Toasted in the Kitchen

by Andrew Michael Flynn

Sam Shepard’s True West is a two-act trip into a particular type of American psychosis visited upon the audience by way of a pair of estranged brothers who find themselves in their mother’s kitchen in the suburbs of late-1970s Los Angeles. The two brothers, Lee and Austin, continually lock horns over certain directions that their lives have taken, both in the recent past and where they could end up in the future. The use of appropriate academic, original play text, and popular culture-based sources will allow a thorough analyzation of these two characters and how their behaviors and eccentricities represent an accurate foreshadowing of the United States’ modern partisan politics in the modern two-party system of government.

Actors Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly continually switched playing the roles of Lee and Austin when they performed a Broadway revival of True West for many months in 1999-2000 in New York City. From this, Hoffman was interviewed on PBS’ Charlie Rose in the Spring of 2000 and recognized truths about the original text of Shepard’s play, bringing to the surface that “this is a play from the id” and that it “can hold any emotion, at any time” (“Philip Seymour Hoffman” – Interview (May 30, 2000)). The 65 pages of True West demonstrate this in wide spectrum of human behavior with the two brothers calmly talking, all the way to coming to fisticuffs and nearly killing each other through any number of types of bodily assault.

Along the way, both mind strength and brute strength are used between Lee and Austin in different stages of their respective unraveling. Austin is the educated and more scholarly of the two brothers, working as a screenwriter and overall creative storyteller and functioning as the play’s protagonist. His older brother, Lee, is the more unfocused, drifter-type antagonist whose life has been scattershot as of late. Lee holds Austin’s larger and certainly more utilized brainpower up to ridicule as a way of alpha-dogging him into a type of submissive state for the majority of the play, giving passionate but mostly thoughtless asides such as “Maybe you’re right. Maybe we’re too intelligent huh? (Pause) We got our heads on our shoulders. One of us has even got a Ivy League diploma. Now that means somethin’ don’t it? Doesn’t that mean somethin’?” (Shepard, Act I, Scene 4, page 29). The passive-aggressive nature of Lee’s dialogue is indicative of a certain brand of today’s red-state mentality that is reactive, angry underneath the surface, and not considerate of deeper introspection. The lack of Lee’s substantive reflection makes him susceptible to demonstrating his “hamartia”, which is a tragic flaw that can directly cause to their downfall (Phillips, Week 2 Module Overview). The ticking time-bomb that is Lee has an expiration date, and the audience will all be witnesses.

Austin’s moderate demeanor, at least in the first half of the play, represents the modern Democratic Party in its largely pragmatic approach to getting things accomplished. He takes the barbs and missives that Lee hurls at him, and even endures the slaps and flicks to his head from his older brother. While the left flank may be what propels both Austin and the Democrats as far as their true motivations and overall raison dêtre, quality experience and a level head have won the day before. So for Austin’s immediate goals of writing a decent screenplay for the Hollywood producer Saul Kimmer, his wits and drive are at the forefront of any conversation he is having with his brother Lee. When Lee attempts to hold the fact that he does not need sleep, Austin almost immediately catches Lee flapping his jaw and contradicting himself. Lee complains that the howling coyotes kept him awake the previous night, to which Austin jolts back, “Well, you don’t sleep anyway do you?” (I.2.14). While the intelligence is definitely being demonstrated by Austin, it can’t help but be seen by Lee as a mental assault: a condescension from his little brother who is atop a psyche pedestal of sorts. And what a treat this aggressive tête-à-tête is to experience in under the umbrella of Aristotle’s trifecta of Unity of Time, Place, and Action (Phillips, Week 4 Module Overview). Not only does True West take place within the same 24-hour period, but it remains in a single location, and focuses on the brothers’ quarrel with only mere mention of outside factors and events.

Even though they are both from California, “Brothers Lee and Austin constitute two dialectically opposed aspects of an American Self, Westerner and Easterner.” (Bassan 12) Shepard’s inclusion of these mild stereotypes serves the larger purpose of the brothers’ constant struggle to find common ground, even if Lee is the authentic antagonist of True West, representing the downtrodden working class who just can’t seem to get a leg up in the world. The playwright Sam Shepard “has always been involved in the matters of searching for one’s identity. The characters that he brings to the stage are shown in the struggle to find their final image of self and they are entangled in the web of society and their family” (Mehrabi et al. 134). This is especially true when the jarred Austin wants to leave his comfortable family life and follow his brother Lee into the unpredictable and pure adventure of the desert: “I do, Lee. I really do. There’s nothin’ down here for me. There never was. When we were kids here it was different. There was a life here then!” (Shepard II.8.58).

