Playwright: Sam Shepard
At: Redtwist Theatre, 1044 W. Bryn Mawr
Phone: 773-728-7529; $22-$30
Runs through: July 13
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
There are these two brothers, you see. One of them has an education, a family and an honest job, if you look upon writing screenplays for Hollywood movies as a respectable means of earning a living. The other is a petty thief, a drifter and, in this production, speaks in a pronounced high, nasal vaguely-Boston drawl which might be significant, or not. So what we've got is a Cain-and-Abel situation—a premise not uncommon in American drama—but the irony is that meek Austin longs to be a desperado like his outlaw sibling, while boisterous Lee finds himself increasingly drawn to the comforts of domesticity. Throw into this volatile dynamic a producer offering a handsome reward to whoever gives him a winning story idea, and the dogfight is on.
Sam Shepard plays are always more fun when you can make a mess, and the standard for this particular exercise in fraternal rivalry was set in 1982 by the brawling, leather-lunged, trash-the-stage, mud-blood-and-beer orgy of destruction mounted by the then-fledgling Steppenwolf Theatre ensemble. But the several-times subdivided storefront space that Redtwist Theatre ( formerly known as the Actors' Workshop Theatre ) calls home restricts all movement to dimensions measuring a mere 16 by 10 feet, with audience sitting barely two-arms' length away from the action. To be sure, stunt doubles can be employed for a cruelly mutilated typewriter and fatally neglected stand of potted plants, and shards of smashed plates can be contained by a downstage kitchen-island, but the fact remains that extensive alarums and excursions will present hazards to both actors and audience, so it's almost inevitable that the text become the center of focus.
And therein lies the problem: Johnny Garcia makes a suitably introspective Austin, flanked by Scott Jones as the clueless Saul and Ana Maria Alvarez as the phlegmatic clan materfamilias. But Paul Joseph appears to have played cracker-nasties many times before, in much larger auditoriums, with the result that by the time Lee begins to show himself capable of animal cunning, let alone rational planning, we have long wearied of his comic-book mannerisms and one-dimensional approach to his character. It's too bad, because actor-turned-director Si Osborne is quickly establishing a reputation in Chicago Theater for capable guidance of performances other than his own—when the performers are willing to listen.
