Sam Shepard’s True West is an intense, actor-driven piece of theatre. Its easy-to-summarize, difficult-to-perform story tells of two brothers who find themselves back in their mother’s home, exhibiting fraternity at its best and its worst. With source material that is rich in dialogue and powerful in emotion, it’s no wonder that past productions have drawn the likes of John Malkovich, Gary Sinise, Philip Seymour Hoffman, John C. Reilly, and even Bruce Willis, whose recent performance will be captured on film by the Showtime cable network.

Unfortunately, the Harvard production, while skillfully directed, never seems to come together, as the actors lack the two-person chemistry and individual chops to pull off Shepard’s challenging work.

At the helm of True West is Joy Fairfield ’02, who most recently directed the Woolgatherer, also in the Ex. Fairfield’s familiarity with the space, meticulous attention to detail, and amazing instinct for blocking were evident in what came across as a thoroughly polished production.

The show was replete with artful uses of space, including an interesting juxtaposition of the brothers’ placement in the first and second acts.

One simple, but most impressive touch, was the placement of Saul, the producer and catalyst of strife, played by Brian Gatten ’01, between the two brothers as they pulled him in a verbal tug of war.

Fairchild’s production, though, never achieved the level that the material and the direction merited, because the cast simply did not execute the staging or deliver the lines well enough to do justice to Shepard or to Fairchild.

Shepard’s script demands that both Lee, Peter Richards ’01, and Austin, Sam McKnight (a Tufts student), know their characters intimately and portray them with a credible sense of familial history. Neither Richards nor McKnight were able to make the relationship believable; the connection needed to pull the audience into the action never evolved.

In his scenes, McKnight was physically awkward, seeming uncomfortable and unsure on stage, at his worst in the second act when he attempted to play drunk.