I always love when a local company let’s me check a play or musical off of my theatre bucket list. Especially being here in Utah there are some shows that aren’t done often and yet I long to see them. This week I had such an experience provided to me by Lil Poppet Productions and their staging of True West. I’d long heard of this play but was delighted to get to see it and it did not disappoint. What a gripping night of community theatre.

This play is put on in the black box space at the Alliance Theater at Trolly Square and it is one of the strongest plays I’ve seen there recently. What I think makes it work is not only are the performances professional quality but it has a good mixture of humor and drama keeping the audience guessing on what will happen next.

The story is set in Los Angeles in the late 1980s and focuses on two brothers who have a volatile relationship to say the least. Austin is back in town to talk to a Hollywood executive about screenplay he has and Lee is financially irresponsible and angry man who has become a thief to make by. They are staying at their mother’s home while in Los Angeles and make a mess of things since she is vacationing in Alaska.

Once they start talking Lee shares with Austin his idea for a new western film and wants his help to write it. As you can imagine this collaboration between the brothers does not go well creating a good mixture of comedy and drama. They even end up attacking each other at several points in the story. I also like that the script stays ambivalent about which brother is our main protagonist. They both have positive and negative qualities to them and one can understand why they find it so difficult to be together at all let alone work together.

True West is directed by Morag Shepherd and she smartly keeps things simple so that we focus on the actors and the tension building between them. The set looks like a small apartment with a kitchen area getting the main focus (costumes, set and props by Stephanie Stroud.) It is also great how little details like the box TV and landline phones take us back to the setting of the play.

Technically this play has 4 actors but it is the 2 actors that get most of the stage time. It’s a play that lives or dies on its performances and fortunately they are excellent there. The more volatile angry brother Lee is played by Jesse Nepivoda in one of the stronger performances in Utah theatre this year. And then Austin is played by David Knoell and I had a lot of questions about his character, which is an interesting choice. For instance, he talks about having a family but then wanting to stay with Lee in the desert. Has he abandoned his family? Are he and his wife separated?

There is a sense of a time capsule appeal to a play like True West. Austin is writing his screenplay on a typewriter, Lee steals a box TV, and the men are writing a script for a version of Hollywood that basically doesn’t exist any more. The amount producer Saul (Jacob Barnes in a very LA performance) offers to pay for a new writer in a Western is wild by today’s standards. Now such a story would probably be co-opted into a Yellowstone spinoff but that’s about it. I’d be interested to learn how writer Sam Shephard would portray Hollywood now in the age of streaming and superhero movies.

The thing that makes a sibling dynamic especially ripe for theatre is it is the one relationship in life we have basically no say in. Outside of who our parents are everyone else we decide if they will be in our life or not. We decide whom to marry, date, be friends and work with. Siblings you’re stuck with and outside of rare circumstances you have to make things work. This in spite the fact you may or may not have anything in common with this brother or sister. Such is the case with Austin and Lee. They may be related but they see the world completely differently and hashing out those differences is the core of the story.

Lil Poppet has a ‘pay what you can’ system so with True West one gets a chance to see a classic play for low cost (be as generous as possible.) Unlike some straight plays it’s not that long and like I said it has both drama and comedy. It is playing through June 28th and tickets can be purchased here.

True West is play by Sam Shepard and it was first performed in 1980 in San Francisco and it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1983. It was nominated for a Tony Awards in 2000 for Best Play and the actors playing the brothers were Phillip Seymour Hoffman and John C Reilly.

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