THEATER REVIEW | 'A LIE OF THE MIND'
Home Is Where the Soul Aches
A scary, splendid clarity radiates from the terminally confused kinfolk who are running wild at the Acorn Theater. That’s where the New Group revival of “A Lie of the Mind,” Sam Shepard’s gorgeous play from 1985 about families in meltdown, opened Thursday night in a production that connoisseurs of precision acting will be savoring for years to come.
Though only one of the addled characters in this drama has been officially diagnosed with brain damage, all appear to be suffering from gravely advanced disorientation. “Who am I?” each seems to be ceaselessly asking. “Where am I?” And “Am I really related to these strange creatures around me?”
But if these people don’t understand who they are, we do, with a grasp that stings like a handful of nettles. The top-flight eight-member ensemble, directed by Ethan Hawke, insists on that, giving crystalline, individual forms to a blurred collective sense of self that anyone who has been part of a of family is going to identify with. In the process a breath-by-breath case is made for “A Lie of the Mind” as Mr. Shepard’s richest and most penetrating play, a 20th-century masterwork of a family portrait to be compared with Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and Harold Pinter’s “Homecoming.”
Though it received a widely praised New York premiere 25 years ago, with Mr. Shepard directing a starry cast that included Geraldine Page and Harvey Keitel, “Lie” is less well known - and less frequently revived - than its author’s similarly themed “Buried Child,” “True West” and “Fool for Love.” Perhaps it was the four-hour running time of the original production that put directors off. (This one clocks in at under three hours.) Or that it’s not easy putting together a complete ensemble (there is no starring role) up to the demands of a script in which hyperreal and surreal teeter in delicate balance.
As in his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Buried Child,” another tale of homecoming in the American heartland, Mr. Shepard is here excavating the profound ambivalence of kinship. Yes, home is where they have to take you in; it is also where they can suck any sense of autonomous self right out of you. But while “Buried Child” leaned memorably toward exaggerated Gothic effects, “Lie” sticks close to the homey grain of everyday domestic life. Its steadily increasing absurdity creeps up on you, as in one of those dreams that feel truer than waking existence.
At the play’s sliding center are a husband and wife, Jake (Alessandro Nivola) and Beth (Marin Ireland). Jake has beaten Beth so badly he believes she is dead, and he and Beth (who is indeed seriously injured) have retreated to their respective families. For Jake, that means returning to Lorraine (Karen Young), his widowed mother in California, and his sister, Sally (Maggie Siff) and brother, Frankie (Josh Hamilton), who sets out to assess the damage Jake has wrought. (The excellent Ms. Young played Sally in the 1985 production, which gives an extra, dizzy dimension to the play’s, uh, mind games.)
The invalid Beth holes up in rural Montana with her parents, Baylor (Keith Carradine) and Meg (Laurie Metcalf), and her brother, Mike (Frank Whaley), who is determined to avenge his sister. The play alternates between the two homes, but the lines that divide them are hazy. Derek McLane’s single suffocatingly cluttered set, with masterly lighting by Jeff Croiter, is shared psychic space, that family attic in the head where you store all those pictures, toys and sticks of furniture whose personal significance is sometimes a mystery.
As for the lines that separate the members within each household, and their present and past selves, they’re as flimsy and translucent as tissue paper. The walls - between parents and children, husbands and wives, older and younger siblings, the living and the dead - never stop tumbling down. Sometimes this blurring assumes the coziest conversational forms. (“They locked me up once, didn’t they, Daddy?” Meg says to her husband. Baylor replies wearily: “No, that was your mother.”) Elsewhere it is as bleakly poetic as a son blowing on his dead father’s ashes, which drift and disperse like a cloud in the wind.
No need to wait for the apocalypse in Mr. Shepard’s universe. It’s happening every minute inside those four walls we like to call home. Or rather, inside each mind within those homes. This play’s title doesn’t apply just to Beth, whose injuries have impaired her speech and thought processes, nor to Jake, who is given to psychopathic rages and paranoia.
At their most demented, confusing the faces of those around them, Beth and Jake - as portrayed with heartbreaking yearning by Ms. Ireland and Mr. Nivola - embody the root reality of everyone else: Home, self, love, genuine connectedness are only necessary myths, always more real in the memory than in the flesh.
