Department Of The Interior

Revived on Broadway with Ethan Hawke and Paul Dano, True West simmers without boiling over.

- Sara Holdren

THINGS FALL APART in Sam Shepard’s True West. The almost-two hander about a pair of estranged brothers locked in competition over the sale of a screenplay to a Hollywood producer is a gradual, grinning descent toward chaos. It lurks and menaces, yapping comically just like one of the Southern California coyotes that prowl the suburb where the brothers are holed up in their mother’s tidy kitchen—until, like the coyote darting out of the shadows to maul unattended puppies, it goes for the kill. It’s funny and nasty, debauched yet dramatically laser-focused. “I wanted to write a play about double nature,” Shepard told an interviewer in 1980, “one that wouldn’t be symbolic or metaphorical or any of that stuff. I just wanted to give a taste of what it feels like to be two-sided … I think we’re split in a much more devastating way than psychology can ever reveal. It’s not so cute. Not some little thing we can get over. It’s something we’ve got to live with.”