True West

by Sam Shepard

Book Overview

Comedy / 3m, 1f / Int. Recently revived at New York's Circle in the Square, where Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly alternated playing the roles of the brothers, this American classic explores... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0573617287
• ISBN13: 9780573617287
• Release Date: June 1981
• Publisher: Samuel French, Inc.
• Length: 74 Pages
• Weight: 0.22 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 4.9" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

Great Play

in True West , Sam Shepard's method is a kind of allegorical realism, where the use of everyday items such as golf clubs, houseplants and toasters is not at all intended to suggest us reality. In this play, Shepard illustrates the duality of human personality, and our primitive instincts for violence against the unavoidable family ties that usually discourage an individual from acting as wanted. In this case, two brothers, Austin and Lee, who experience the typical good boy vs. bad boy sibling rivalry unexpectedly meet. As a result a series of emotional angry outbreaks take place as Austin can't defined himself: Is he frightened of Lee or does he admire his brother's willingness to break the rules? Austin graduated college, got married, has a family to whom he will return soon. He is disciplined, striving and ambitious. Quite the opposite, Lee is uneducated, violent, envious and resentful. Austin, a Hollywood screenwriter, is housesitting his mother's home while she is on a sightseeing trip to Alaska. His brother, Lee, has appeared all of a sudden and wants to share the house. Lee is a tramp and small-time criminal, who has just spent the previous six months in the Mojave Desert with their alcoholic father. The filthy and foul Lee invites Austin's Hollywood producer for a round of golf, and ends up selling him on a story idea for a modern Western film, totally displacing his hard-working brother, who as a result crumples into a chaotic and violent wreck. Shepard's focus is not on verisimilitude, but on the intensity of the conflict that is revealed. For instance, the main action in the play is the reduction of the mother's neat household into a garbage dump. This includes the destruction of Austin's typewriter with a golf club, vomiting into the desiccated remains of a philodendron and squashing fresh toast into the linoleum. Additionally, Lee had stolen several toasters from the neighborhood, "There's gonna be a general lack of toast in the neighborhood this morning..." he says. In various occasions, Austin seemed to be afraid of his brother as he winds up doing what Lee asks him, such as lending him his car or typing the script of his imaginary screenplay. However, what Austin mostly seems to fear is not Lee, but his own deep-set, self-destructive impulses as he lives out the paranoiac nightmare of being displaced by his brother. "You think you are the only one in the brain department?" Lee questions him. When Lee is dictating Austin the lines of his screenplay, he narrates the story of two characters that are running after each other -- actually referring to themselves. He says: "The one who is chasing, doesn't know where the other one is taking him, the one who is being chased, doesn't know where he is going." The two brothers are constantly competing with each other; even though, they head in opposite directions in life. Austin has a career and a family while Lee doesn't but he has the ability to break the rules, his brot

my review

this play is great, buy it!