Home On The Range

The chaos of American manhood in “True West.”

- Sarah Larson

The Broadway première of Sam Shepard’s acclaimed 1980 play, “True West,” in 2000, was astonishing for several reasons. For one, by 2000, Shepard—who had brought his cowboy swagger, muscular language, and rock and-roll rhythms to New York’s downtown theatre scene in the sixties and seventies—was a prolific, Pulitzer Prizewinning playwright and a prolific, Oscar-nominated film actor. Yet the anguished, funny “True West,” which the actor Ethan Hawke recently called Shepard’s “card-carrying audience-pleaser,” had never been staged on Broadway. Then, there were the production’s virtuosic performances. Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly alternated in the roles of Austin, a screenwriter, and Lee, his ne’erdo-well brother—a device that could have felt like a gimmick but, instead, enriched the play’s exploration of duality. (A 1982 revival, at the Steppenwolf, in Chicago, starring Gary Sinise and John Malkovich, is also legendary.)