After recent posts about Sam Shepard and Philip Seymour Hoffman it occurred to me that the pair had “True West” in common — Shepard’s Pulitzer Prize nominated play was first produced in 1980, and in the year 2000 Hoffman and John C. Reilly starred as estranged brothers Lee and Austin in another celebrated production of the play. That said, the best known version of “True West” was the Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s 1982 production which starred Gary Sinise and John Malkovich. That version of the play eventually left Steppenwolf’s Chicago home to run Off-Broadway for almost 800 performances. The production’s success resulted in a PBS American Playhouse production of the play.

Here’s a bit from The New York Times review from that production which came two years after the play’s first New York run in 1980….

The new version – using the same script – is an exhilarating confluence of writing, acting and staging. As performed by John Malkovich and Gary Sinese, two members of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater Company making their New York debuts, and as directed by Mr. Sinise, this is the true ”True West.” The compass needle is unwavering.

One sees now that the play is a rambunctious and spontaneous tale about sibling rivalry and the cronyism of popular culture. It shares with an earlier Shepard, ”Angel City,” a sardonic concern with the seductiveness of Hollywood and with the battle between art and business. The play’s principal characters, Lee and Austin, are fraternal opposites. Lee is a scurvy desert rat, Austin a hot shot intellectual screenwriter. They are country and city mouse, or the old and the new West.

The main problem with the first New York production was that the actors cast as the brothers were too similar in type and temperament. As wittily played by Mr. Malkovich and Mr. Sinise, the brothers become idiosyncratic individuals. As Lee, Mr. Malkovich looks as if he had been sleeping under benches in bus terminals. He is the prototype of a seedy scrounger, and his very presence is an offense to his brother’s dignity. As Austin, Mr. Sinise is sober and respectable – and an insult to his brother’s sense of freedom.

Here’s the PBS American Playhouse production of “True West”…

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Playwright, actor, songwriter, poet, musician, sex symbol — Sam Shepard has worn many masks over his five-decade career. While his mercurial creative output has acted as a kind of camouflage against any too-intense celebrity spotlights, Shepard’s relative obscurity — for a Pulitzer Prize winner and Academy Award nominee — can also be chalked-up to his refusal to submit himself to even cursory media scrutiny.

Shepard’s self-imposed-one-man-media-blackout has been nearly total with the exception of the interview he gave for this 1998 episode of PBS’s Great Performances. Here’s the low-down from the film’s website:

A documentary autobiography following Sam Shepard on the journey of writing plays –– featuring the only in-depth biographical interview he‘s ever given on-camera. This intimate film portrait also features selections from his plays and prose, in performances by Ethan Hawke, Ed Harris, Gary Sinise and Vincent D’Onofrio. Sam Shepard has always referred to the way he writes his plays as a journey — a quest into the idea of self, family and identity. But it is also a journey into the heartland of America – the landscape, the characters, the anxieties, and the music. This documentary catches up with Sam Shepard at a key stage along this route of self-discovery. In 1996, the Signature Theatre Company presented an entire season of his plays at the Public Theatre in New York. Spanning thirty years of writing, the season covered the one-acts of the Sixties, the rock and roll plays of the Seventies, the later works that feature Shepard’s recurrent preoccupation with the American family, and concluded with the premiere of his latest play. Though notoriously shy about giving interviews, Sam Shepard speaks eloquently in this film about the process of writing and about the origins of his work.

Here is Sam Shepard: Stalking Himself

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