March 9 True West

Abstract Readers of the major overnight reviews on the morning of March 10 were greeted with the unexpected sight of six outright raves for Sam Shepard’s True West. Not simply good reviews; ecstatic, all in all. While a couple of less overwhelming opinions eventually surfaced, the reception of the revival of Shepard’s 1980 comedy was staggeringly enthusiastic, and easily the best reviews for a Broadway play since the revival of Arthur Miller’s The Price opened four months earlier. True West got off to a quick start, as opposed to the Miller play. This is easily explainable, perhaps, by comparing the action-packed, laugh-filled Shepard play to Miller’s static, laugh-filled talkfest. Although they were first produced only a decade apart, Shepard wrote with the voice of a thirty-six-year-old rebel. (Miller, at the time of The Price, was a fifty-seven-year-old rebel with a different cause.) In 1999 – 2000, Shepard is understandably the more relevant playwright. Except that Miller’s truly ancient play Death of a Salesman, from way back in 1949, was the artistic and commercial hit of the 1998 – 1999