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The best part of the show, to me, was Bates' delivery of a drunken monologue about their father driving to a dentist in Juarez to get his teeth pulled for a bargain price. He spends the rest of his money that night in bars up and down some West Texas highway, leaving his teeth in a bag of leftover chop suey. Bates' voice moves in and out of a slur as she tells it, like a badly tuned radio. It's meant to be a sad moment, with the sisters' screenplay mired in bickering and phony dialogue. Their drunken father never finds his teeth: "True story," says Austin wistfully, and the lights fade.
-- Michael Scott Moore
Desert Rats
True West. By Sam Shepard. Directed by Dan Chumley. Starring Philip Stockton and Mark Phillips. At the Magic Theater, Fort Mason Center, Marina & Buchanan, Oct. 1-Nov. 2. Call 441-8822.
The Sam Shepard trilogy of Buried Child, True West, and Curse of the Starving Class share a common denominator -- family, those frightening people and spooky places we are born into without choice. Families are fairly pedestrian fare, but Shepard gives them alluring depth by making dysfunctional homes parables about America -- the America constantly in search of coherent identity.
In these plays, key characters steer their lives in the direction of the American Dream, only to be caught in the muck of alcoholic fathers, despair, and dead babies buried in the back yard. The other plays boast plot developments like maggot-infested livestock wandering the kitchen; in this context, True West is probably the most accessible. It's not-so-simply the story of two brothers who try to make a fortune as screenwriters and nearly destroy each other with sibling rivalry and jealousy. But playing True West like a suburban melodrama misses out on the mythic themes Shepard has woven through the story. In the Magic Theater production, the brothers aren't aggressive or macho enough to step up to the great archetypes they're supposed to represent. Too often they are apologetic, friendly, and just too familial -- more My Three (Drunk) Sons than Cain and Abel.
Austin (in his early 30s) and Lee (10 years older) are crashing in Mom's Orange County home. She's on a pleasure cruise through frigid Alaska; ever-absent Dad is drunk and toothless in the desert. Shepard's meticulous set notes describe a generic home in one of many subdivisions spreading, cancerlike, over the hills. This is the newly tamed West: Through the white-lace-trimmed windows, silhouettes of a fence framing the ridge and distant hogback hills are visible; the sound of barking coyotes grows as the night sets.
Austin, who tries to maintain an intellectual coolness in the face of Lee's wild tales of desert survival, is a Harvard graduate and Hollywood screenwriter. He is the affluent New West -- with no accent and no dirt under the nails. The sports shirt and white tennis shoes Shepard requests should indicate his acquired sophistication. The Magic's Austin is less refined: Mark Phillips' broken-in jeans and a casual shirt make him seem on a par with the older Lee. But Lee is of a much different pedigree: He represents the West that was the land, not an opportunistic attitude. Like the loner in the Shepard-scripted Paris, Texas, he wanders the dry, open West as a subsistence drifter, robbing homes of small appliances when he needs cash. His only purpose in visiting Mom's pad seems to be to aggravate his brother.
Austin's trying to write a script as a period romance, but Lee instigates petty fights -- about their parents, their manhood, and the keys to Austin's car. Ultimately, he takes control of a meeting with Austin's agent and convinces the man to dump Austin's romance for Lee's vision of a "true-to-life" western. But man-of-the-land Lee can't script dialogue and needs his brother's talents to write a draft.
What should result is a natural tension between intellectual and physical prowess; but the weakening of Austin's character never allows it to materialize. The pair aren't an equal emotional match. The conflict only reaches the parboiled, primal jealousy the script is capable of when the struggle turns physical. Phillips ultimately turns up the machismo, becoming surly as the two brothers booze and try to hammer out the story. The fight scenes, choreographed by Nick Scoggin and R. Randal Miller, threaten to rip the frail walls of the set apart.
The play closes with a frieze of the brothers set against the purple hills, suggesting a battle to the death. But the full import of this modern struggle isn't realized. The actors are talented, but not mythic; entertaining, but hardly the participants in the war for masculine identity in the West. True West premiered at the Magic Theater in 1980 (with Peter Coyote in the role of Austin); this revival was decent, but a bit disappointing from the inheritors of Shepard.
-- Julie Chase
Rapper's Delight
Evolution of a Homeboy: Jails, Hospitals & Hip Hop. Written and performed by Danny Hoch. Directed by Jo Bonney. Presented by Berkeley Repertory Theater at the Julia Morgan Theater, 2640 College (at Derby), Berkeley, through Nov. 16. Call (510) 845-4700.
For Danny Hoch's Evolution of a Homeboy, the Berkeley Rep is offering half-price tickets to people who can prove they're under 30. The idea is to bring in customers who Don't Usually Go See Theater, either because they're too young, too hip, or too worried that theaters are full of stick-straight white people overconcerned with Art. The ploy isn't working. Danny Hoch is a Jewish kid from Brooklyn who's becoming one of theater's most prominent -- one of its only -- hip-hop voices, and his talent is so broad that even the people who wince at the foul language and don't get the rap references think he's funny. What's weird is that these people made up most of the audience on Hoch's opening weekend at the Julia Morgan Theater. It was like watching a Shaw-and-Shakespeare crowd titter at Andrew Dice Clay.
