Reviving Sam Shepard's 'A Lie of the Mind'
In some dark and twisted way, "A Lie of the Mind" is Sam Shepard's love story. Yes, the love that kicks off the catastrophes involves wife beating, an attack so vicious that the husband believes he killed her. But if one can get past the uncomfortable reality of the plot point, Ethan Hawke's revival of this family-monster of a play has an odd tenderness I don't recall from its 1985 premiere.
That production, directed by Shepard, ran almost four hours and included Harvey Keitel, Geraldine Page and Amanda Plummer in its cast of gold-standard eccentrics. Hawke, who directs with much the same rough energy and surprising discipline that drives his acting, has put together a long-boned band of mostly expert absurdists - most wonderfully Laurie Metcalf and Keith Carradine as the wife's incredulously blunt and clueless American Gothic parents.
Hawke and Shepard have brought the thing down to less than three hours, building to a more coherent, almost elegiac lyricism that elevates the work into prime Shepard territory. This always was the most naturalistic, least wildly poetic of Shepard's massive family tragicomedies, including his 1979 Pulitzer-winning "Buried Child." By establishing the mysterious bonds of love as firmly as the destructive ones, however, the lies of the mind here seem just a tiny bit like hope.
The crazy-jealous husband Jake (Alessandro Nivola) and the (now brain-damaged) wife Beth (Marin Ireland) return to their respective family homes at opposite sides of the stage. Each has siblings (Frank Whaley and the invaluable Josh Hamilton) who, despite initial appearances, turn out as screwed up as everyone else.
Yet, for all the mayhem, there are these unexpected love connections. Shepard is considering, among many other things, the unknowable self that remains outside of family ties, outside of love. With surreal humor and wrenching sadness, he examines the wounds - psychic and physical - that result when people, not truly knowing others or themselves, blunder into disaster following the lie called love.
The junk-piled set seems better suited to David Mamet's "American Buffalo" than the place Shepard describes as "infinite space going off to nowhere." But the live found-object music by brothers Latham and Shelby Gaines is evocative enough to be a Shepard character all its own.
WHAT "A Lie of the Mind"
WHERE The New Group @ Theatre Row, 410 W. 42nd St., Manhattan
INFO $61.25; 212-279-4200; thenewgroup.org
BOTTOM LINE Reclaiming rough Shepard with odd tenderness
