[In the following review, Weales criticizes A Lie of the Mind, objecting to the “cartoon atmosphere” of the play.]

Sam Shepard's new play, A Lie of the Mind, runs for more than four hours, but its length does not herald structural innovation in his drama. He is still working in short scenes, as he has been since he turned up off-off-Broadway in the 1960s. In the new play, he cuts back and forth between two families and their homes on opposite ends of the stage, jumping from one painful or comic sequence to the next. The play, as one expects with Shepard, is absorbing, but a kind of attenuation has set in. It has no images as sharp and compelling as the corn shucking in Buried Child or the nude man with the lamb in Curse of the Starving Class; nor does it manage the intensity of True West or Fool for Love, even though many of the scenes are two-person encounters.

Shepard is on familiar ground in A Lie of the Mind, dealing once again with the disintegration of the American family, as in Curse and Child, and with the violence and mutability of sexual love, as in Fool for Love. The event that triggers the minimal action of Lie is Jake's jealous beating of his wife, which sends him back to his home thinking he has killed Beth, and sends her, brain-damaged but slowly recovering, to her family. Both homes are loveless, Jake's father having long since walked out on his mother and died in a drunken accident for which Jake may have been responsible. Beth's mother is servant and burden to her husband, a Montana rancher who seems to prefer the deer he hunts to his family. Jake's mother dotes on him and tries to return him to the womb of his childhood room, evicting his sister in the process. When I used the adjective minimal with action, I intended to suggest that there was no dramatic development of importance. There is incident aplenty. Beth's father shoots Jake's brother, mistaking him for a deer, when Frankie comes to see if Beth is alive or dead; Beth, who perceives in fragmentary ways, decides to marry Frankie and gets herself tarted up for the occasion. Jake has made his way from California to Montana—that is, has crossed the stage—where, after having been tortured by Beth's brother, he begs everyone's pardon and gives Beth to Frankie.

The play is sprinkled with moments in which a character displays love, affection, protectiveness toward another, but the effect of the play as a whole is to suggest the impossibility of a happy relationship between a man and a woman or a healthy closeness within a family. At the end of the play Jake's mother, on one side of the stage, is burning her house down and getting ready to go to Ireland with her daughter to visit probably non-existent relatives; on the other side, Frankie and Beth embrace in an ending that would be a more comforting final clinch if her parents were not laboriously folding an American flag into the triangle that suggests a funeral; and the mutilated Jake and his mutilator are somewhere in between, each self-exiled from his uncongenial family circle. In the final moment, Beth's mother looks across the stage and comments on the fire which is presumably burning hundreds of miles away, thus providing the connection-disconnection image which indicates that the lie of the mind is not simply the false promise of love, but the geography of shared loss.

The most startling thing about A Lie of the Mind is the broad comedy in it. Vincent Canby, reviewing the movie version of Fool for Love (New York Times, December 15, 1985), called the original play “a live-action Maggie and Jiggs cartoon for which there is no exit,” a label that he intends as descriptive, not pejorative, since he admires the play in preference to the film. I had not thought of Fool for Love in those terms, although the comedy in it, as in the other Shepard plays, is often center stage. With A Lie of the Mind the cartoon quality of the characters becomes pervasive, so much so that the knockabout often robs the play of the kind of powerful image that Shepard so often comes up with when a potentially comic situation or character turns suddenly painful or lyric. Since Shepard directed Lie and presumably chose the performers, the excessiveness in the production must be what he wants. Will Patton, as Beth's brother, gives a frenetic physical performance as though the character's anger has gone to the actor's nerve ends. At one point, he stiffens like a board and falls flat on his back; at another he throws himself on the ground and drags himself under the step in a single fine sweep of exasperation. All of the characters are overstated, but none of them has quite the flamboyance of the two mothers. Shepard has been having a run on peculiar mothers—in Curse, in Buried Child, in True West—but the two in A Lie of the Mind win blue ribbons for eccentricity. Ann Wedgeworth plays Beth's mother as a gently demented women, nervously upright in her fluffy mules. Geraldine Page, as Jake's mother, mugs and punches relentlessly, as though she were finally getting a chance to perfect her Marie Dressler imitation, a reading which should suit Shepard. After all, he seems to have built his performance as Eddie in the Fool for Love film out of bits and pieces of Gary Cooper.

On the night that I saw A Lie of the Mind, Harvey Keitel was out of the cast. His replacement as Jake was Bill Raymond, who had just been hired as understudy and had to work with script in hand. He knew the business, he knew the character, he even knew most of the lines, and the pages he carried interfered with his performance only once. Jake throws a tantrum, knocking a bowl of soup out of his mother's hand and ripping his bed apart; in the process, Raymond lost script as well as bed linen and had to scramble around to retrieve the pages, which he did without ever losing Jake or his histrionic bad temper. It is possible, I suppose, that Raymond's presence disoriented the production to some extent, but the disconcerting broadness in so much of the show was clearly a deliberate decision of Shepard and his cast.

A major new Shepard play is always an occasion, but A Lie of the Mind seems to have extended Shepard's staying power without enriching his art. In the past, he has used his taste for caricature in the interest of dramatic or visual truth. Here the serious side of the play is so compromised by the cartoon atmosphere that Shepard sometimes seems to be mocking the themes that have given substance and force to so much of his recent work.