
The Classics Theatre Project (theclassicstheatreproject.com), under Managing Artistic Director Joey Folsom, focuses on producing live stage plays that offer high entertainment value, beautifully crafted scripts, and universal appeal for today’s audiences. TCTP’s production of Sam Shepard’s TRUE WEST, running through August 24 at the Stone Cottage in Addison, is a dramedy to salivate over. Get your tickets now. It’s a sell-out production.
TRUE WEST has real staying power as live theatre. Shepard first produced his Pulitzer Prize- nominated play at the Magic Theatre in 1980 in San Francisco. It received its Off-Broadway debut later that year at The Public Theatre, starring Tommy Lee Jones and Peter Boyle in the title roles of Austin and Lee, moved to the Steppenwolf in 1982 with John Malkovich and Gary Sinise, and made its Broadway debut in 2000 with Philip Seymour Hoffmann and John C. Reilly, receiving a Best Play nomination at the Tony Awards that year. It has had multiple triumphant revivals in London’s West End and a major Broadway revival in 2018 with Ethan Hawke and Paul Dano. Savage throughout with unexpected moments of humor and humanity, its action soars at ripping pace as its brother characters plumb the depths of sibling rivalry and estrangement, as grit-filled realism shines through their outrageous, risky, wacked out lives.
TCTP’s director Terry Martin masterfully enlivens this production with a naturalistic boldness, honoring text and character while allowing the rough physicality to emerge with genuine spontaneity. Choreographed to the split second, the show makes its audience feel as if they could be watching an episode of reality TV caught on a bystander’s cellphone. Martin’s cast makes superb use of every nuance, every pause, every confrontational moment with taut focus and presumptive abandon. Joey Folsom as Austin, the introverted intellectual brother, conveys a futile neediness for validation, underlying his smugness in an apparently successful life as a screenwriter, while Clay Yokum uses his intimidating physicality, bombastic delivery and innate ferocity to dominate the younger man and “seemingly“ best him at the screenwriter game. But is there a real “winner” in this macho match slice of life? You decide. The actors play so at ease with each other it seems they were born creating the characters together. Michael Miller as the movie studio agent Saul brings an annoyingly ingratiating contrast to Austin and Lee’s in-your-face excess, increasing the volcanic strife between the brothers with offhand, cultivated “civility”. Poor mom arrives home to encounter the scene of battle; she lives a delusional existence and scolds her adult “boys” like errant teens then escapes to a hotel for peace. Allyn Carrell, Mom, has just a short scene with her sons but plays both her resignation to their violence and her battiness effectively. We know where some of her sons’ inner battles came from.
Set design by Terry Martin, Devon Rose, Louis Shopen, and Cameron Potts. Superior fight choreography by Dakoda Taylor.
The Classics Theatre Projects’s TRUE WEST runs through August 24 at Addison’s Stone Cottage.
TICKETS: www.theclassicstheatreproject.com
Go get you a heaping bowl-full of Sam Shepard’s fun times in the S. CA high desert.
criticalrant.com Alexandra Bonifield 