A LIE OF THE MIND

by Sam Shepard

Second Thought Theatre

Studio Theater at Addison Theatre Centre

Directed by Mac Lower

CAST:

Anastasia Munoz

Chad Gowen Spear

Duane Deering

Elizabeth Evans

Bryan Lewis

Sylvia Luedtke

Nancy Sherrard

Barry Nash

Reviewed by Christopher Soden,

Associate Theatre Critic for

John Garcia's THE COLUMN

_______________________A LIE OF THE MIND______________________

Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind doesn't just debunk romance. It skewers romance and sears it. And us in the process. curiously, at the same time it mocks and derides love it doesn't exactly diminish it. It doesn't suggest alternatives or any plausible escape from this virulent obsession that abruptly turns from pleasure cruise to train wreck. Lie of the Mind explores love and devotion: se*ual, non-sexual and the blurring of the two like a surgeon looking for cancer.

Intense, savage involvement with another human being seems to be both the Holy Grail and plague. Shepard considers "the war of the genders" but he also looks at the animosity between fathers and sons, and the tacit misogyny lurking in the nuclear family. Love is an atomic explosion, setting off a chain reaction of destruction and despair. Men are incorrigible dogs. They can't be housebroken and they can't subsist on their own.

A Lie of the Mind summons numerous themes from Shepard's previous work. Ideas we've seen before: blind patriotism, virility, soaring and crashing, absent fathers, dominant mothers, incest, toxic jealousy, love as privilege and torment, appear in this drama.

"Falling in love is the path to misery," Shepard seems to say, "but there's no help for it." Though it might be closer to observe, "If you fall, you're fucked." If I make Lie sound bleak that's because it is. But it's also, profoundly disturbing, harrowing, brilliant, laced with a kind of poetry of the id, menacing and implacable.

There are times when the characters create tableaux that resonate far beyond the immediate situation. The battered wife crawling on top of her wounded brother-in-law, wearing her father's shirt. The husband and wife folding a bloody American flag, oblivious to the havoc going on around them. It's like finding a station-of-the cross depicted on a birthday cake. It's astonishing, grotesque and difficult to take. But you can't look away. The layers of meaning inform and italicize one another.

When A Lie of the Mind begins we see Jake (Chad Gowen Spear) phoning his brother, Frankie, from a pay phone. In a fit of jealousy he's beaten his wife Beth, nearly to death. The light on Jake is an ominous blue, and the music cues us to the dangerous journey we're about to take.

Frankie (Duane Deering) tries to figure out where Jake, exactly, is, and Jake is too overcome and/or drunk to be of much help. Next we see Beth (Anastasia Munoz) face covered in bandages, on a hospital gurney. Her brother, Mike (Bryan Lewis) is trying to keep her calm in the midst of this catastrophe. She is wailing, hysterical, nearly incoherent, but we can make out the phrase, "He [Jake] is my heart."

The rest of the play (three acts) cuts back and forth between Jake and Beth's progress (or regress) after they have moved back to their childhood homes to recover. Jake moves back to his old bedroom with a mobile that from a distance could be suspending either jet planes or birds.

Lorraine, the mother (Sylvia Luedtke) keeps trying to kick his sister, Sally (Elizabeth Evans) out of the house and restore Jake's health with cheese and broccoli soup. The absence of the father, who died long after the marriage dissolved, permeates the household. Frankie decides to visit Beth's home in Montana to make sure she wasn't killed during Jake's outburst.

In Beth's home recuperation is slow and painful. The head trauma resulting from Jake's beating has affected Beth's speaking ability, though her seeming gibberish has a primal, oracular sense to it. The way infants observe the unvarnished and actual. Beth's mother Meg (Nancy Sherrard) and Mike help her along while her father, Baylor, spends increasingly long stretches in the hunting cabin, trying to bag his minimum before deer season ends.

When Frankie attempts to sneak into the house from the rear, Baylor (Barry Nash) accidentally shoots him, mistaking him for a deer. Consequently the family must put Frankie up on the couch, waiting for the snow to clear before getting him medical attention. They don't want him there, but they won't let him to leave. A Lie of the Mind is interwoven with this sort of duality and duplicity. Characters polarize, then spill over into each other, then split all over again.

They howl with longing, and then spit with contempt. Ah careless love. Second Thought Theatre's production of A Lie of the Mind has a powerful, impressive, masterful cast, equal to the intense demands of this script. They work a viable balance between the bizarre extremes of the plot and the emotions which run from high and strange to detached bliss.

Mr. Shepard loves his lengthy, surreal monologues, and the cast handled them well, though the pacing might have been a little off. Much of this play turns on recognizing the outlandish in the everyday, and vice versa, and Spear, Deering, Evans, Munoz, Lewis, Luedtke, Sherrard and Nash have the skill and grace to pull it off.

Coincidentally, the character, Meg, points out to her family that so much shouting isn't necessary, and I tend to agree with her. The tumultuousness of content and dialogue would have come through without so much yelling and otherwise turning up the flame so high. Of course these are interpretive choices made by director, Mac Lower.

We get the sinister, impending calamity vibe fairly readily, without Mr. Lower beating the drum so hard. It's not that what he's doing is inappropriate to tone, but it seems he could take it down a notch. Set Designer Chris Jenkins has come through with a clever, under -stated, symmetrical set.

It reverberates with recognizable interiors from a million blue collar homes, hitting us with the shock of familiarity and the quintessential code of minimal representation. He rhymes thematically with the idea of separate entities nonetheless connected and operating in tandem to each other. The homes of the lovers suggest each other; if not identical they have the same ambience. The jagged walls of the living rooms make an objective correlative to their state of mind.

I have tried to do justice to Second Thought Theatre's production of A Lie of the Mind, a stunning, unnerving, overwhelming experience. Anyone who cares deeply about drama and the places it can take us should make a point of seeing it. Whether or not you agree with Shepard's grasp of the subject, it's undeniably compelling and hard to refute, if you've ever been subjected to the torment of a failed relationship. As you might expect, Shepard has found new ways of expressing hard truths, of finding how the ridiculous and sacred mingle in our lives.

Reviewed by Christopher Soden, Associate Theatre Critic for John Garcia's THE COLUMN

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Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind Second Thought Theatre Playing through November 14th, 2009

Thursdays @ 7:30pm, Fri-Sat @ 8pm, Sun (Nov 8th only) @ 2pm WHERE: Addison Theatre Centre Studio Space, 15650 Addison Road in Addison, TX.

TIXS: $20 Reservations: brownpapertickets.com, 1-800-838-3006 or at http://www.secondthoughttheatre.com/attend/attend.htm