Midway through its run, A Lie of the Mind (through October 1; tickets: $25) brought an standing-room-only crowd to ACT Theatre’s Bullitt Cabaret to see the new collective Collektor‘s take on Sam Shepard’s 1985 play. (ACT, with its Central Heating Lab and ACT Pass, can be officially said to be the home of Seattle’s young theatre scene.)
Pruned from four to three hours (with two intermissions), Lie of the Mind is an unlikely recent revival–it opens frantically, with a husband having beaten his wife into brain damage, but otherwise spends much of its time alternating between couch and bed, as characters try to discover what’s to be done. In the hands of director Rob West, there’s never a dull moment–his cast follows motivations through scenes like a pack on the scent of prey.
Probably of economic necessity, designer Etta Lilienthal keeps the set minimal (homely couches, beds, chairs), but it’s also all that’s needed, as Evan Ritter’s shifty lighting and Sean Patrick Taylor’s lonesome, plucked guitar aid a phenomenal cast in stepping in to carry you off with them to southern California and Montana, where two families absorb the punishing after-effects of Jake’s homicidal outburst.
Though Jake’s brutalization of Beth provides the inciting incident (Jodie Knowles’ make-up provides a wince-worthy tapestry of bruising, slow to heal throughout the night), the play widens its focus again and again, first to other family members coping with Jake (Ray Tagavilla) and Beth (Aimée Bruneau), then to their lives, then to the traumas they’ve endured.
It’s a phenomenology of family–how we are made up by family, yet never wholly seen by them. Shepard keeps you guessing at whether Frankie and Jake are two sides of the same person, at least symbolically, as children of an alcoholic, but it doesn’t come to much either way. It’s these associations in Shepard’s mind, fleeting thoughts made explicit, that are the reality. The play frames–and heightens–the uncertainty of what we can know.
Shepard’s families may remind you of how little smart young playwrights are interested in that mundane messiness. So often, people in plays are exactly the sort of people who should be in plays: They are witty or dramatically tortured or great to look at. Shepard’s people balk at all that. His parents are your parents–or at least the parents of people you know. (Jennessa West’s regionally specific costumes underscore the lived-in lives of these people.)
Jake (the awesomely-voiced Tagavilla), it turns out, more than balks at theatre. To him, it’s a lie–and people lie because they want to put something over on you. Shepard pursues Jake into his misogynistic, schizophrenic freak-out, when everything–including family–turns false and scheming, but also observes how his family both blankets and strait-jackets him.
His brother Frankie (Tim Gouran) doesn’t trust Ray to be telling the truth about having beaten Beth to death, and heads off to her family’s home in Montana, a mule ranch run by the crusty patriarch Baylor (Joe Ivy), whose wife Meg (Sally Brady) has become his caretaker in later life, the person to pull off Baylor’s boots and rub mink oil into his cold-cracked feet.
Late in the play, Lorraine’s daughter Sally (Maggie Tatone) diffidently sits down with her mom, looking through old photos, and Lorraine (Macall Gordon) reminisces about the parades she and her horse rode in–a bygone southern California springs to country-fair life–and then Lorraine tells Sally to burn the photograph.
It may or may not mean much–it’s just the way Lorraine is. But you are far, far away, you realize, from Jake beating Beth to a pulp, and how is that? Only Beth’s brother Mike (Eric Riedmann) seems to be able to stay on task, though no one has much use for his attempts to set things right. Shepard isn’t exactly clear on this: You probably can’t set brain damage “right,” but it also seems as though the families have, in taking responsibility for blood, diffused the original wrong. Hunting seems to be one way to find peace, especially if you shoot someone accidentally.
Life goes on.
Sometimes life goes on, even when you don’t expect it to. At West of Lenin last weekend, director Paul Budraitis gave a workshop presentation of his surreal take on the afterlife of Willy Loman, The Salesman is Dead. Long Live the Salesman! I won’t review it here, since it’s in workshop, but it’s already something you may want to keep your eyes peeled for. James Cowan is terrific as the ex-Willy, but although it’s a solo show, he has co-stars in the Splinter Group, the creative team (Montana Tippett, Heidi Hunt, Joshua Tillman) that drapes him in dust and shadow, water and light. Seattlest calls it a tone poem, which is exactly right: Once life is extinguished, there’s not much drama left (though Cowan’s discoveries in his new state of being can be searing). There is confusion, there are memories, perhaps longing. You’re left impressed by what, in this almost wordless play (except for piped-in recordings), would be background to dialogue elsewhere: Cowan’s adrenalin shivers as he grips the steering wheel, his Jack Benny reverie from a long-ago sales trip, the transparent house that, like a crystal in an old radio set, tunes in his lost family, unsteadily. “A MAN IS NOT A PIECE OF FRUIT!” rings out, and you have the terrible suspicion that Loman really is back.