Achieving a Vision of Order a Lie of the Mind

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Many playwrights master technique, a fair number possess innate narrative gifts, but only a few achieve a genuine, persuasive voice. When plays are described as depicting reality, the statement cannot be taken literally: a set is recognizably a set, not a house or a tree, and speeches palpably differ from authentically aimless conversation. What makes a set seem real, what enables dialogue to stand for experience is the writer's capacity to create an alternative world, distinctively his own, and lure audiences into it. That talent is the true measure of voice, a blend of personality and vision.

Sam Shepard's voice has often seemed querulous or cruelly funny. Even as he was attracting an avid following as perhaps America's foremost active playwright, critics sensed in his plays a compulsive urge toward violence, a lack of compassion, a reveling in the bizarre. His comic scenes made viewers wonder whether he was laughing with or at his characters. His work has shifted from expressionist flights of fancy to a kind of grim, weird naturalism and has tended more and more to portray families as the poisoned wellspring of human evil. He has brought to life the same fumbling, feckless dreamers from the heartland that Tennessee Williams did and, like Williams, has shown a special sensitivity to the yearnings of women. But having seen the world with cold comprehension, he has lacked the perception or perhaps the will to envision a possibility of kindness, of decency, of morally redemptive hope.

Until now. Shepard, 42, last week unveiled A Lie of the Mind, the newest, longest (3 hours 45 minutes) and best of his 40-odd plays. Staged off-Broadway by the playwright, Lie superficially resembles yet another Shepardian slice of life among borderline psychotics of the underclass. It opens with the confession of an uncontrollably jealous man (Harvey Keitel) who has beaten his innocent wife (Amanda Plummer) and left her for dead. Before it is over, characters have been shot, pummeled, enslaved and murdered. Yet the play's real action is a coming to terms with the past by the families of both the wife beater and the wife, and it ends with a flickering flame and a folded flag that symbolize the restoration of order.

More than in any other Shepard play, the combat leads to catharsis. It also results in an apparent union, all but unprecedented for him, between two wholly sympathetic characters. And because Shepard has directed the play to be uproarious, it casts new light on all his work. In retrospect, his eerie lowlifes seem more farcical, less perversely heroic. His characters frequently lack a core of conviction. In this tale, some have so little sense of self that they cannot recall whether events happened to them or to someone they knew. Moreover, Shepard characters rarely speak lyrically; he keeps their language as mud-bound as their lives. Plummer is allowed poetically disjointed speeches only because her character is brain damaged. That infirmity also leads to harrowing scenes of reptilian rage at the brother who tries to help her, pathetic palsy as she learns to walk again, and a confused seduction of her husband's loyal brother (Aidan Quinn) when he comes to make peace. The entire cast, especially Quinn, is solid. Plummer, like the play, is unforgettable.