True West

“ “Critic’s Pick – Chicago Tribune; Highly Recommended – Chicago Sun Times; Critic’s Choice – Chicago Reader

“True West: Entertaining revival of the 1980 Sam Shepard standard, in which two brothers ? screenwriter Austin and desert rat Lee ? enact eerily funny games of role reversal, arrested development and toast consumption. The standout performance in the Hypocrites production comes from Paul Noble, who gets the flashier, more combustible brother Lee. His blend of lashing hostility and palpable sadness is very shrewdly judged. Even when it should get further down and dirtier, the show draws you in” – Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune 4/29/05

“John Malkovich is everywhere, even where he’s not. While the actor continues his run in “Lost Land” at Steppenwolf Theatre, ghostly reminders of an indelible Malkovich performance from a generation ago haunt each new performer undertaking the role, whenever a revival of “True West” surfaces. The latest “True West” in Chicago comes courtesy of The Hypocrites, performing in the basement space of Wicker Park’s Chopin Theatre. It’s an entertaining production, and the strongest element ? along with Sean Graney’s droll scenic design, depicting a Carter-era Southern California kitchen and Astroturfed patio ? is Paul Noble’s performance as Lee. This is the role Malkovich played opposite Gary Sinise in Sam Shepard’s 1980 play, produced in 1982 by Steppenwolf. Most actors tend to respond well to volatile sociopaths. Noble is one of them. After disappearing into the bland woodwork of “Paragon Springs,” a recent TimeLine Theatre show, here he’s all fire and purpose, aggression with a dash of hurt. Noble’s smart enough to stop short of Malkoviching it up. He and director Geoff Button know that way lies potentially tiresome madness. The funny thing is, Malkovich realizes it too: In “Lost Land” Malkovich is doing his honorable, level, rather dutiful best to portray a conflicted liberal idealist. Better than anybody, Malkovich knows he can’t “Do Malkovich” when it doesn’t make sense. Otherwise he’d end up playing Lee in “True West” no matter who he was playing. Shepard’s play remains a rock-solid slippery slope, a comic indictment of Hollywood that transcends the usual Hollywood-is-evil cliches. (It is evil, but still.) Struggling screenwriter Austin (Brad Harbaugh) is housesitting for his vacationing mother (Kay Schmitt). Brother Lee has arrived unexpectedly, a burglar and a refugee of the Mohave at odds with the west Los Angeles has become. The brothers’ father is a potent offstage presence, a destitute drunk. There’s a little of the old man in Austin, and little more of him in Lee. Shepard’s plot is a simple reversal of fortune, beautifully sustained: With a touching sort of inevitability, Lee doesn’t just befriend Austin’s producer (Gregory Hardigan), he sells him his idea for a contemporary western, zooming his brother at his own game. By the time “True West” reaches its tantalizingly open-ended conclusion, the brothers have become the characters in Lee’s story, out for blood but suffused in regret. Noble and Schmitt, the latter doing nuanced work in a small and somewhat thin role, are very good. Harbaugh’s Austin is vaguely defined; it’s the tougher of the brother roles, to be sure, but this performance needs some sharper edges. Harbaugh does, however, come alive when the violence (however tentatively choreographed) kicks in. As for Graney’s primo scenic design, it is topped, subtly, by a trickly fake-waterfall on the flagstone walls ? a perfect lying image of an endless Southern California water supply” – Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune 4/19/05

