BROADWAY REVIEWS
Grease
Gypsy
Hairspray
In the Heights
Jersey Boys
Legally Blonde
Lion King, The
Little Mermaid, The
Mamma Mia!
Mary Poppins
Monty Python's Spamalot
Phantom of the Opera, The
Rent
South Pacific
Spring Awakening
Wicked
Xanadu
Young Frankenstein
OFF-BROADWAY REVIEWS
COMING UP:
Sept 18 - A Tale Of Two Cities
Sept 25 - Equus
Oct 1 - The Seagull
Oct 2 - To Be Or Not To Be
Oct 5 - 13
Oct 7 - Man For All Seasons
Oct 16 - All My Sons
Nov 13 - Billy Elliot
Nov 20 - Dividing the Estate
Dec 11 - Pal Joey
Dec 14 - Shrek: The Musical
| Show | Did He Like It?* |
Synopsis | |
 |
 |
|
A new play by Sam Shepard arrives in New York from Ireland's Abbey Theatre, where it enjoyed a sold-out premiere run. Click here for tickets. |
Horse Can’t Head Into the Sunset in Sam Shepard’s New West
*By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
Published: July 15, 2008
A sick-souled Manhattan art dealer tries to resurrect his inner cowboy in “Kicking a Dead Horse,” the new play written and directed by Sam Shepard that opened on Monday night at the Public Theater. The first image we see makes it blue-sky clear that the quest has not been a roaring success.
As the lights rise on a landscape of dusty earth and distant buttes, a tarp slides from the stage to reveal the majestic corpse of a horse lying supine. Just in front of the body is a horse-size hole in the ground. All is silent for a moment as honky-tonk music fades, and then a spray of earth flies up from the hole. Another follows a few seconds later. Out jumps a shovel, followed by the grave-digger himself, a bedraggled, angry-looking, mud-smeared fellow in a bolo tie, played by the terrific Irish actor Stephen Rea.
That opening tableau — dead horse, yawning grave, merciless sky, peevish shovelfuls of dirt arcing across the stage — is funny, macabre and somehow crushingly sad. Mr. Shepard’s writing strikes all those chords too, as Mr. Rea’s character, Hobart Struther, recounts the events that have led him to this sorry pass.
But nothing in the play really improves upon that starkly eloquent initial image, which seems to announce with nary a word that Mr. Shepard, who has drawn on visions of the West, mythic and real, for decades now, is about ready to give up the game, to intone the last rites over a galloping symbol of freedom, possibility, redemption. Although it provides a fine showcase for the craggily compelling Mr. Rea, “Kicking a Dead Horse” is a disappointingly arid lament for America’s lost ideals and despoiled frontiers, a blunt position paper from a playwright whose best writing is rich in mystery and oblique but potent imagery.
As Hobart announces plainly up front and repeats more than once, he fled west in a desperate search for “authenticity.” He isn’t sure where he lost it, or if he ever really had it, but he knows for certain that it’s as scarce as sagebrush in the concrete-and-glass canyons of New York City. A spiritual crisis found him heaving lucrative pieces of art out the window and onto the Park Avenue sidewalk in a frenzy of self-disgust. Now Hobart has left career, foundering marriage and all else behind to go back to his roots.
Unfortunately his four-legged vehicle of redemption, a beloved old horse, has let him down. “Barely even got started on the Grand Sojourn, and he drops from underneath me,” he says with bitter disgust, then gives the poor creature the first of many swift blows to the belly with his boot. Still, Hobart refuses to let the vultures and coyotes and the blazing sun do their worst. He’s determined to bury the big, beautiful animal, and as he talks he embarks on a bruising campaign to wrestle the dead horse into his welcoming grave.
Mr. Shepard, like most playwrights of the latter half of the 20th century, is an admirer of another playwriting Sam, the great Beckett. In its barren but suggestive landscape, its gallows humor and the defeating near-futility of Hobart’s quest, “Horse” feels like a conscious homage to Beckett. The setting recalls the wastelands of “Waiting for Godot” and “Happy Days,” those masterly portraits of end-of-days despair laced with mordant comedy. As in those plays, the passage of time lurches and stalls erratically in “Horse,” as dusk falls with a flick of a light switch. (Perhaps it is significant, too, that Mr. Shepard chose an Irish actor to create the role of Hobart, and the Abbey Theater of Dublin, co-presenter of the play here, to stage the world premiere.)
