Maya Van Wagenen

Theatre Appreciation

OTHER PEOPLE:
An Analysis of Plot, Character, and Idea in Sam Shepard’s True West

Watching Sam Shepard’s True West is a bit like listening to a metal rake being dragged

down a concrete driveway, in that both experiences leave me gritting my teeth in discomfort.

This was not a bad thing, in fact the ability for a play or work of writing to illicit that kind of

guttural, emotional response is impressive. I screamed at the wall for a little while after it ended.

I suppose it reflects on my behavior this semester that my roommate remained unphased.

I will speak to the plot first, since that is where the play deceives the audience into

thinking that it is simple. Two brothers, Lee and Austin, are left house-sitting for their mother

while she is away in Alaska. They attempt to write a screenplay. That, essentially, is it. I sat at my

desk and wrote down notes on my predictions as to what would happen. All of them were wrong.

Very rarely does a story outsmart me to such a degree that this one did. Every pulse, every

moment when I expected the action to change or go in a different direction, Shepard surprised

me. He surprised me by choosing not to surprise me.

To clarify, each plot point is emotionally predictable even if it is not logically predictable.

In the beginning of the play, we witness Lee’s resentment of his younger brother and his lack of

filters. We note Austin’s guilt and see right through his adopted grandeur to his deep-rooted

insecurities. This is what moves the plot along. For example, Lee hops on the bandwagon of his

brother’s career, wanting to prove that he can do just as good a job as the “Ivy League graduate.”

This gets under Austin’s skin, who while initially overly supportive of his brother’s

accomplishment in impressing the producer, erupts into self-righteous anger upon finding out

that this takes away from his own project. In this way, plot and character become interwoven and
harder to detangle. As Austin changes places with Lee, devolving into a loud and unproductive

drunk, Lee tries to adopt the more authoritative role. He desperately attempts to finish his script,

wanting to prove that he can, that he is just as capable as his younger brother with the wife, the

car, the diploma, the American dream. This is not who Lee is, and they both realize this. Lee is a

cowboy. He is his own “true to life” story of the west, the freedom of sleeping alone under the

desert sky. Yet, he is lonely. “This is the last time I try to live with people!” he shouts brokenly at

his brother who refuses to help him find a pen when he’s trying to write down a phone number.

Lee is presented as unhappy, but an honest kind of unhappy.

Austin however, feels fake. One of my earliest notes was something to that effect. It is

not until the end of the play, when the barking of the coyotes escalates to a maddening frenzy,

that he shows fully his dismal true colors. In the first scene of the play, he seems like an inflated

version of a stereotypical success. As he starts to dismiss his achievements, the audience sees his

emptiness. It is a frantic, desperate emptiness. It is as if he’s been stuffing himself full of all the

“right” things his whole life to try and forget that ache. The audience sees that Austin’s life has

been a series of obsessive desires. In the play that desire begins as selling his script then into

proving to his brother that he is clever enough to steal. When Lee breaks off their deal to go out

and live in the desert together—an idea that could never have come to fruition based on Lee’s

general flakiness—Austin snaps. The emptiness swallows him up. He sits on top of his brother

choking him, telling himself that he does not want to kill Lee, but that he just wants to gain back

the upper hand, the control that he lost through the course of their time together. “Just give me a

head start!” he says.

Shepard has set up for this moment from the beginning. The audience can easily interpret

Lee’s screenplay, one long chase seen between two unnamed men in no particular direction, as a
metaphor for what the brothers are doing. It seems up until this moment that Austin is chasing

Lee, writing down his story and following him into a sort of collaborative insanity. In this

moment, the rolls reverse, with Austin as the wrongdoer being tracked down. “Just give me a

head start!” Austin pulls back as Lee goes limp. Austin stands emotionally exposed, thinking that

he has killed his brother. He pulls back, stumbling across the kitchen. As Lee jumps up, they face

off, staring at each other. The play ends.

It is true that many of my predictions were inaccurate, for example “Lee killed the

producer with the golf clubs” or “The mom is dead. No one actually goes to Alaska.” Yet there

was one that I kept rolling back over and over again in my mind. “They are in hell.” I thought it

would turn out to be a literal hell, in some sweeping and decisive twist. I admit I was

disappointed when the producer did not turn out to be the devil, simply because the character

gave me hives. Still, I would argue that there is some merit to that claim. More than Lee’s hell,

though, I felt it was Austin’s. Lee seemed aware of something from the beginning, in fact I toyed

with the idea of arguing that there were subtle tones of metatheatre, just because of the way Lee’s

lines reminded me that something was off, that it wasn’t quite real life. When Austin said, “Look,

I don’t want any trouble, all right?” I immediately scoffed under my breath, “That’s a dumb

line!” Lee piped up before I had time to write the note down with “That’s a dumb line!” The

crickets droned on and on in the background, to the point that I was annoyed at the sound

director. Then, Lee spoke my observations, “Those are some monotonous fucking crickets!” I did

not think I could argue metatheatre so much as the idea that Lee had some sort of heightened

awareness of a larger situation. “What time is it?” never got an accurate response, and as scene

after scene passed in the deteriorating kitchen, I wondered if there was anything more to their

particular world.
 As sad as I was to be wrong that this was no literal hell, it does not mean that it was not a

figurative one. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in his play No Exit that “Hell is other people.” In this

story, the brothers serve as each other’s punishment. They, like the characters in Lee’s unfinished

screenplay, are caught in an endless chase, pursing the other to an unknown destination, to a west

that no longer exists.