True West at the
American Airlines Theatre.
Ethan Hawke and Paul Dano in True West.
True West, Sam
Shepherd’s 1980 play, inevitably plays out as a vying for supremacy between two
great actors. The original production starred Gary
Sinise and John Malkovich, but the most famous one remains the 2000 Broadway
revival starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly; Reilly and Hoffman
switched between the roles of screenwriter Austin and his brother, drifter Lee,
nightly. It made dramatic sense – Shepherd’s
angry, fiery story switches the reins of the proverbial Cain between the two estranged
brothers so quickly it’s meant to seem as if they’re blending into one another.
No one
could make that mistake watching the new Broadway production, a Roundabout staging
directed by James Macdonald and starring Ethan Hawke and Paul Dano. In the first act, Lee (Hawke) arrives at the
Los Angeles ranch house belonging to their absent mother (Marylouise Burke),
the better to menace Austin (Dano), who’s struggling to close a screenplay deal
with the smooth-as-a-manikin producer Saul Kimmer (Gary Wilmes). I was bowled over by Hawke’s performance,
earlier this year, in the film First
Reformed, in which he plays a moon-faced preacher overcome by the horrors
of climate change, and the promise of seeing Hawke as something of a human knife,
slicing through the conventions of Hollywood, was exciting. Unfortunately, at least in the first act,
Hawke, opposite Dano in his usual milquetoast mode (as in 2007’s There Will Be Blood), isn’t so much a
threat as deeply annoying, lobbing whiney complaints across the room and
lounging thoughtlessly on the carpet. When
Lee sidles up to Austin and whisperingly reminds him of the statistical
frequency of fratricide, you’re tempted to go, “Yeah, yeah.” This True
West lacks the requisite edge that gives Shepherd’s writing its sting.
Dano is the
saving grace. Halfway through the second
act, after Lee has conned Kimmer into dropping Austin’s script for a Western
tale of Lee’s own devising, Austin loses it and gets drunk, and the production
suddenly becomes halfway-brilliant. Dano,
whose interests in the past few years have tended more in the writerly
direction (see this year’s Wildlife),
has imbibed the screaming-maniac wisdom of Daniel Day-Lewis, his co-star in Blood, and much of Act Two could be
called an extended re-enactment of the “I drink your milkshake” speech from
that film. He roars with the prehistoric
furor of a dinosaur; he squeaks and squeals and lords his newfound liberation
from sanity over his now-cowering brother.
He validates the entire exercise, even making Hawke better by pure force
of energy. What comes across most
strongly is their shared sense of themselves as pathetic, as worthless in the face of their circumstances. Lee begs Austin for help with his newfound
role as a screenwriter. Austin begs Lee
to take him to live in the desert. And
round and round it goes.
The
production spends too much time in its enervated, Hawke-focused haze for it to be
entirely worth one’s time, but its pleasures are real. Burke has a brief, scene-stealing cameo in
which she squeaks out her bemused maternal commentary like a cross between a
Golden Girl and a chew toy. Jane Cox’s
lighting design, filmic, blinding, and centered around the flare of a candle beside
Austin’s typewriter, is genius, and it complements Mimi Lien’s competent scenic
design (and its surprise transformation in the final seconds of the play). But Macdonald, a British veteran making his
Broadway debut, lacks the skill to marshal all of these disparate
accomplishments into a combination that packs too much of a punch. Most disappointing, Hawke and Dano never seem
close to the role-swapping that so defines the piece, mostly because they seem
to be acting in different plays.
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