“Consider this delicious little twist of Chicago theatrical history: At the very moment that Sam Shepard’s “True West” — the play that set the young John Malkovich on the road to celebrity — is being revived in high style by the Hypocrites, the youthful company that injects fresh life into the 20th century dramatic rep, Malkovich himself is over on the Steppenwolf mainstage. And there he is portraying a middle-aged European aristocrat who sips fine Hungarian wine — a continent and a generation away from his days as the sweaty, typewriter-bashing, toast-eating, beer-swilling, semipsychotic brother in Shepard’s play. As for the “new boys” — and “True West” is all about the relationship between a pair of brothers — they don’t miss a beat. Nor does director Geoff Button (also an excellent actor, as he demonstrated in the recent “Equus”), who makes sure his cast hits every crucial beat — capturing the tense rhythms of the play’s menacing dialogue and edgy moves. At once pitch black and deadly comic, “True West” may not be a great play, but it is a hugely entertaining, wildly actable one. And just as the fabled 1980s version lodged in the minds of all those lucky enough to have seen it (remember Malkovich wielding his golf club on that typewriter?), the Hypocrites’ revival is sure to bring fresh converts (and toaster jokes). It all unfolds in the spotless southern California kitchen of a middle-class home straight out of a Sears catalog. It is there that Austin (Brad Harbaugh), an insecure but established screenwriter, is putting the finishing touches on his latest screenplay while house-sitting for his mother, who is on vacation in Alaska. And it is there that he is seriously interrupted by his feral loser of a brother, Lee (Paul Noble), who just drops in after weeks of living in the desert. Austin is the successful brother — Ivy League education, wife, kids, house, good salary, discipline. Lee is the volcanic failure — bitter, full of rage, desperate, uninhibited, dangerous. And push comes to shove when Saul Kimmer (Gregory Hardigan), a slick and malleable Hollywood producer, stops by for a meeting with Austin. With less than nothing to lose, Lee pitches his own story idea — a crazy updated Western far more commercial, and far more rooted in “real life” and primal emotions, than anything the all-too-civilized Austin could devise. War is declared, and well before it’s over the two brothers — each profoundly envious of the other –begin to subtly shift places. (It is worth remembering that in the recent Off-Broadway revival of the show, actors Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly alternated roles during the show’s run.) Looming large in the background, yet unseen — as is often the case in Shepard’s plays — is the brothers’ father, a broken alcoholic who also lives on the desert in a state of advanced decay. The fear — or the inevitable fate — of the sons turning into their father hangs heavily in the air. And with that fear comes guilt and anger. The Old Testment-style clash of brothers is key. But so are notions of creativity: Is it rooted in an adventurous, instinctive, chaotic mind, Shepard wonders, or a more cerebral, disciplined one? The playwright’s obsession with questions of art vs. commerce — and just what the movies should be about — are in full flower here. And he captures the phenomenon of the celebrity artist to bizarre and tragicomic effect in the speech by the boys’ mom (a perfectly shell-shocked Kay Schmitt) about a Picasso exhibit coming to town. And about those brothers: Harbaugh and Noble are a marvelous match. Noble (in the Malkovich role) has the showier part as Lee, the scruffy, bearded home-demolition expert who thrives on being outrageous yet secretly yearns for the good life. He is a wonderful mix of the unpredictably homicidal and the laconically charming. And Harbaugh — as the brother who has opted for the safe life but craves a taste of raw authenticity — is a big surprise as he morphs, entirely believably, into what may be Austin’s truer self. Sean Graney, the Hypocrites’ artistic director, has designed a superb set, a genteel, stone-walled bungalow with patio where the drip, drip, drip of water — along with the hum of crickets and the snap of pop-top beer cans — creates a perfect din” – Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun Times 4/20/05

“I’ve seen this play so many times I can practically repeat the lines with the actors. Sam Shepard’s 1980 drama about the reunion of two brothers, one a weak, respectable suburbanite and the other an untamed animal, is frequently revived, usually by recent college graduates. Seldom has it been done by anyone, however, as well as it is by the Hypocrites in this smartly directed, intensely acted production. Key to its success are two young but seasoned actors, Brad Harbaugh and Paul Noble. Too often the brothers are played by performers so out of sync with each other that they don’t seem like members of the same species, much less the same family. But with these two, every glance and gesture and word they exchange seethes with a lifetime of unfinished business. Noble in particular plays the volatile, deeply wounded Lee with such half-hidden menace and fury you don’t dare take your eyes off him for fear he’ll pounce. Yet for all his magnetism, he never goes over the top. The direction, too, is first-rate. Geoff Button avoids the self-indulgent pauses that bloat neophyte productions–the actors strike fast and hard, performing the piece at such a clip you don’t have time to think” – Jack Helbig, Chicago Reader 4/21/05