Shepard, Sam (Vol. 169) - Katherine Duncan-Jones (review date 23 July 2001)
Katherine Duncan-Jones (review date 23 July 2001)
SOURCE: Duncan-Jones, Katherine. “A Little Legend about Love.” New Statesman 130, no. 4547 (23 July 2001): 45.
[In the following review, Duncan-Jones praises a London production of A Lie of the Mind, calling the play a “triumph.”]
To label Sam Shepard's modern family melodrama A Lie of the Mind as “Greek”, “Shakespearean” or “Chekhovian” would be reductive, even though it has elements of all three. It is, above all, thoroughly American, right up to the symbolic climax in which a crumpled and bloodied Stars and Stripes is first unfurled, then carefully folded, and the choric old man Baylor (Keith Bartlett), seeming scarcely to notice the visible collapse of his entire family, staggers up to bed saying: “I don't wanna get woke up in the middle of a good dream.” For this stubborn pioneer alone, the American dream lives on and still has value, almost like...
[The entire page is 654 words long]
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