Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind
Denver's Paragon Theatre Erupts in Language
By: Susan Hall - 08/18/2011
Beth starts in harsh gutturals to her brother.
Mother and Son Engage...or don’t.
Beth’s family, Mike, Baylor and Meg
A Lie of the Mind
By Sam Shepard
Paragon Theater
Denver, Colorado
August 11, 2011
Jarrad Holbrook Director
Warren Sherrill Scenic Designer
Jen Orf Lighting Designer
Cast in Order of Appearance
Tom Borrillo Jake
James O’Hagan-Murphy Frankie
Emily Paton Davies Beth
William Hahn Mike
Caroline Valentine Sally
Edith Weiss Lorraine
Jim Hunt Baylor
Patty Mintz Figel Beth
A Lie of the Mind is the lie of many minds, the lie of every character is Sam Shepard’s play. Jake tells us that stories in his mind lie, “…except you. You are true. I love you more than life.” You is his wife Beth who he has just battered.
The Paragon Theare set opened in a black hole, infinite space going off to nowhere created by Warren Sherrill. Jake is talking on the phone with his brother. As the lights come up, we discover two spaces in which parallel families, joined by the marriage of Jake to Beth, live in California and Montana.
When Sam Shepard mounted A Lie of the Mind, it was his first play on Broadway. He had eschewed conventional venues for twenty years. Now he was thirty blocks north of the Great White Way, but still on Broadway. Heightened states of hyperconsciousness and agitation are the play’s disturbing building blocks. Yet this is a legend of love.
As the years have gone by, the play has gained in stature, today often singled out as one of the great plays of the 20th century. It is certainly a powerful play, even by Shepard standards.
The New Group revived it on Theater Row in 2010. Ethan Hawke directed. The newspaper of record raved. We were among the cadre of reporters who had questions. No questions about the play, but about the Hawke production. Only watching the Paragon Theater’s production in Denver did we realize that the 2010 production had not served the play well. Paragon has brought out its true quality.
Paragon is an ensemble troop and this is an ensemble play. There are no stars. Each actor carried his/her own weight and each performed brilliantly. In some ways, Beth, who must recreate her world and herself from scratch, has the juiciest role. She begins with gutturals, inarticulate cries and as the play progresses the actress who portrays her, Emily Paton Davies, forms seminal words and thoughts not only with her voice, but with her body and in gestures
Beth is reaching out. The other characters all dwell in an inner emotional space that others can not enter, because it is a personal space. Talking out of feelings dominates the characters’ lines. Very rarely is direct expression of emotion directed at another person.
Jake who has abused Beth is a flatter role, but Borrillo arrests us by the sheer force of his attachment to Beth – who has driven him around the bend acting love scenes in a local theater production. “This acting shit is more real than the real world for her,” proclaims Jake. But Beth says this is an imaginary deal Jake has cooked up in his head. Everyone in this play cooks up imaginary deals, the lies they tell themselves.
Edith Weiss, a consummate stand up comic, was Lorraine, the mother of Jake, his sister Sally and brother Frankie. She was here to show us Lorraine as a complex woman, bound to her children, but bound also to her dead husband who still lives on inside her. “Something identifies you with the one who leaves you,” another theme.
At any time during the play, you can close your eyes and know who is talking by the rhythm and the tone of their speech. As Frankie and Sally, Lorraine’s other children, Murphy and Valentine draw complex portraits of sibling attachment.
The other family is in no better shape. Dad Baylor spends all his time shooting. His daughter says, “He has not room for love. H e only has room for death.” His wife Meg is long suffering, as she rubs his feet with mink oil. Finally liberated, she announces that mink oil is designed for boots. Mike, their son, as out to avenge Beth’s beating. William Hahn stomping through the house carrying newly dead carcasses, and taming Jake into an all fours beast, is the wildest character on stage, but he too has shape, and touching and tender moments.
In Shepard’s earlier plays the emotional range of the women did not reach that of the men. Women were at the service of the men and survived. Now Lorraine dumps her cloying past for an unknown future, Beth is getting well.
What intrigues Shepard is a raw present. The past is seldom the subject at hand. We are taken on a journey through the death of Jake’s father. Short references to family members of foregone days come in bursts like Meg’s remark that she has been in an insane asylum, to which Baylor retorts, “No, that was your mother.” Mostly we are here and now, placed inside the tiniest impulse of a character and in the moment catch what they smell and see and feel.
A Lie of the Mind is about the lies we all tell to keep going forward, yet the play has a curiously hopeful conclusion: Meg outside her window sees a fire in the snow. For all the coldness, there is a bit of warmth.
In the lightning eruptions of language, words are not thought, but felt. They cut through space and make perfect sense without having to hesitate. Shepard says that “ideas speak to the mind, but also to the body and the emotions and everything else related.” While some say Shepard lacks the lyricism of Tennessee Williams, lyrical is not the only line that words can take. Shepard’s language is particular to each character and erupts from many different places: from the body, from the emotions, from the soul. Often in three sentences, an actor can shift emotionally phrase to phrase nine times.
The play suits Paragon’s mission to “illuminate the human experience with unflinching courage and truth.”