Brothers battle regrets in ‘True West’
STURGEON BAY - Whether he’s playing a lumberjack in love or one of the guys on ice, Doug Mancheski has always been so much more than his prodigious gifts as a comic actor.
Like all great clowns, Mancheski’s laugh-inducing ability to morph into what he’s not underscores his characters’ often melancholy yearning to be other than they are. He’s therefore ideally cast as Lee, one of the two brothers in Sam Shepard’s “True West.” Under Robert Boles’ direction, Third Avenue Playhouse opened a strong production Thursday night.
As the lights come up, Lee and Austin (Jonathan Wainwright) are in their mother’s nondescript suburban California kitchen. Set designer James Valcq has faithfully reproduced what Shepard prescribes, right down to the wall of house plants that Mom (Laurel Brooks) has charged Austin with watering while she’s away.
It’s the sort of domestic task that appears to suit Austin, a tidy and quiet writer who plays and writes by conventional rules; he’s working on a screenplay involving a Hollywood love story.
Or trying to work, anyway: the unkempt, beer-guzzling Lee continually interrupts, with passive-aggressive comments underscoring his envy of Austin’s Ivy League education, settled family life and meetings with a hotshot producer (Mark Moede), each going well beyond what Lee himself has accomplished in a life of drinking and drifting in the desert.
But it soon becomes clear that even as he looks down his nose at Lee, Austin is similarly envious of his ne’er-do-well brother. Austin sees Lee as an embodiment of an older and more primitive West, filled with adventures Austin himself has missed by living his buttoned-down, blueprint life – in a West where, he bitterly notes, he swallows the smog and shops at Safeway.
This being a Shepard play, it’s no surprise that each brother gradually becomes his opposite – or, more accurately, begins indulging his long-repressed urges and dreams. Lee reaches for the posh life he’s never had; Austin indulges fantasies of the wild man he never was. Both men’s efforts are ridiculous, and this production doesn’t miss a humorous beat in Shepard’s script.
But for all the laughs, Wainwright and Mancheski also suggest the tragic undertones in a play about two men feeling trapped by who they’ve become and unsure how to break free. Wainwright is an old hand at playing characters furiously tamping down smoldering inner fires; when Lee finally erupts, Wainwright covers the waterfront, capturing what’s sublime, silly and scary about a man admitting to himself that he’s wasted his life.
Meanwhile, Mancheski serves up the most poignantly bittersweet Lee I’ve seen. This Lee is more than his frightening anger; he’s also a long-buried and hopelessly lost child, trying to feed a hunger he can’t understand. Yes, it’s funny. It will also break your heart.