[In the following review, Brustein offers a mixed assessment of A Lie of the Mind, noting that the “plotting is a little too undisciplined.”]

A Lie of the Mind is Sam Shepard's most ambitious play to date, the closest he has come to entering the mainstream of American drama. Directed by the playwright in association with professional producers, it has been mounted at the Promenade Theatre with a strong cast. Like David Rabe's Hurly-Burly, which also played that off-Broadway theater with box-office actors, it stands a good chance of moving later to a Broadway house. Thus Shepard seems to be following the pattern of all serious American dramatists since O'Neill—beginning with a small but passionate coterie of devoted admirers, and then achieving popular support and media recognition. In Shepard's case, this recognition has been enhanced, and complicated, by his celebrity as a movie actor, which has exacerbated the tension between his public and private careers. A similar tension was partly responsible for that neglect suffered by most reputable American playwrights after their greatest success (followed perhaps by a revival of interest when the playwright died or reached some venerable birthday). Clifford Odets got smothered by Hollywood; Arthur Miller ran out of usable material; Tennessee Williams lost control of his form; William Inge turned to increasingly hysterical plots; Edward Albee sacrificed his absurdist power for mythical drawing-room comedies modeled on T. S. Eliot. On the other hand, O'Neill, with whom Shepard is most frequently compared, wrote his greatest plays years after Broadway had abandoned him.

For that reason, any cautionary remarks about Shepard's future are premature, though I must admit I found A Lie of the Mind disappointing—a big canvas on which the colors run in smeared, sometimes slipshod fashion. True, Shepard's play writing has never been neat, but then it has never been very accessible either. What is strange for Shepard enthusiasts is how closely this one resembles a play by Lanford Wilson or Tennessee Williams. Ever since Curse of the Starving Class, Shepard has been moving away from extravagant characters, dream actions, and hallucinatory riffs into a more domestic style. With Buried Child, arguably his finest work, he managed to make the family play a structure for subterranean probes into the American nightmare. Now, however, those relationships between violent and sensitive brothers, loony mothers and children, fathers and alienated sons, husbands and estranged wives, have increasingly moved to the center of his plays, while whatever was fantastic and demonic has gone to the fringes. A Lie of the Mind goes delightfully haywire in the last of its three long acts, but for most of its four-hour length the action and the characters are relatively recognizable, even endearing eccentrics.

In short, Shepard is beginning to domesticate himself as a writer—ironically at the very moment when, as a movie actor, he is being catapulted into legend as the iconic lonely Westerner. Composing more and more out of his actual as opposed to his dream experience, Shepard is moving inexorably toward the heart of American realism, where audiences have the opportunity to identify him as a family member like themselves—son, brother, lover, husband. This has advantages: greater clarity, concentration, and recognition. It also has disadvantages, in that Shepard is now displaying what he has in common with the spectator rather than what the spectator unwittingly shares with him. Another disadvantage is that as Shepard's life gets increasingly familiar from interviews, his work seems to get increasingly biographical—and confined. The brothers in A Lie of the Mind remind us of the ones in True West; the husband and wife recall the brother and sister in Fool for Love. The California family comes from Curse of the Starving Class, the Montana family from Buried Child. Worse, one finds oneself speculating about more personal links: whether the enmity between the dead father and his son is based on Shepard's own published filial feelings, whether the hero's jealousy over his actress wife has any bearing on his relationship with Jessica Lange, whether the character's brain-damaged dialogue has been influenced by that of his close friend Joseph Chaikin, a recent stroke victim. One is tempted, in short, to confuse fiction with reality, imaginative creation with biographical gossip.

A Lie of the Mind begins with a frenzied telephone call from Jake to his brother Frankie, saying that he has killed his actress wife, Beth. Objecting to the way she identified with her roles, Jake imagined that, Method-like, she was sleeping with her leading man, and beat her about the head. Beth, however, is alive, though the assault has damaged her brain; hospitalized and visited by her own brother, Mike, she can speak only nonsense syllables (“I'm above my feet. … How high me? How high up?”). Jake is having his problems too; he refuses to believe Beth has survived and suffers catatonic fits. His mom, a menopausal vamp, tries to cure him by feeding him cream of broccoli soup, but he is in a fever of jealousy over a past affair he imagines between his brother and his wife.

