[In the following excerpt, Brustein offers a mixed assessment of Simpatico, faulting the play for its “manipulated suspense.”]

Sam Shepard's new play, Simpatico, which he also directed (at the New York Public Theater), has taken as many critical lumps as his last play, States of Shock. Viewed as an overarching dramatic work, Simpatico probably deserves a few knocks, but I found it an absorbing evening nevertheless, Shepard's best since Buried Child—not because of the cryptic writing, which is strong in individual scenes but ultimately too swamped by its own mysteries. I admired it largely for its acting values. Shepard's directorial technique has advanced considerably in confidence and precision since he last staged A Lie of the Mind. He's a whiz now with scene work: there isn't a slack moment in the play. But, as in Lie of the Mind, the director is too reluctant to edit the playwright; some fat could have been profitably cut. At three hours, Simpatico is simply too long for its subject matter. Even supplied with ample detail to distract you from the thin dramatic purpose, you tend to leave the theater feeling a little unsatisfied. Still, the evening is wonderfully conceived and performed, and riveting moment by moment. Simpatico is a sustained piece of virtuosity that makes you happy Sam Shepard has returned to the stage.

At some point in the proceedings, a character says, “Who is it decided to do away with all the plots?” Well, whoever it was, all the plots ended up in Simpatico, which has enough for a dozen such plays. It is true that Shepard has already written some of these plots, and has often written them better. He has looted True West for the symbiotic tension between his once “simpatico” central male characters. Geography of a Horse Dreamer for reflections on the corruptions of the racetrack and A Fool for Love for a sultry love scene. He has also borrowed some sexual teasing from Tennessee Williams's Baby Doll, some film noir atmosphere from James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, and a whole character (a drifter masquerading as a detective) from the movie Miami Blues. This is larceny on a grand creative scale, but Simpatico still bears the characteristic stamp of its author. Like Brecht, Shepard knows how to convert others' private property into his own idiosyncratic real estate.

The trouble is that a coherent dramatic purpose tends to get lost in the underbrush. Simpatico is tantalizing enough in its narrative twists and turns to hold your interest, but what it finally delivers is not sufficient substance to reward your patience. As the action drifts from Cucamonga, California, to bluegrass Kentucky and back again, Simpatico begins to revolve around a racetrack scam that is now causing Carter, the central character, to come apart at the seams. Fifteen years before the action begins, Carter switched a couple of thoroughbreds in order to make a quick bundle and, when the racing commissioner detected the swindle, arranged to have him discredited. In the manner of a private eye collecting evidence for a divorce, he had photos taken of the commissioner in a motel encounter with a young woman, and blackmailed him into silence.

The commissioner (Simms) agreed to hold his tongue and go to another town under an assumed name. But Vinnie Webb, the accomplice who took the photographs (his ex-wife, Rosie, was the woman in the motel room), now wants to expose the truth, partly to come out from under his long exile, partly to pay Carter back for stealing Rosie and his '58 Buick. As in most Shepard plays, the sibling rivalry between these longtime companions is the nub of the action. The play wright draws a familiar contrast between a slick successful achiever (Carter) who is nevertheless riddled with guilt, and a disheveled, disreputable loner (Vinnie) who maintains the moral high ground.

Carter and Vinnie are played by Ed Harris and Fred Ward, both of them (along with Shepard) alumni of The Right Stuff, so the casting is like a class reunion. Harris, wearing a tan double-breasted suit in danger of being shredded by his muscles, does a subtle take on a rigid man without a center, an ex-ex-alcoholic with quivering shoulders, an eggshell in the process of being fragmented. Ward, sporting a two-day growth of beard and a mischievous glint as Vinnie, fully inhabits the role of a derelict masquerading as a private dick and only dicking himself.

Vinnie takes a tour of Kentucky, carrying a shoebox full of the incriminating photographs, eager to find “the man who fell from grace,” the mysterious Simms. Simms (another strong, raspy performance by James Gammon), while denying his identity, nevertheless admits that he once heard of a man who had been vilified and railroaded out of town, at the loss of his entire family (though, Simms adds, “loss can be a powerful elixir”). When Simms spurns the photos, Vinnie goes to Lexington to offer them to Rosie, his ex-wife (Beverly D'Angelo in a steamy, gin-soaked performance). First she refuses to recognize him, then also refuses the negatives.

In the meantime, Carter has been making time with Vinnie's girlfriend, Cecilia (Marcia Gay Harden). He eventually persuades her to visit Simms by telling her hypnotic sagas of the Kentucky Derby. She believes Simms has bought Vinnie's negatives and now wants to buy them back for Carter. But Simms's ironic manner, his insinuating stories of great thoroughbreds such as Secretariat, work on her like an aphrodisiac, making her short of breath. Simms tells her he was betrayed by two snakes: “Some of us get caught with our pants down and some of us don't—I was one of the lucky ones.”

When Vinnie rejoins Carter, who is holed up in Vinnie's bed, he finds a shivering wreck of man who can't put on his own pants and believes his number is up. Carter now wants to swap lives, just as he once swapped horses. He offers Vinnie his fortune, his estate and Rosie in return for Vinnie's purity of conscience. Vinnie, “working on a new case,” ignores him and leaves. Cecilia returns to pour Carter's money over him on the bed, just as Tilden in Buried Child once poured vegetables over his father's sleeping body. The phone rings. Carter is too paralyzed to answer it.

Aside from its impressionist portrait of treachery, betrayal and failed redemption, this doesn't add up to much more than manipulated suspense, but it is a wonder how Shepard can keep us traveling with him on this long day's journey into blight. Simpatico is a treasure hunt that never yields much treasure, except as a demonstration of fine ensemble acting and powerful directing (along with sharp minimalist designing by Loy Arcenas, who can even make a dirty kitchen sink look like a sinister symbol). If it doesn't entirely deliver as a play, Simpatico certainly satisfies as a rich theatrical effluvium, and that's no small thing in a time of drought.