Word: sheparded
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...three hours, Burn This is too long and digressive, but as staged by Marshall W. Mason and a splendid young cast, it wins laughter in even its unnerving moments. If the narrative is indebted to the mainstream past, the tone has a more avant-garde echo of Sam Shepard -- a border skirmish between knockabout farce and knockdown violence. Yet Playwright Lanford Wilson manages to integrate well-crafted gags, mostly for the surviving gay roommate (Lou Liberatore). He describes his friend's gaudy casket as looking "like a giant Spode soup tureen." He says to the choreographer (Joan Allen) about...
...requisite Shepard themes: the lack of communication between people, the fallibility of memory, the breakdown of the traditional American family, the insatiable restlessness and violence of the American way of life, and the souring of the American myth of rugged individualism, as personified in the hollow denizens of the West...
These, in turn, are represented by the requisite Shepard blatant symbolism: a giant mobile of model warplanes, an ominous yellow-green moon on the backdrop, rifles, a deer carcass, an American flag, and lots of people wearing plaid flannel shirts, Levi's button-fly jeans, and shitkickers...
...then there are the requisite Shepard characters. There is Jake (Chad Raphael), the Violent Drifter, who has just beaten his wife, Flighty But Passionate Beth (Heather Gunn), so mercilessly that he thinks he has killed her. Their respective families run to their aid. On Jake's side there's his Loyal But Timid brother Frankie (Daniel Hurewitz), his Embittered sister Sally (Diane Paulus), and his Oedipally Overnurturing Mother Lorraine (Susan Schwartz). Their counterparts in Beth's family are her Vengeful brother Mike (Sam Sifton), her Death-Obsessed Hunter father Baylor (Jon Tolins), and her Fearful And Self-Deluding mother...
...daunted by the play's running time, which is nearly three hours. The scenes are short, and the action moves rapidly. Besides, three hours is not very long, considering that A Lie of the Mind is any number of Shepard plays rolled into...