Sam Shepard’s True-West Portrays Family
The gritty play demonstrates just how tentative the shorelines of individual identity become against the inescapable undercurrents of family ties. Yet the ideas of brotherhood and the American family become eviscerated in the conflict that exists between the two protagonists, Austin and Lee. Clearly, the play starts off with a good brother vs. bad brother rivalry. Austin, is a Hollywood screenwriter. He graduated from an Ivy-League school, got married and has a family.
He is disciplined, ambitious and successful. Lee is uneducated, unkempt, violent and a small time crook. He has spent the previous few months in the desert with their alcoholic, no-good father. Lee appears rather unexpectedly as Austin is house-sitting their mother’s home while she is off on a trip to Alaska. The brothers end up sharing the house for the duration of their mother’s trip. The viciousness with which they battle with one another indicates the deep-seated conflict between them. It doesn’t take long for the resentfulness that exists between them to take play.
Scene after scene, the demonic Lee lashes out at his brother verbally and at times, physically. In the first scene, Lee lunges at Austin, after Austin has offered him money. Lee yells – “Don’t you say that to me! Don’t you ever say that to me! You may be able to get away with that with the Old Man. Git him tanked up for a week! Buy him off with yer Hollywood blood money, but not me! I can git my own money my own way. Big money!” Much of the anger in this outlash, comes from Lee’s envy. He is envious of his brother’s success. Another example of Lee’s envy and resentment occurs when the brothers are discussing houses. Lee mentions that he has seen a house that was like paradise.
“Warm yellow lights, Mexican tile all around. Copper pots hangin’ over the stove. Blonde people moving in and outta the rooms, talkin’ to each other. Kinda’ place you sorta’ wish you grew up in, ya know.” It might be perceived that Lee’s description of warm yellow lights refers to the lack of warmth feels in his own life. Also, a lack of communication is hinted at by his mention of “people talkin’ to each other”. This possible feeling of being cheated, Lee seems to blame on his brother. The resentment Lee harbors for Austin becomes more and more apparent in each outburst throughout the play. Time after time Lee gnaws at Austin for his college education and his money.
The things he himself doesn’t have. The bitterness that Lee harbors for Austin is reciprocated by Austin himself. Austin is unsure of himself and the life he chose, and Lee almost knowingly drives Austin to question himself. In scene four, Lee and Austin exchange the following dialogue:
Lee: I’ve always wondered what it is like to be you.
Austin: You did?
Lee: yea, sure. I used to picture you walkin’ around some campus with yer arms full of books. Blondes chasin’ after ya.
Austin: Blondes? That’s funny.
Lee: What’s funny about it?
Austin: Because I always used to picture you somewhere.
Lee: Where’d ya picture me?
Austin: Oh, I don’t know. Different places. Adventures. You were always off on some adventure.
Lee: Yeah.
Austin: And I used tosay to myself, “Lee’s got the right idea. He’s out there in the world and here I am. What am I doing?”
This exchange, demonstrates that Austin is as envious of Lee, as Lee is off Austin and it is our first glimpse into the deeper conflict surrounding the characters. Both men are lost within the lives they’ve built for themselves. Their sibling rivalry consisting of envy, fear and resentment is a contributing factor to the disillusionment with their own lives. At the end of the fourth scene in act one, Lee dictates his “true” western to Austin at the typewriter, he states – “So they take off after each other straight into an endless black prairie.
The sun is just comin’ down and they can feel the night on their backs. What they don’t know is that each of ’em is afraid, see. Each one separately thinks that he’s the only one that’s afraid. And they keep ridin’ like that straight into the night. Not knowing. And the one who’s chasin’ doesn’t know where the other one is taking him. And the one who’s being chased doesn’t know where he’s going.”
This is obviously a direct reference to the underlying feelings in both Lee and his brother. Lee and his brother exist in fear. What Austin fears is not Lee, but his own submerged, self-destructive impulses. He is terrified of giving in to the darker side of himself, the Lee inside himself. Lee is envious of the mundane in Austin, yet he lives in fear of the mundane in himself. I think the mere mention of the two men “ridin’ straight into the night” breaks the separation between the two men. They share a common bond – fear.
Yet both men are too busy focusing on their own misdirected hostility to acknowledge the presence of a common bond. It’s also interesting to note, that as the hostility and confusion builds, there is a gradual cluttering of the kitchen space, in which the play takes place, mirroring the escalating conflict occurring between the two brothers. The typewriter is demolished with a golf club, there are paper and toasters everywhere, and every kitchen cabinet has been turned inside out.
By the end of the play, the mother’s tidy kitchen is left in unholy ruin. In course of the play, the two men drive each other towards role-reversal. Austin, the mild-mannered screenwriter with a wife and family, steals toasters from neighboring homes, while Lee, the desert rat who steals for a living, hustles a movie to Lee’s agent. Lee promises to take Austin out to the desert with him if Austin helps him write his screen-play for the western. As a result of the brothers living closely together for several days, the dichotomy between them breaks down entirely.
By the end of the play, it is no longer clear who the good brother is, who the bad brother is, and whether there’s a difference between the two at all. What is clear is that their rivalry and pent up feeling towards each other took them on a ride through their darkest sides. They became men in search of themselves. The final image is of the two brothers locked indefinitely in an insoluble conflict forms the conclusion to True West. The light fades and a lone coyote calls in the distances. Austin and Lee are stuck, forever unable to move forward, but after what has transpired; they can no longer go back either.
