A Lie of the Mind

Written by Sam Shepard

Directed by Fred Pletcher

At the Loeb Mainstage

This weekend and next

IT HAS been said that if you have seen one Sam Shepard play, you've seen them all. If that is true, then the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club production of Shepard's A Lie of the Mind is an economy-sized bargain.

Lie has all the 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.

Oh yes, 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 Meg (Jenny Lyn Bader).

This is not to suggest that Lie's characters are two-dimensional. Much of the credit for keeping them three-dimensional, though, belongs to the actors, all of whom are excellent. Kudos especially to Gunn, who makes convincing Beth's slow, painful rise from vegetabledom after her beating, and to Schwartz, whose authentic Texas drawl steals the show.

The only thing that mars these otherwise solid performances is the actors' tendency to adopt a certain gesture or mannerism and repeat it over and over, as if Director Fred Pletcher had told his cast that nervous tics make characters more human. As a result, Raphael slicks his hair back, Hurewitz stammers like James Stewart, Paulus taps her foot, Bader walks around with her hands folded in her lap, and Tolins picks the wax out of his ear with his pinky and bellows, "Hehhehhehheh," like Jackie Gleason snapping at Audrey Meadows. All this becomes annoying quickly.

SPECIAL mention should go to Set Designer Regan McClellan. Unlike the usually lavish Mainstage sets, the set for Lie has an spare understatement that is wholly appropriate. The stage's vast desolation, with dividing lines down the middle, is just the right setting for the isolated, detached characters.

The two houses on the stage are especially effective, since, as my companion pointed out, they demonstrate the paranoid, skewed perspectives of their inhabitants, Jake and Beth. The houses are built on a superhuman scale, with the doorways, windows, walls, and even the floors at bizarre angles to each other. The houses are placed far enough from each other that they seem hundreds of miles apart--which, as the script suggests, they are--yet they are close enough for Jake, imagining he sees Beth, to actually look over to her house and see her.

Cynics will find some of the play's more overt symbolic actions silly. Jake opens a box of his father's ashes and blows. An American flag somehow finds itself draped like a blanket around Jake's shoulder's and later stuffed like a bridle into his mouth or tied like an old rag around Mike's rifle barrel. But these tend to be balanced by moments in which the play takes itself less seriously, as when Lorraine says of Beth and Jake, "A woman who lives with a man like that deserves to be killed," or when Baylor rhapsodizes, "Hunting is no hobby. It's an art. It's a way of life."

Don't be 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 one.