True West

By Sam Shepard. Directed by Dean Paul Gibson. A Playhouse Theatre Company production. At the Vancouver Playhouse on Thursday, April 3. Continues until April 19

In this Playhouse production, True West has about as much edge to it as a butter knife.

Playwright Sam Shepard pits brother against brother in this 1980 script. Austin is housesitting his mom’s place near L.A., working on a screenplay. Lee, his violent petty thief of a sibling, shows up and takes over Austin’s life. He convinces a producer named Saul to dump Austin’s project and take on a story that Lee is pushing. In response, Austin starts to act more and more like the drunken Lee.

If Lee’s not scary—if the actor playing him doesn’t convincingly embody the threat of chaos, the appetite for selfishness and destruction that lives in all of us—then the whole thing falls apart. Brian Markinson’s Lee isn’t frightening for a second. The violence never feels real.

That’s not just Markinson’s fault, of course. Director Dean Paul Gibson delivers a flat interpretation. The stakes are never high enough. The shifts in status are never clear enough. The actors yell, but that only produces a facsimile of tension.

Vincent Gale, who plays Austin, fares better than his acting partner. He acquires some texture, especially when Austin gets drunk and develops a sense of humour.

Without the crucial emotional element of threat, the play’s bones are laid bare and it looks schematic. Each brother contains the other. Lee’s screenplay comments on their relationship. Authenticity is hard to come by, especially in Hollywood.

It’s all obvious.