Tuesday, April 04, 2006

A Lie of the Mind

by George Hunka

The Michael Chekhov Theatre Company, founded three years ago by artistic director Michael Horn, has just opened its doors on its own performance venue, the Big Little Theater, way out on the Lower East Side. And little is little; at only about 40 seats and a small stage crammed into a former retail space (in its former incarnations also a bordello and an after-hours club–insert your own joke about its appropriateness as a theater here), you won't find spectacle. What you will find, at least this week, are three actor-centered productions of Sam Shepard plays, part of a new festival of his work. If Kathy Curtiss' production of A Lie of the Mind, which closes next weekend, is any indication, each one of those 40 seats deserves to be filled for every performance. The ambitions of the company reach high and strike home.

A Lie of the Mind is a tale of two families, shattered by the frustrated animal violence of uncontrolled masculine roles, their definitions traumatized by a changing social and cultural dynamic. As the play opens Jake (Curtis Nielsen) has beaten his wife Beth (Anna Podolak) nearly to death in a fit of jealousy (she has chosen to be an actress to give voice to her burgeoning imaginative life, and he is threatened by her new-found imaginative freedom); Beth's family takes her in as she recovers from temporary brain damage, and Jake seeks refuge in the bosom of his own family. The rest of the nearly three-hour play is a means of realigning conceptions of male-female relationships within traditional family structures that can no longer contain imaginative freedoms, the ability to explore the "lie of the mind" (in both senses: the psychic landscapes of love and sensuality and the constrictive ideals of marriage, gender roles and the traditional nuclear family).

Dr. Curtiss' production is of necessity spare and performer-centric, and the excellent cast does more than its share to bring these characters to life. The problem with Shepard's individual creations is that they rarely attain to a full three-dimensional status; instead, they are collections of linguistic and psychic traits and tics, demonstrative rather than internalized. That the performers here internalize these traits in themselves is some miracle of physical and emotional exploration. Anna Podolak as Beth and Curtis Nielsen as Jake, married perhaps too young and too early in their maturation as individuals, are remarkable to watch as their characters find that they must divorce themselves from the insidious, possessive and infantilizing dynamics of simplistic American attitudes to sexual relationships within the family for any future growth or health; Ms. Podolak finds a new strength of character as she recovers from her injuries and her tenderness is infused with imagination and passion, while Mr. Nielsen journeys the long road from masculine delusion to sacrifice his own internal urges of violence and possession to the new kind of mature sexual relationship he sees in his wife and his brother, the feverish and confused, but on the verge of his own epiphany, Frankie (a very funny and textured performance from Adrian O'Donnell).

Shepard can't write women, especially when it comes to women older than 30 or so; that's all there is to it. (The most interesting female role in the Shepard canon is Cavale in Cowboy Mouth, written in collaboration with Patti Smith.) Let it be said, then, that Susan Capra as Beth's mother Meg and Freida Lipp as Jake's mother Lorraine limn two contrasting pictures of American motherhood in all their grim detail, from Meg's relationship with her husband Baylor (a fine Thomas Francis Murphy) that tends to infantilize each of them, to Lorraine's confrontation with the demons that haunt her and her eventual escape from tragic disintegration into a new beginning for her life and that of her daughter Sally (Ali Costine). Left swaying in the wind is Mike, Beth's brother, caught in the tornado of these family dynamics before he has a firm purchase on his own individual self; Will Schneider plays the role with the requisite amount of adolescent fury and thoughtless and obligatory compassion for his sister.

Dr. Curtiss' direction foregrounds these accomplished performances in the small space of the brand new Big Little Theatre on Ridge Street with spare props against a functional black background; the simple and uncredited light and sound design make an evocative most of the space's to-date limited resources. It is something of a wonder, this very distilled production of a very realistic play. More congratulations, then, to the Chekhov Company, and I am particularly excited to see what the company does with Shepard's sparer, more abstract works like The Rock Garden, which contrasted with A Lie of the Mind seem like bare-bones schematics for these later, fuller explorations of American sexuality and culture.

The company's A Lie of the Mind closes this weekend, with final performances on Sunday at 2 and 7 and Monday at 8; tickets are available online at Smarttix. (The other plays in this repertory cycle are Buried Child and the 1994 drama set in the world of horseracing Simpatico.)

*****

In choosing to produce all 40-some of Shepard's plays over the next two years, the Chekhov Company makes a wise decision. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Shepard was the Great White Hope of the American theater, one of the very few undeniably forceful and idiosyncratic voices to emerge from the off-off-Broadway movement of the 1960s. Originating with a series of bizarre language-drunk short plays at Theatre Genesis and elsewhere, his career skyrocketed to Lincoln Center status by 1970 with Operation: Sidewinder; then, in the ten years between 1975 and 1985, Shepard took on the great tragic American theme of the disintegrating family.

Shepard's four family plays (Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child, True West and A Lie of the Mind) confirmed his reputation as a playwright of extremes, of setting (the desert and blank prairie are never too far from the front steps of a Sam Shepard family house), of language (a rock-and-roll inflected stylization of American speech, transformed by the 1970s into a more twisted interior form of self-torture), and of form. In these four plays one can see Shepard struggling to find an objective correlative for his vision of family, each success marked also by a fatal failure. Buried Child, though the winner of the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for drama (the first awarded to a play that originated off-Broadway, believe it or not), is burdened by an overdrawn symbolism; True West's entertainment-industry comedy is too light to sustain too deep an insight into its duelling brothers; my own favorite of the four, Curse of the Starving Class, attempts an uneven balance between comic absurdity and blood ritual, and takes not a few headers off this very thin tightrope. Except for True West, these plays are all epic in scope and intention, extremely physical and poetic, sometimes very consciously so.

But attractive to performers and playwrights indeed, for just those same reasons. The Chekhov Company's production of A Lie of the Mind bids fair to confirm Lie's status as the most successful of the four family plays, not least because the symbolism takes a back seat to Shepard's incisive map of the dynamic sexual and social drives that tend to spin families apart. After all the ritualistic and symbolic conceit (none dare call it "bullshit") of his early work, Shepard emerges as a closet psychological realist.

Following the success of his film career, premieres of new Shepard plays have become rarer and rarer, with Shepard's The God of Hell in 2004 the first premiere of a new Shepard play since 2000. So this is a good time for a retrospective of his work, especially to begin assessing its place in the development of American drama in the early 21st century. Now, the Great White Hopes of American drama (no longer exclusively white, heterosexual and male, thank god) assess visions of the margins of America's subcultures and the dynamic conflicts between assimilation and the integrity of individual identity. Shepard's vision placed these same conflicts in the bosom of the American home; nor have these conflicts been resolved there; indeed, with the rightward swing of American culture, many of Shepard's concerns have re-emerged as indictments of an even more debilitating cultural recidivism, even for the white American middle class, Shepard's true milieu. I will be following the Chekhov Company's explorations closely, and if its production of A Lie of the Mind is any indication, the retrospective will provide much energetic food for thought.