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Chicago Tribune
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Review: ‘A Lie of the Mind' is a Chicago-style treatment of Sam Shepard's most difficult play
With 'Fool for Love' playing at the Steppenwolf Theatre and now 'A Lie of the Mind' at the thriving Raven Theatre, Chicago is having something of a Sam Shepard revival. The late, great bard of the lonely American prairie and desert went out of favor here for a while; it's good to have his work back and being interpreted by a younger generation of artists. I found Steppenwolf's 'Fool for Love' overly styled and tentative, but that's far from the case with director Azar Kazemi's Raven production, filled with compelling young actors such as Ian Maryfield, Arash Fakhrabadi, John Drea and Gloria Imseih Petrelli going for broke in Raven's intimate theater. Now 40 years old, 'A Lie of the Mind' started out as a three-act, four-hour play, although Raven is using the revised version, first produced by the New Group in 2010, that clocks in at around 2 hours and 40 minutes — still nearly twice as long as 'Fool for Love.' The piece has accurately been described as the final episode in a quintet of familial dramas that also includes Shepard's 'Curse of the Starving Class,' 'Buried Child,' 'True West' and 'Fool for Love' and it's probably fair to say that it's Shepard's last great 20th century masterpiece. His 'Long Day's Journey Into Night,' kinda. All of those plays deal with broken families and romantic relationships, some subject to healing, some not. All of them are about the disconnect between the sparse natural environment in these United States and the human craving for intimacy. And all deal with American iconography: more specifically, the nation's foundational reliance on mythology and self-dramatization and the largely detrimental impact of all of that on, well, just making love and having children and trying to keep the wolf from the door. Whatever else I have to say about Kazemi's show here, this is a most serious production, one that understands this great writer strikingly well and that wrestles admirably with what is, I think, his most difficult work. All the characters in 'Lie of the Mind,' even the parental figures played here by Meighan Gerachis (in an exceptional stretch of her long career in Chicago theater) and Rom Barkhordar, who plays Baylor, the classic brutal Shepard father figure. The plot? It involves a young marriage where there has been horrific domestic abuse and both parties, aggressor and victim, have gone back to their original families in a kind of psychic retreat. Things go from there. Thus the piece tells the story of two agonized families striving for, oh, I don't know, coherence? Forgiveness? Self-awareness? Revenge? Redemption? Probably all of the above. Compared to other productions, which have fused much music into the show and used a sparser and more experimental or meta visual aesthetic, Kazemi situates the play more in terms of domestic realism or, if you like, a storefront Chicago gestalt. That's fair enough, especially given the resources at Raven, and it often works very well in terms of helping us identify with these struggling characters and reminded us of the autobiographical underpinning of all this man's plays. At other times, though, it fights Shepard's more surreal inclinations, especially as the play goes on and its non-realistic elements become more and more pervasive. The show's strength is the potent and courageous ensemble acting, as adroitly and generously directed by Kazemi (it will get yet better too). Its weakness is an intermittent lack of vulnerability and an occasional disinclination to leave all of that behind and pull out individual characters who have figured out that their travails flow from the difficulty of stopping American family life from turning into a Sam Shepard play. Chris Jones is a Tribune critic. cjones5@ When: Through March 22 Where: Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark St. Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes
New York Times
26-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: ‘Curse of the Starving Class' Doesn't Satisfy
When a member of the Tate family stands in front of the open fridge — as happens quite a bit in 'Curse of the Starving Class' — it's with the dejection of a gambler caught in a seemingly endless losing streak. The Tates' fridge is almost always empty, and there's a similar sense of vacancy to the direction and performances in the New Group's lackluster production of this 1977 Sam Shepard play. 'Curse of the Starving Class,' which opened Tuesday night at the Pershing Square Signature Center, begins with Wesley Tate (played by Cooper Hoffman, son of Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his mother, Ella (Calista Flockhart), shuffling around a wreckage area vaguely resembling a kitchen. Cluttered counters, old, mismatched chairs, busted cabinet doors, shattered glass everywhere — the house looks as if it were struck by a hurricane. (Scenic design is by Arnulfo Maldonado.) But the cause wasn't a natural disaster in the traditional sense; it was just Weston (Christian Slater), the Tate family patriarch, returning home once again stinking of booze 'like some rank old animal' and breaking the door. Though Weston's tempestuous drunkenness is responsible for the most egregious disorder, disarray is the usual state of affairs in the Tate household. The empty fridge is the norm, and Ella argues with her daughter, Emma (Stella Marcus), about whether they're part of the starving class, or if it even exists. The Tates are barely getting by, and each one has his or her own solution on how to proceed: Ella plans to sell the house to a skeevy land developer and fly the family out to a new life in Europe, unaware that Weston is planning to sell the house too, to clear his debts. Wesley believes they should keep the house and fix it up themselves. And Emma is plotting her imminent escape from them all. Like Shepard's 'Buried Child' and 'True West,' 'Curse of the Starving Class' is an American tragicomedy, equal parts earnest portraiture and satire. It moves between realism and a stylized kind of theater whose logic is driven more by lyricism and abstractions than by more traditional character arcs or plot progression. Which can pose a challenge to a director, who must ride a Shepard balance board, teetering between the somber and the sardonic, the real and the metaphorical. Scott Elliott's direction fails to fit all the seemingly disparate vocabulary of Shepard's work into a coherent stage language. Throughout the play, the characters randomly break out into monologues that seem taken from a lucid dream state. Emma rhapsodizes about her imagined future life in Mexico as a car mechanic; Wesley recreates the sounds and feelings of the evening Weston came drunkenly crashing into the house. Even the land developer has a speech about the powers and ambitions of corporate America. Instead of incorporating these moments into the play's more straightforward goings-on, Elliott further heightens them by setting a prominent spotlight (lighting by Jeff Croiter) on the character, who delivers these lines not to the rest of the cast but to the audience. These speeches then feel didactic in a way Shepard's script never does, their fourth-wall-breaking execution making the play feel disjointed and self-consciously stagy — which is also a problem with the performances. When the typically passive Ella erupts into an expletive-driven rage later in the show, Weston calmly critiques her inflection of the words, saying: 'Something doesn't ring true about it. Something deep in the voice. At the heart of things.' That could easily apply to the acting as well, which lacks intimacy and urgency. Flockhart's Ella and Hoffman's Wesley aren't just impassive; they're a little dull. Slater does the best work with his take on Weston, whose violent outbursts and wild, lurching movements provide the production with some spark. That's not including Lois, the 4-year-old California Red sheep who nearly steals the show as an animal who belongs to the Tate family and is afflicted with something nasty. Truly, some of Lois's bleating fell perfectly in pace with the dialogue opposite Slater and Flockhart. (Lois is a professional, who was also a featured performer in the living Nativity section of the 'Radio City Christmas Spectacular.') I'm being facetious, but only a little bit — some of the funniest moments on the night I saw the show were unintentional, when a vegetable went flying into an audience member's open hand, or when Lois interrupted a tense argument with a few loud, enthusiastic 'baas' toward the audience. It's telling if a production's gravitas and humor comes mostly from its livestock, especially if it's a staging of a Sam Shepard play. 'Curse of the Starving Class' is a work that intentionally leaves its characters bereft, but shouldn't do the same for its audience.
