Mime flattens humor of ‘True West’

When it comes to a Sam Shepard script, you can count on loneliness, misery, menace, family dysfunction, dark humor, perhaps some violence and, for sure, a whole lot of guyness. It’s great stuff.

But what I was really missing in the new Ten Bucks Theater Company production of “True West,” running through Saturday at Brewer Middle School, was a toaster. Guest director Adam Kuykendall has staged the entire production without props and with very little set. He uses sound effects and miming to fill in for the missing visuals. For me, the minimalist approach subordinated too much of the story and added a level of distraction so sustained that what wasn’t there was more dominant than what was. Maybe that was the point, but after 90 minutes of trying to decipher the imaginary materials, less really began to feel like less.

Partially that’s because this now classic American stage story about two brothers who hunker down together in their mother’s Southern California home for some fisticuffs family time depends on physical and material conceits. While Mom (Julie Arnold Lisnet) is away in Alaska, Austin, a screenwriter, has agreed to housesit. His drifter brother, Lee, shows up unexpectedly and not only arrives with contraband from his local suburban pilfering, but Lee also trumps his brother by successfully pitching a script of his own to Austin’s agent (Ron Lisnet).

By the end of the play, the sibling rivalry has transformed into sibling symbiosis. But it’s filled with threat and throttling boy activity.

And toasters. That’s what Lee, played with crazed wildness by Allen Adams, challenges Austin, depicted with progressive intensity by Putnam Smith, to steal to prove himself less of an effete and more of a powerhouse. But when the toasters don’t exist in the actual visual realm, something is lost. Namely, the toasters. Namely, the humor. That’s my biggest complaint about this production. It’s hard enough to struggle to hear actors who deliver their lines with their backs to the audience or yell in a hall where sound bounces like a rubber ball. Or to see the actors taking their lines well out of the onstage light. Or to have them engage in awkward blocking that obscures their stage presence.

But to flatten the humor by miming a Shepard play? It’s just too confusing. I found myself mostly involved with the imaginary world of this play in all the wrong ways – is that really where he set down that briefcase? Didn’t he just slam his head into a kitchen cabinet? What’s he doing with all the hand movements – cooking?

I admire Kuykendall’s ambition. I respect his interpretive brawn. And the collegiate style of this play is likely to appeal to those with a more daring sense of Shepard. For instance, in 2000, “True West” was staged in New York City with Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly, who alternated roles each night. But Kuykendall’s challenges for the audience as well as for the actors are overly demanding. This is a complex, powerful script filled with tension, irony, psychological drama and quirky wit. It can easily slip into cartoon or melodrama or overly indulgent commentary about the writer’s life. To infuse it with mime is simply asking too much of a community cast and of an audience that gets so few brushes with edgy drama that they deserve to have it delivered with innovation, accessibility and toasters.

Ten Bucks Theater Company will present “True West” at 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday through June 14 at Brewer Middle School Auditorium. For more information, call 884-1030.