‘TRUE WEST’: Ethan Hawke & Paul Dano. Photo: Joan Marcus

TRUE WEST

Written by Sam Shepard
Directed by James Macdonald
Through March 17, 2019
American Airlines Theater
227 West 42nd Street
(212-719-1300), www.RoundaboutTheatre.org

By David NouNou

Siblings by nature tend to have a rivalry. Some of the rivalry is created by parents, some by nature, and some by Sam Shepard. Some are friendly rivalries but in Shepard’s plays, they seem to have a nihilistic overtone. They start with tension, move to the absurd, and then go for the kill.

While Mom (Marylouise Burke) is off on vacation in Alaska, her sons stay in her well-maintained California home. She has left her house to be looked after by her younger, meek, college-educated writer son, Austin (Paul Dano). Austin has come for solitude to write his screenplay and desperately wants to sell it to filmmaker Saul Kimmer (Gary Wilmes). On this particular night, the unexpected older brother, Lee (Ethan Hawke), the black sheep of the family, has arrived to wreak mayhem on Austin’s life. To say he is menacing is an understatement.

Austin is set to close the deal with Saul to sell his screenplay (which is a love story) gets blind sided by Lee with his ridiculous story of two cowboys chasing each other at night in Texas by car and horses whichever the occasion suits them. In losing a golf match to Lee, Saul drops Austin’s piece in favor of Lee’s drivel. To make matters worse, Saul wants Austin to drop his own work and instead write Lee’s Western screenplay. This ends Act I.

Act II starts in a hilarious manner, Mom’s home has been trashed and decimated. Her beloved plants have been neglected and are dead, and Lee is having a fight with the typewriter in trying to get his dialogue moving. Thus, the role reversal, Lee is now the tormented writer and Austin is the instigator knowing his illiterate brother won’t be able to crank a word out for his screenplay. This leads to anarchy and unusual turns of event.

The play is boldly directed by British director James Macdonald with new twists and more humor inserted to make it more like theater of the absurd. The two aces here are Ethan Hawke and Paul Dano, both giving sterling performances and their best stage performances to date. The changing of their dynamics is precision sharp, and they make each moment count.

In all honesty, Sam Shepard isn’t the easiest playwright to sit through and understand the fatalistic psychological undercurrents throughout his plays. For audiences he is an acquired taste. For most actors, they love to get a crack at his machinations and come up with new meanings. Ethan Hawke and Paul Dano have done this and their performances are a welcome addition to the start of a new theatrical year.

Edited by Scott Harrah
Published January 31, 2019
Reviewed at January 30, 2019 press performance.

‘TRUE WEST”: Ethan Hawke & Paul Dano. Photo: Joan Marcus

‘TRUE WEST”: Paul Dano & (standing) Ethan Hawke. Photo: Joan Marcus

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THREE WITCHES: (left to right) Malcom Gets, John Glover & Byron Jennings. Photo: T. Charles Erickson

MACBETH
Written by William Shakespeare
Directed by Jack O’Brien
Through January 12, 2014
Vivian Beaumont Theatre
150 West 65th Street
(212-239-6200), www.lct.org

By David NouNou

There should be a moratorium against any future productions of Macbeth for at least five years or till 2020. This is the third version this year alone. Earlier in the spring, there was the dreadful, hubristic one-man version with Alan Cumming set in an insane asylum and playing all the characters.  Now we have Ethan Hawke in a vanity project, with a missing Hawke in search of his Macbeth. Shakespeare certainly has had his ups and downs this year; from the brilliant authentic revivals of Twelfth Night and Richard III with Mark Rylance currently playing at the Belasco to the abysmal, soon-to-be closing Romeo and Juliet with Orlando Bloom; and now with this misguided and misdirected atrocity by Jack O’Brien.

Lord, spare us from false prophets and pretentious “visionary” directors who think they have new ideas to infuse into classic Shakespeare for new audiences. Sitting through this version of Macbeth, one can’t help but stumble upon a myriad of questions and on top of the list is: What made Ethan Hawke think he could play the Thane of Cawdor? Why was Lady Macbeth in Givenchy-inspired costumes?  What were Grizabella, Jennyanydots, Skimbleshanks, and Rumpleteazer from Cats doing in Macbeth?  Why were a lot of the scenes acted in almost total darkness?  Why were extras marching from offstage upstage to downstage offstage for no apparent reason? Why was everyone doing different accents? Why was everybody overacting, and why was the stage so full of distracting noises and special effects?

My best guess would be Jack O’Brien tried to fill the stage with as many distractions as possible so the audience would not notice that Macbeth was missing. Ethan Hawke is an intense actor from Austin, Texas and has a definite speech pattern. In the movies, his intensity works well. However, Shakespeare is a different matter. His delivery of Macbeth sounded like he was phonetically breaking down the script. As for Anne-Marie Duff’s Lady Macbeth, due to her lack of stage presence and the absence of Lady M’s ferocity, the massive Beaumont stage swallowed her whole.

There was one original idea; the three witches (usually played by women) were portrayed by three men: Byron Jennings, Malcolm Gets, and John Glover. They added to the distraction. With the exception of Brian d’Arcy James as Banquo, as for the rest of the cast, they were overwrought and might as well have well been doing a scene from the Tower of Babel, for each one had a different accent and different style. They somehow all forgot they were Scotsmen doing Macbeth.

We’ve seen so many Shakespearean productions that spend too much time, effort and money trying to put a “spin” on the Bard to bring in new audiences, and this rarely works.  Here, we are bludgeoned by hokey, horror-film-style sound effects, over-the-top, high-tech lighting, and characters running around in ridiculous costumes like something out of a Duran Duran video on MTV circa 1983. As the current twin Broadway productions in repertory have shown us, the classics of Shakespeare work best when they are performed as written. Otherwise, the richness of Shakespeare’s language and narrative gets mired in gimmickry.

SOMETHING ‘WICKED’ THIS WAY COMES: (left to right) Ethan Hawke, Daniel Sunjata, Richard Easton & cast in ‘Macbeth.’ Photo: T. Charles Erickson

Edited by Scott Harrah
Published November 25, 2013
Reviewed at  press performance on November 24, 2013

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