TRUE WEST is a the story of the reunion of two brothers in their absent mother's California home. Austin, played by Paul Rowe, is an Ivy League-educated script writer who has left his wife and kids in some northern state to try to sell his pedestrian movie script to a Hollywood producer. He's also houseminding, while his mother holidays in Alaska. Quite unexpectedly his brother Lee, played by Brian Downey, shows up dirty and unkempt from the desert where he seems to have been hiding out. From their opening lines we sense an ominous undercurrent to this filial relationship. When the producer Kimmer comes to the house to discuss Ausin's script, Lee outmanoevres his brother and manages to sell his own trite idea for a contemporary western movie instead. Although Lee has the bankable concept, he needs Austin to dress it in lanuage. Austin refuses to cooperate at first, then hits the bottle and is changed almost instantly from the model American citizen into a bum and a thief. He agrees to help, if Lee will take him back to the desert to live. As they struggle to create the movie script, they gradually destroy their environment and finally each other.

This is the second of Sam Shepard's works to be put off by the Elysian Players. It is a superior play to The Curse of the Striving Class if only because it is more plausible. Shephard's nihilistic vision is introduced through cliche-ridden conversations echoing all the dislocations of American society: brotherly love, high living, random violence, family loyalty, individualism and the frontier way of life. These become the fundamental theme of the play: American society has returned to the cave. Shepard has captured, in these two brothers, all that is savage and ugly about contemporary American life. Lee is the omnipresent mugger, vandal, house thief and rapist on the nightly TV news. Austin is his daily victim, made all the more terrifying because the veneer of civilization is ripped so quickly from him.

In the original script the set is totallly trashed by the two brothers at the play's end. In this production, financial restraint limits the destruction to some noisy mess-making and we miss the apocalyptic vision of hell on earth unfolding before our eyes. Understandable but regrettable.

Brian Downey is brilliant as Lee, giving us a convincing portrayal of every aspect of this complex and nasty character. By keeping a tight rein on his brutishness, and his drunkeness, he sustains the aura of violence about everything he does.

Paul Rowe's interpretation of the upright Austin is over-simplified and bland, failing to convey the intimidating effect that Lee has on everyone. In the key scene with the movie producer, Rowe looks like Mr. Nice Guy being done in by a crook. This misses the poin tof the play. Austin is not an innocent defiled; he is an ape like everyone else, except that he went to college to learn to hide it.

Frank Holden gives a rather low-key, nervous reading of Sal Kimmer, the movie mogul. If Kimmer had more of the opportunistic shark about him it would make Lee's manipulation of him even more disturbing.

Sheilagh Guy as mom is a compelling foil for the savagery of her two sons. In a brief scene she conveys the mother as the female of the herd having no influence on the male of the species.

Ed Martin's direction achieves its intention of delivering a hard-hitting blow to our smugness, and complacency. He has struck a good balance between the many comic moments and the underlying terror of True West. Some scenes lose their tension because of awkward blocking, and the lengthy frozen-frame fades at the end of each scene only make the audience uncomfortable when sharp black-outs would be more effective.

The set design and decoration by Colin McNee was a superior piece of work. However the lighting design by Sarah Knowling was unnecessarily complicated and served no obvious dramatic function. It was also marked by several miscues on opening night.

The theme of True West may not appeal to everyone -- Sam Shepard is an important but unsettling playwright -- but this production by the Elysian Players is thoroughly professional and dramatically successful. I definitely recommend it.

This is Frankie O'Flaherty for Weekend A.M.