Staging Lil Poppet’s production of True West in the round removes all distance between the audience and the damage. At the Alliance Theatre, Morag Shephard (Director) places the audience close enough to the action that we see the sweat, the grip, the failed smile, and the second before a joke turns mean with all of the visceral danger lurking there. Shephard removes the safety of the domestic space and replaces it with a cage fight. There is no escape for either the brothers or the audience.

Myth typically frames Sam Shepard’s portrayal of the American landscape: the vast West, the untamed frontier, and the violent potential of the lone man. Romanticism is rejected in Morag Shepherd’s production. She reduces these myths to intimate, ugly, and unavoidable proportions. Here, the connections of brotherhood are devoured by a primordial, competitive hunger, and the hope of escape is revealed as nothing more than robbery – an endless loop of parasitic theft.

The painstaking physical aspects of this True West, such as the furious beat of Knoell’s typing, Nepivoda’s possessive grip on the television, Barnes’s deliberate posture changes, and Sanderson’s still presence amid the pandemonium, are more powerful than the cacophony. The power of the production resides in the sound of breathing in desperation, the tightening of a telephone cord, and beer cans strewn everywhere. The piece invites us to do more than just watch a room being destroyed. It compels us to witness these brothers’ eventual self-recognition among the rubble. But by then, such clarity is just more debris left on the ground; it offers no salvation. And no escape.

No Escape: Lil Poppet’s Intoxicating True West at the Alliance Theatre (Front Row Reviewers)