Although he is known for the long arias that pepper his works, Mr. Shepard’s best plays explode with primal conflict between brothers or lovers, fathers and mothers, fathers and sons. With but a single character onstage (save for a mysterious female apparition), Mr. Shepard is forced to employ an unconvincing dramatic device to generate theatrical heat and expose the fissures in Hobart’s soul.
As he pours forth his story — the loose living out West, the wily purchases of old paintings from back-roads bars that he parlayed into a lucrative career, the desiccated marriage — Hobart conducts a testy argument with an alter ego. Mr. Rea uses a snippy, nasal whine to embody this devil’s advocate who challenges his insights and decisions at every turn. At one point this imp-Hobart persuades the other to toss all his cowboy accouterments into the grave — spurs, saddle, hat — and dismisses the noble call of the West as “sentimental claptrap.” Hobart protests mightily but ultimately goes along.
Many of Mr. Shepard’s greatest characters are hollowed-out men with strangely fluid identities, torn up by confusion or engaged in a search for a fixed self. But in spite of this forthright airing of his riven psyche, Hobart never really acquires the kind of psychological substance or emotional specificity that would engage our interest in his spiritual crisis. The few details of his history that we learn have a generic quality, as when he discusses his cooling relations with his wife, as he came to realize “how much she deeply resented me.”
After a while, when Hobart begins recalling doomed historical figures from the Western days of yore, like Meriwether Lewis and Crazy Horse, he begins to seem less like a fully imagined character with his own obsessions and demons than like a convenient mouthpiece for the playwright’s anguished disappointment over the state of American art and society in the bleak, dawning days of the 21st century.
Infuriated to find himself incapable of even pitching a tent properly, Hobart launches into a diatribe about the destruction of the West and its native population that balloons into a laundry list of sins: “Dammed up all the rivers and flooded the valleys for recreational purposes! Ran off the small farmers. Destroyed education. Turned our children into criminals. Demolished art! Invaded sovereign nations! What more can we possibly do?”
Mr. Rea rises to a fine pitch of fury in this foaming climax, and he makes wonderful pantomime of Hobart’s comic tussles with the recalcitrant horse and an equally testy tent. The whole performance is infused with a jittery restlessness that speaks affectingly of Hobart’s itchy discomfort in his own skin.
But, questions of education and nation-invading aside, Mr. Shepard has covered much of this territory before, far more subtly. This deeply instinctual and intuitive artist here seems to be giving fullest rein to his intellect, resulting in a play that lacks the molten core of feeling that energizes his better work. In wrestling head-on with themes he’s covered more elusively before, he comes close to joining his protagonist in the fruitless activity that gives the play its title.
And yet “Horse” concludes with a grim but brilliant gag hinting that Mr. Shepard may not have given up entirely on the theatrical lexicon that has proved so inspiring to him over the years. Yes, the Western landscape may be vanquished by shopping malls and freeways. The American ideals that fed men’s souls may be tarnished and corrupted. The horse is dead, true, but maybe, just maybe, there’s some life left in him yet.
KICKING A DEAD HORSE
Written and directed by Sam Shepard; sets by Brien Vahey; costumes by Joan Bergin; lighting by John Comiskey; sound by Dan Moses Schreier; production stage manager, Barbara Reo; general manager, Nicki Genovese; associate artistic director, Mandy Hackett; associate producer, Jenny Gersten; director of production, Ruth E. Sternberg. Presented by the Public Theater, Oskar Eustis, artistic director, and the Abbey Theater, Ireland. At the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, at Astor Place, East Village; (212) 967-7555. Through Aug. 10. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.
WITH: Elissa Piszel (Young Woman) and Stephen Rea (Hobart Struther).
Click here for tickets.
Sign up to get email updates of Broadway and Off-Broadway reviews from DidHeLikeIt.com. You can be the first to find out if He liked it!
COMING UP: |
||
|
||