The struggles that naturally occur between siblings has been a common theme throughout dramatized plays just as much as real life. The difficulties in communication are usually at the root of these relationship troubles, whether by nature or parenting that went askew in childhood development. As Hoffman alluded to above, the id can take over a character and therefore moronic hubris can be exhibited (sometimes becoming a feature, not a bug), usually to the detriment of an antagonistic character like Lee. The title character is Molière’s Tartuffe has echoes of Lee, as they are both hucksters and confidence men at their very cores. While true that their approaches are different, both just want what they feel they are entitled to. This is more than they currently have in their possession, to hell with any kind of personal responsibility.

The themes of True West are as prevalent today as they were in the 1970’s when the play first premiered. Both Lee and Austin are dreamers, albeit entirely different kinds. Lee is the type who schemes for the next score, and Austin uses his education and mind to work at scoring respect and viability in Hollywood as a screenwriter. Every generation in the United States has different personalities that attempt to achieve the American dream by a spectrum of means, even if they face obstacles that seem impossible to overcome. Sam Shepard’s work features these kinds of struggles, with his “dramatic universe [as] a complicated and largely unhappy place where characters suffer extraordinary anxiety due to the instability and inauthenticity of the world which surrounds them” (Mehrabi et al. 131). Lee and Austin’s fractured relationship is a bounty of family strife and different roads taken as soon as they were able to as young adults. Were Lee and Austin placed in 2022, they would surely be at each other’s throats with differing political ideologies, likely on extreme ends. One wonders if they would ever end up in their mother’s kitchen at all to argue whatsoever.

Taking in the entirety of a play like True West, modern analogues pop up almost immediately. Where there is extended dysfunction and abuse between Lee and Austin, each of them carries a torch for a political ideology and way of existing in the world. It would not take much imagination to imagine the character of Lee at a rally for Donald Trump, or even him taking part in the attempted Capitol Insurrection on January 6th. Flipping the coin to the other side, Austin’s pragmatic yet overly defensive symbol of Democratic normalism is fragile and has the potential to be pushed off his own cliff through its own brand of extremist tendencies. In these two, the “political dysfunction [has] exposed: red America and blue, blended into a violent purple; the failure of the fortunate to respect the wretched; the consequences when the wretched seek their reckoning” (Wood). In this extrapolation, the political climate of today is well-represented and further electrified through the performances of Lee and Austin as they try to figure out what genuine success is since what was taught to them in their formative years does not necessarily exist now that they are racing through their corresponding adulthoods.

###

Works Cited

Bassan, Maurice. “The ‘True West’ of Sam Shepard and Stephen Crane.” American Literary Realism, 1870-1910, Winter 1996, pp. 11–17., https://www.jstor.org/stable/27746649.

Dunster, Matthew (dir.). “True West.” Smith & Brant Theatricals, Vaudeville Theatre, London, UK. Audible Original, Compact Disc.

Mehrabi, Bahar, et al. “Postmodernism and Language in Sam Shepard’s True West and Tooth of Crime.” International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature, vol. 1, no. 4, 2012, pp. 131–137., https://doi.org/10.7575/ijalel.v.1n.4p.131.

“Philip Seymour Hoffman – Interview (May 30, 2000).” Performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Charlie Rose, YouTube, PBS’ “Charlie Rose”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSJ-Xf8poPk. Accessed 11 Nov. 2022.

Phillips, Roshonda. “Week 2 – Module Overview.” LIT-323-H7015 Studies in Drama 22EW2, Southern New Hampshire University, https://learn.snhu.edu/d2l/le/content/1201147/viewContent/21082479/View

Phillips, Roshonda. “Week 4 – Module Overview.” LIT-323-H7015 Studies in Drama 22EW2, Southern New Hampshire University, https://learn.snhu.edu/d2l/le/content/1201147/viewContent/21082483/View

Shepard, Sam. True West. Samuel French, 2011.

Wood, Graeme. “Sam Shepard Saw It All Coming.” The Atlantic, Aug. 2019, pp. 36–38.