Critics used to say that Shepard had an instinctive talent for plumbing the modern collective unconscious, as if he could connect a hose to the welter of peculiar feelings that define our age and spray the stuff out on a page. His characters don't stand for anything other than themselves, but somehow they embody the ethos of anger, despair and yearning in all those trailer parks and suburban kitchenettes in Arizona and Southern California. But in True West , which premiered 21 years ago and which has become probably Shepard's most popular play, he gives us a pair of brothers who seem almost like symbols of two tragically divergent cultural strains in the Southwest. But he longs for a more authentic life. Lee may be a pitiful last remnant of the Wild West, looking unbathed in his worn raincoat and cowboy boots that have been repaired with duct tape, but he can talk authoritatively about the Texas Panhandle or surviving in cactus country.
Serenity has a way of evaporating quickly.
Lee craftily conspires to steal Austin's producer away, making a deal of his own and trying to get Austin to help him write a script. Manure-kickin' reality meets the mass media. Suddenly, it's Lee wrestling with character development and plot lines. There's a wonderful scene in which Lee attacks Austin's typewriter, smashing it again and again with a golf club, as if its cold, inanimate shape were somehow responsible for his inability to write. Meanwhile, the achingly dissatisfied Austin is undergoing a radical transformation of his own, becoming another version of his violent petty thief of a brother, hauling in stolen toasters from the neighbors' kitchens just to prove a point.