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Use Your Delusion
A Lie of the Mind review
Laurie Metcalf, Josh Hamilton, Marin Ireland (Photo: Monique Carboni)
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Absorbing, amusing and “Aye, dios mio!” are the A-list adjectives that best describe The New Group’s revival of A Lie of the Mind, Sam Shepard’s dysfunctional family drama and Drama Desk Award winner for Outstanding Play in 1986. This year’s production is directed with surprising sass and savvy by actor, author and Uma Thurman baby-daddy Ethan Hawke, and features an impressive ensemble cast including Keith Carradine, Laurie Metcalf and Alessandro Nivola. Together they take the audience on a jittery joyride through Shepard’s tequila soaked slice of life on the badlands of the American dream. It’s a bumpy journey that veers wildly between shell-shocked horror, down home humor and just plain craziness. And when all the shouting and shooting is done, the friendly folks in trash-bags preaching their personal gospel outside the Port Authority will seem comforting in comparison to Shepard’s trademark brood of redneck nut jobs.
“A love ballad, a little legend about love,” is how Sam Shepard describes A Lie of the Mind. Love, apparently in Shepard’s world, comes with cream of broccoli soup, violent rage, prolonged misery and brief relief in a rub of mink oil applied by a doting, albeit harebrained, wife.
From the opening phone call between jackass Jake (Alessandro Nivola) and his mild mannered brother Frankie (Josh Hamilton) wherein Jake is convinced he has murdered his wife Beth (Marin Ireland) in a brutal, but in Jake’s mind justified, act of jealousy, to Frankie’s misadventure at Beth’s family home in Montana to find out what really happened, to the play’s overly drawn out conclusion, the twisted truth depends on whom you ask and what he or she wants it to be.
Rather than “a lie” there are more untruths afoot here than the Warren Commission, Watergate investigation and the Iran Contra hearings combined. Only instead of the American people, it’s themselves the characters are deceiving until there’s nothing left to do or say but turn out the lights or burn down the whole shebang and walk away.
Bearing witness to the often self-pitying proceedings that pinball between catatonic and hysteric becomes as frustrating and exhausting as being designated driver on a bachelor party in Tijuana. Looming large is Shepard’s career theme of father issues, in this case Jake striving to please and escape the memory of his long gone daddy, a WWII Air Force veteran who took to hard drinking and disappearing acts after the war. Nonetheless Jake’s father’s memory lingers “ten feet tall and bulletproof” in Jake, his widowed mother Lorraine’s (Karen Young) and his sister Sally’s (Maggie Siff) eyes. Though the old man’s ashes, burial flag and bomber jacket may have been under Jake’s bed, his incendiary influence is in the air like a gas stove left on, ready to explode at the slightest spark.
Interestingly, Karen Young (now the elder Lorraine), played the role of Sally in the show’s 1985 production. So she at least knew of the depth of the emotional snake-pit into which she was jumping. Still, this year’s version must be a walk around the block compared to the original production’s four hour running time. Imagine Shakespeare unabridged in flannel shirts and you get the idea.
Meanwhile back in Montana, the one degree of levity in a mood often heavier than an eighteen wheeler, comes from the relationship between Beth’s father Baylor (Keith Carradine) and mother Meg (Laurie Metcalf ) a couple who have been together so long, the only thing they can’t stand more than each other is being apart. Baylor while not oblivious to Beth’s brain damaged condition is equally concerned with the impending close of deer hunting season and he is without a trophy, at least until Jake’s brother Frankie appears unexpectedly in his sights. After getting shot through the leg by Baylor, Frankie is stuck in the family’s snowbound house with nothing to do but fight off infection and Beth’s misplaced affections. Beth sees Frankie as the kinder gentler version of Jake and her mother swoons at the possibility of an old-fashioned country wedding even though her daughter is still married to the wife-beating brother of the man slowly getting gangrene on her couch. All the while Beth’s brother Mike (Frank Whaley) wanders in and out, determined to avenge his sister and if he can bag a deer in the process so much the better. Somebody call Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton because there’s a country music concept album here just waiting to be recorded.
With all the yelling and shooting and everything but possum-pie-making going on, kudos are due to Ethan Hawke for keeping the rubber burning like the General Lee in 4th gear, right up until the story runs out of gas with a half hour still to go. Congrats too are due to the set design of Derek McLane for crafting a perfect backdrop of random junk piled rafter high to symbolize the decades of emotional debris that Jake, Meg, Baylor etc. have accumulated through their desperate, twang talking lives.
Despite accomplished acting, cagey staging and Shane Rettig’s moody, bluesy sound design, the hillbilly histrionics start to wear as thin as bald tires and towards the end I just wanted to get the hell away from these hicks whose erratic behavior was starting to resemble an HBO special on Mountain Dew abuse in the Appalachians. So while Shepard, Hawke, and company might not be telling any lies, the awfully long truth doesn’t shed a whole lot of light either.
But the long, teeth grinding proceedings do provide a perfect excuse for stopping in at Chez Josephine, the unique bistro down the block from the New Group’s Acorn Theater for a pre or post show libation or three. To quote Jean-Claude, Josephine’s flamboyant proprietor when I told him I’d be reviewing the show. “Go easy on them, they need the work.”
And as I told J.C. “It’s not up to me, it’s up to them.” But in this case I’ll lay the blame at Sam Shepard’s boots for not knowing when too much is enough.
And that’s no lie.
For more information of A Lie of the Mind or to book tickets to see the show yourself, visit www.thenewgroup.org.