True West
The Gist
True West is a tale of two brothers who grow up to be polar opposites but secretly both grow envious of each other’s lifestyles. They are brought together back under the same roof after decades apart and personalities clash as they fight among one another on what they want in life. Tensions rise as they discover new things about each other and themselves.
The Review
Mr. Mustang and I tend to walk into theaters completely blind sometimes - there are some plays we already have a pre-existing understanding of but True West isn’t one of them. The story is simple enough with the premise of two brothers being asked to house sit their mother’s home while she’s away. The younger but more successful brother was directly asked to watch the house but the older (and practically homeless) brother insisted she wanted him to watch the house instead. With both of them having differing opinions on lifestyle and life choices, they almost immediately clash with each other and that premise should sound good but unfortunately the play just goes downhill from the moment the curtain rose.
The play actually had fantastic potential and all the people involved in the production did a great job however like Game of Thrones season 8, what makes or breaks a story is the writing. The only good parts of the play were before the first scene even started which is never a good thing. The set design is absolutely fantastic - kudos to the stagecraft crew for this project. The detail in the slice of a 1970s home is incredible with the retro vibrant color appliances, the linoleum floor, the harsh fluorescent lighting reminiscent of a ugly gas station - all of it was perfection. The best thing about the stage was how it evolved over time, the plants begin to wither, trash starts to collect on the floor after every scene transition and the two brother’s behaviors mirror the living conditions of the house as the play progresses.
Kevin Anderson as Lee and Zachary Ray Sherman as Austin. Photo from Seattle Rep.
The acting was phenomenal too with a shout out to Zachary Ray Sherman playing the younger brother. I thought Sherman’s portrayal of Austin (the younger brother) was the best out of the four actors in the play because I felt his character was the only one that had any actual depth to them. Kevin Anderson who played the older brother Lee, did a decent job too however it seems he only gets cast as an ‘outcast’ character as those are the only roles we’ve seen him play. Now that’s the only things the play excelled at - what the play did wrong was numerous.
As the story dives deeper into the turmoil between the two, the audience learns one is a college educated man with high aspirations of success where the other brags about robbing homes and lives in a broken down RV in the desert nearby (you can guess who is who). On paper, this dynamic sounds great but in practice the brothers are portrayed as mere stereotypes of their backgrounds and despite the actors being 3 dimensional, the characters they are playing are 2 dimensional. As an audience member, I couldn’t relate or sympathize with either of them because they were so hollow and poorly written. The personalities of both characters were merely caricatures of what they could have been and instead are structured like cardboard cutouts of what a liberal democrat may envision of what a redneck republican would be like and vice versa. There was no true depth to these men and only was playing off of the stereotypes of their given backgrounds.
Photo from Seattle Rep’s performance of True West
The plot is poorly structured and is filled with every cliche of a tacky 1970s sitcom as well. The first half was painfully predictable with scenes where the older brother magically became more successful than the younger brother because he was more charismatic towards a Hollywood agent. In the second half of the play however, the plot takes an extremely sharp right turn into the nonsensical and nosedives so badly that Mr. Mustang and myself looked at each other in utter confusion. The two brothers devolve so drastically where they now behave and react to situations that do not match the personalities of the characters established in the first act. Towards the end of the play, it was as though the playwright switched hands and was finished by a completely different person that wanted to finish the play with a twist involving murder. Seriously, it got really weird towards the end.
Overall, I thought the play was one of the weakest of the 2019/2020 season at Seattle Rep. The set design, lighting, acting and even the direction were really good but it all hinges on a well written script. True West was written by Sam Shepard who we learned shortly after the play is known to have...unconventional story lines and even stranger endings. In the theater world, his plays typically have an edgy ‘twist’ just for the hell of it as a means to get the audience to ‘think’ about what they witnessed long after the curtain has dropped. My thoughts are to avoid all of Mr. Shepard’s works with a mile long pole since the True West rings all too similar to the poor writing styles of David Benioff and D.B. Weiss.