“A Lie of the Mind” may be the most poetically coherent of Mr. Shepard’s works, and an English student could have a field day tracing patterns of imagery (mummies, suffocation, the inside versus the outside, acting). But poetic coherence counts for little in the theater unless it assumes palpable human life. Mr. Hawke has provided his ensemble with a mood-stirring mise-en-scène (replete with dreamscape country music written and performed by the team called Gaines). But as an actor himself, he knows that any divination of truth here has to come primarily from within the performance.
And does it ever. I can’t think of another recent production in which everyone onstage is so quirkily specific and so universal, or in which you could analyze each performance as such a thorough expression of the play as a whole. This embraces everything from Ms. Metcalf and Mr. Carradine’s even-keel portrait of a marriage’s resentful symbiosis to Mr. Hamilton’s wild-eyed descent into stark, raving terror.
It helps, of course, that the choice, idiosyncratic dialogue is among Mr. Shepard’s best. (Meg: “There’s no reason to scream. Screaming is not the thing we’re born for.”) But the cast members deliver these lines as if they had either just thought of them or had been saying them all their lives.
Aside from a few moments of Daffy Duck spleen by Mr. Whaley toward the end, no one pushes the comic into the cartoonish. And even when Mr. Shepard’s family members are having something like out-of-body experiences, the actors playing them remain in their characters’ skin.
Early in “Lie” Jake tries to explain the resentment he felt when his wife appeared in a local play as an actress. “They try to ‘believe’ they’re the person,” he says, with disgust, of actors. “Try to believe so hard they’re the person that they actually think they become the person.” But that’s the human condition, as Mr. Shepard sees it. Believing you’re the person you pretend to be is the leap of faith that lets you get on with your life. Playing the great pretenders of “A Lie of the Mind,” Mr. Hawke’s cast members leap so high you may feel the safe, solid earth receding beneath you.
Source
Beyond Broadway: A Lie of the Mind. Video here.
Oh my gosh. I hope I get to see this. This cast is amazing.
A scary, splendid clarity radiates from the terminally confused kinfolk who are running wild at the Acorn Theater. That’s where the New Group revival of “A Lie of the Mind,” Sam Shepard’s gorgeous play from 1985 about families in meltdown, opened Thursday night in a production that connoisseurs of precision acting will be savoring for years to come.
Though only one of the addled characters in this drama has been officially diagnosed with brain damage, all appear to be suffering from gravely advanced disorientation. “Who am I?” each seems to be ceaselessly asking. “Where am I?” And “Am I really related to these strange creatures around me?”
But if these people don’t understand who they are, we do, with a grasp that stings like a handful of nettles. The top-flight eight-member ensemble, directed by Ethan Hawke, insists on that, giving crystalline, individual forms to a blurred collective sense of self that anyone who has been part of a of family is going to identify with. In the process a breath-by-breath case is made for “A Lie of the Mind” as Mr. Shepard’s richest and most penetrating play, a 20th-century masterwork of a family portrait to be compared with Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and Harold Pinter’s “Homecoming.”
Though it received a widely praised New York premiere 25 years ago, with Mr. Shepard directing a starry cast that included Geraldine Page and Harvey Keitel, “Lie” is less well known - and less frequently revived - than its author’s similarly themed “Buried Child,” “True West” and “Fool for Love.” Perhaps it was the four-hour running time of the original production that put directors off. (This one clocks in at under three hours.) Or that it’s not easy putting together a complete ensemble (there is no starring role) up to the demands of a script in which hyperreal and surreal teeter in delicate balance.
As in his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Buried Child,” another tale of homecoming in the American heartland, Mr. Shepard is here excavating the profound ambivalence of kinship. Yes, home is where they have to take you in; it is also where they can suck any sense of autonomous self right out of you. But while “Buried Child” leaned memorably toward exaggerated Gothic effects, “Lie” sticks close to the homey grain of everyday domestic life. Its steadily increasing absurdity creeps up on you, as in one of those dreams that feel truer than waking existence.
