STAGE REVIEW : ‘True West’ Shows Brotherly Love Gone South

Sam Shepard--at least the one we can see through his writing--has never bought any of those notions about the family being a loving, supportive unit, even in an idealized state. To Shepard, a family is more like an uneasy alliance of peculiar personalities linked not so much by blood as by a need to overcome their own desperation.

In “Curse of the Starving Class” (1978), he coughed up a darkly comic vision of a family gone to seed on a barren ranch. His Pulitzer Prize-winning “Buried Child” (1978), with its not-so-subtle theme of incest, is even more unsparing; if ever a family is on a collision course with itself, it’s this one.

Then there is his 1980 bouquet to sibling rivalry, “True West,” which can be seen through Saturday at the Cabrillo Playhouse in a generally awkward but sometimes engaging production. There may be some affection between the desert rat loser, Lee (Tom Amen), and his Hollywood writer brother, Austin (Buck Stevens), but if so, it’s all but swallowed by a shared suspicion of each other.

In “True West,” actually a pretty slim piece by Shepard standards, the playwright works up a warped dynamic by first making Lee and Austin as different as can be--so far apart, in fact, that you have to wonder how they came from the same mother. Austin is sensitive, passive and easily manipulated--a thinking guy who sits in front of the typewriter a lot. But Lee is loud, demanding, exploitative and menacing--a man of action who, when not wandering through the Mojave, steals things for a living.

Everything hits the fan when Lee shows up at their mother’s (Sandra Orchin) home in the San Gabriel Valley, where Austin is house-sitting, trying to finish his career-making screenplay. These guys don’t just get on each other’s nerves; they strangle them.

The fun here is Shepard’s very hip dialogue, which paints Lee and Austin into a corner where confrontation is the only game, where Lee rants and bullies to beat the band and Austin tries weakly to parry.

Things get a little physical too. Austin is slapped around some, and before you know it, the kitchen (nicely designed on the playhouse’s tiny stage by both Amen and Stevens) is a shambles. Besides playing Austin, Stevens directs, and he’s not shy about taking a physical approach.

Among other things, “True West” works over the Hollywood image. When Austin’s agent, Saul (Walt Stevens), a powerful industry type whom Austin has been cultivating for years, decides to go with Lee’s half-baked idea for a Western instead of Austin’s love story, Shepard takes a swipe at Tinseltown’s fickle nature.

This production is not without laughs, and, at the same time, is able to plump the play’s blacker undercurrents.

But it falters for several reasons. Stevens’ pacing stalls too often and lacks a crispness that would add dimension to the scary momentum that builds between Lee and Austin.

The final scene fades with Amen and Stevens in a frozen fistfight, looking like Abbot and Costello in the middle of a bopping session. Who’s on first? Take this. Wham! It just doesn’t have the right impact.

The performances are uneven too. Amen has some great scenes in which he really captures Lee’s extremism--there are layers of menace in some of his exchanges with Stevens, and he finds the appropriate hilarious abandon when ripping the kitchen apart--but at other times the portrayal lacks needed definition.

Stevens appears uncomfortable early on, as if he’s not sure what the parameters are for Austin. He improves later, though, and shows some genuine skill during a drunken scene.

So this isn’t a top-notch treatment of Shepard, an unusual playwright whose works, because of their inherent ambiguity, invite mistakes. But it brings you into Shepard’s world, where the family, at best, is an off-center, troubled thing.

‘TRUE WEST’

A Cabrillo Playhouse production of Sam Shepard’s play. Directed by Buck Stevens. With Tom Amen, Buck Stevens, Walt Stevens and Sandra Orchin. Sets by Tom Amen and Buck Stevens. Plays tonight and Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Cabrillo Playhouse, 202 Avenida Cabrillo, San Clemente. Tickets: $7. (714) 496-1541.