by Jennifer Ernst
True West, Arena Stage’s latest production, takes place in suburban L.A., near the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains, where the coyotes howl at the moon, and the men howl at their typewriters. Unwinding in two acts, the tale of brothers divided, reunited and divided again crackles with the tension between Ted Koch and Todd Cerveris, who as Lee and Austin bring Sam Shepard’s 1980 script to bruisingly physical and gut-wrenchingly funny life.
Austin and Lee are brothers and opposites. Austin is a Yale-sweatshirted, coffee-drinking pseudo-yuppie and screenwriter; Lee is a desert-dwelling, beer-swigging drifter and petty thief. Austin is housesitting for his mother while trying to finish and sell his latest love story; Lee is disturbing his concentration. Together over the span of three days and three nights, they bicker, drink, fight and try to craft a story of two men chasing each other across Texas in big riggs and on horseback, a “real Western.”
Under Howard Shalwitz’s direction, Cerveris and Koch run deliriously roughshod over the stage. Koch as the archetypal cowboy-in-the-black-hat Lee, is crude, menacing and oafishly endearing. He clearly scares the everloving crap out of his industrious younger brother, played by Cerveris as a man nimbly adept at placating the volatile souls of agents and brothers. The peculiar rhythms of Shepard’s dialogue sit comfortably in both men’s mouths, making exchanges both weighty and banal work on a multitude of levels. When the power dynamics established in the first act are stood on their heads in the second, it is at once eyebrow-raising and delightful. Seeing Austin skipping around the stage in the throes of a 24-hour tequila binge while Lee vivisects their typewriter with a nine iron in frustration is an exercise in sublime comic timing.
The set, designed by Loy Arcenas, is vintage-1980, ranch-style house in the Los Angeles suburbs, detail-perfect down to the hardware on the cabinets. It’s Everyman’s suburban house: Seeing the set is like seeing an unsettling ghost of friends’ houses past. However, in this house, the West with which Lee and Austin are trying to connect is coming in at the windows, with tentacles of flora and the howling and chirping of the local fauna.
Shalwitz’s vision of True West can be said to be excessive. It is. But, the very over-the-topness of True West?the extravagance of the dialogue, the excessiveness of the volume and the sheer gratuitousness of the violence, be it man-on-man or man-on-typewriter, the grandioseness of the themes of family, art, authenticity and the West?makes it work. The West is a big place, even if we don’t know what it is, and it requires big characters, even if they don’t understand it either. It requires a big play to tell the story, and at play’s end, the actors stand sweating and tattered, taking their bows as the smell of toasted Wonder Bread wafts through the air. It’s a great time to be at the theater.
True West is running through April 7 at the Arena Stage in the Kreeger Theater, located at 1101 Sixth St., S.W.