At the play’s sliding center are a husband and wife, Jake (Alessandro Nivola) and Beth (Marin Ireland). Jake has beaten Beth so badly he believes she is dead, and he and Beth (who is indeed seriously injured) have retreated to their respective families. For Jake, that means returning to Lorraine (Karen Young), his widowed mother in California, and his sister, Sally (Maggie Siff) and brother, Frankie (Josh Hamilton), who sets out to assess the damage Jake has wrought. (The excellent Ms. Young played Sally in the 1985 production, which gives an extra, dizzy dimension to the play’s, uh, mind games.)
The invalid Beth holes up in rural Montana with her parents, Baylor (Keith Carradine) and Meg (Laurie Metcalf), and her brother, Mike (Frank Whaley), who is determined to avenge his sister. The play alternates between the two homes, but the lines that divide them are hazy. Derek McLane’s single suffocatingly cluttered set, with masterly lighting by Jeff Croiter, is shared psychic space, that family attic in the head where you store all those pictures, toys and sticks of furniture whose personal significance is sometimes a mystery.
As for the lines that separate the members within each household, and their present and past selves, they’re as flimsy and translucent as tissue paper. The walls - between parents and children, husbands and wives, older and younger siblings, the living and the dead - never stop tumbling down. Sometimes this blurring assumes the coziest conversational forms. (“They locked me up once, didn’t they, Daddy?” Meg says to her husband. Baylor replies wearily: “No, that was your mother.”) Elsewhere it is as bleakly poetic as a son blowing on his dead father’s ashes, which drift and disperse like a cloud in the wind.
No need to wait for the apocalypse in Mr. Shepard’s universe. It’s happening every minute inside those four walls we like to call home. Or rather, inside each mind within those homes. This play’s title doesn’t apply just to Beth, whose injuries have impaired her speech and thought processes, nor to Jake, who is given to psychopathic rages and paranoia.
At their most demented, confusing the faces of those around them, Beth and Jake - as portrayed with heartbreaking yearning by Ms. Ireland and Mr. Nivola - embody the root reality of everyone else: Home, self, love, genuine connectedness are only necessary myths, always more real in the memory than in the flesh.
“A Lie of the Mind” may be the most poetically coherent of Mr. Shepard’s works, and an English student could have a field day tracing patterns of imagery (mummies, suffocation, the inside versus the outside, acting). But poetic coherence counts for little in the theater unless it assumes palpable human life. Mr. Hawke has provided his ensemble with a mood-stirring mise-en-scène (replete with dreamscape country music written and performed by the team called Gaines). But as an actor himself, he knows that any divination of truth here has to come primarily from within the performance.
And does it ever. I can’t think of another recent production in which everyone onstage is so quirkily specific and so universal, or in which you could analyze each performance as such a thorough expression of the play as a whole. This embraces everything from Ms. Metcalf and Mr. Carradine’s even-keel portrait of a marriage’s resentful symbiosis to Mr. Hamilton’s wild-eyed descent into stark, raving terror.
It helps, of course, that the choice, idiosyncratic dialogue is among Mr. Shepard’s best. (Meg: “There’s no reason to scream. Screaming is not the thing we’re born for.”) But the cast members deliver these lines as if they had either just thought of them or had been saying them all their lives.
Aside from a few moments of Daffy Duck spleen by Mr. Whaley toward the end, no one pushes the comic into the cartoonish. And even when Mr. Shepard’s family members are having something like out-of-body experiences, the actors playing them remain in their characters’ skin.
Early in “Lie” Jake tries to explain the resentment he felt when his wife appeared in a local play as an actress. “They try to ‘believe’ they’re the person,” he says, with disgust, of actors. “Try to believe so hard they’re the person that they actually think they become the person.” But that’s the human condition, as Mr. Shepard sees it. Believing you’re the person you pretend to be is the leap of faith that lets you get on with your life. Playing the great pretenders of “A Lie of the Mind,” Mr. Hawke’s cast members leap so high you may feel the safe, solid earth receding beneath you.
Source
Beyond Broadway: A Lie of the Mind. Video here.
Oh my gosh. I hope I get to see this. This cast is amazing.