Meanwhile, Beth has moved from a California hospital to her Montana home, where her father spends his days hunting venison. When Frankie arrives to try to reconcile Beth to Jake, her father, Baylor, mistaking him for a deer, shoots him in the leg. (“In my prime, you'd have been dead meat, son.”) Beth's family, particularly Mike, is primed for vengeance. Beth, alternating between moments of clarity in which she confesses her love for Jake and periods when she thinks they cut out her brain, dresses up like a hooker and tries to seduce the wounded Frankie, while Mike gleefully hauls in the hind end of a deer and drops the carcass on the living-room floor.

Back in California, Jake is preoccupied with the ashes of his own father, an alcoholic Air Force officer who had abandoned the family. In a long revelation scene, Jake confesses his responsibility for the death of his father, whom he led from bar to bar, then encouraged to run down the middle of the highway. When Jake finally goes to Montana to find Beth, Mike trusses him like a horse, putting an American flag in his mouth for a bit. (Baylor is mighty upset by this desecration of the “flag of our nation.”) While Baylor and his dotty wife carefully fold the flag, Jake announces his love for Beth—“I love you more than this earth. … Everything lied—you—you're true. I love you more than life.” Then to prove it, he delivers her to his brother Frankie and leaves in the snow.

This is essentially the plot of the play, though there are dozens of other scenes, many irrelevant, including one in which Jake's mom leaves home with her daughter and, in order to avoid packing, sets fire to the house. (In Montana, Beth's mother thinks she sees a fire in the snow.) It may seem odd to describe such idiosyncratic characters and bizarre behavior as normal or domestic. Yet the eccentricities, while often amusing, sometimes seem willed, like the studied gothic in Beth Henley or Tennessee Williams, and at the heart of this work is a rather conventional, even somewhat banal, love story. “I love you more than this earth” is not a line one would ever expect to find in a Shepard play.

Nor would one expect to find such crude symbolism as the flag business at the end. Even his title lacks the customary, instinctual Shepard resonance. What A Lie of the Mind could use is a really exacting editor, one who might have persuaded the playwright to pare away irrelevancies and obesities from his rather bloated text, while encouraging him to examine more closely its themes and situations. This is a director's function; and much as I admire some of Shepard's work with the actors, I think it was a mistake for him to stage his own play. The setting, for example, apart from being crude and unsuggestive, leaves the central area of the stage virtually unused, with most of the scenes being staged in the two rooms on the sides.

I did not see Harvey Keitel play the part of Jake; perhaps to counteract his image as a woman-beater (following a similar role in Hurly-Burly), he was away with his own wife as she gave birth to a child. Instead, his understudy, Bill Raymond, performed Jake, script in hand, in a display of guts and talent that drew cheers, though it made one attend more to the achievement than the play. People have a tendency to miscast Amanda Plummer, and she seemed to me again miscast as Beth, too spiritual and stentorian to capture the steamy voluptuousness of the character. As Frankie, Aidan Quinn adds to his growing stature as an intelligent performer. Will Patton is a strong, vaguely simian Mike, roaring out the fury of an unsatisfied revenger; and James Gammon brings a hoarse crude authority to the deerstalker, Baylor, whether having his bare feet rubbed with an ointment made to soften leather boots or giving his wife her first kiss in 20 years.

But the acting honors of the evening belong to the two moms, Geraldine Page as Jake's mother and Ann Wedgeworth as Beth's. Her talent and control increasing with her age, Miss Page is a fearless and accomplished actress. She brings a bleary dissociation to the role—her belly swollen into a pot, bobby socks on her feet, a flower in her ear, whining like a fire siren—that tells us more about Jake's genetic disorders than Shepard's writing. As for Miss Wedgeworth, equally amnesiac about the facts of her past—demure, wan, trembling on the edge of hysteria—she emerges somehow as the most delicate member of the family, and the sanest too, for all her flakiness (“Please don't scream in this house; this house is very old”).

But ultimately, despite the felicities of the acting and the writing, this play wears you down rather than works you up. The dialogue is a little too declarative, the plotting a little too undisciplined, the characters a little too unforgettable, to persuade you that the motor energies come out of inspiration rather than will. Critics are saying that Shepard's double role as playwright and movie actor is providing that missing link in American culture between high and popular art. I wonder. It must be very hard to write plays when people are staring at your hands to see if your nails are dirty. How does one perform the private act of creation under the blinding glare of publicity? How do you base your work on experience without making it a subject of gossip or speculation? How can Shepard find the freedom to separate himself as a writer from the role determined for him as a movie star? Perhaps those Pirandellian questions might form the subject of his next play.