True West Shepard Views

General Goods

True West was first performed at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco, where Shepard was the resident playwright. It had its world premiere there on July 10, 1980 [1]. It was originally directed by Robert Woodruff and starred Peter Coyote as Austin, Jim Haynie as Lee, Tom Dahlgren as Saul Kimmer, and Carol McElheney as Mom. The production later moved to Joseph Papp's The Public Theater in New York City, where it starred Tommy Lee Jones and Peter Boyle.

Critic Richard Gilman once described playwright Sam Shepard as the “Jackson Pollock of the American theater,” meaning that some thought, or form of an idea may be there amongst all of the stimulating and mysterious swirls of mood, character, and angry words, but one must be diligent to find them. Contemporary Theatre of Dallas tries to untangle the hues in Shepard’s dark comedy of a sibling psychodrama True West.

With Curse of the Starving Class (1977) and Buried Child (1978), Shepard began producing what are now considered his major plays, works defined by a clear focus on such topics as dysfunctional families and social fringe dwellers These plays, in contrast to his earlier work, also display a more conventional approach to plot and character. His popularity broadened and by the time True West appeared in 1980, many critics felt that Shepard was at the forefront of new American playwrights and, along with other dramatists such as David Mamet, Marsha Norman, and Beth Henley, was defining a new decade of theatre.

While True West represents a continued movement in Shepard's drama toward realistic characterization, plot, setting, and dialogue, the play also has touchstones in his experimental days, retaining a number of unusual, fantastical elements—such as the grotesque violence and the startling transformations of its two main characters. Some commentators refer to these later plays as examples of magical realism (a literary genre denned by the works of such writers as Jorge Luis Borges and Federico Garcia Lorca) because they begin with realistic characters and situations but gradually acquire more bizarre qualities until they finally seem to fuse realism and fantasy. In many circles True West was hailed as a breakthrough for Shepard, a work in which experimental drama was successfully melded with the more conventional elements of modern theatre. Though True West is one of Shepard's most accessible dramas, it retains the unmistakable signature of his earlier adventurous work.