True West

This audio version of one of Shepard's best known plays stars Kit Harington and Johnny Flynn, who performed the play earlier this year at the Vaudeville Theatre in London. It's a dark comedy about two long-estranged brothers--Austin, a successful screenwriter, and Lee, a grifter--who clash when they meet again in the family home on the edge of the California desert. Lee is a master manipulator who lays the guilt on Austin for abandoning their alcoholic father and even persuades Austin's producer that he has a better story for his upcoming movie than his brother. Each brother knows just which buttons to push to goad the other in this modern day tale of sibling rivalry.

I've seen the play on film and in performance, and I don't feel this show more version really stands up to the script. (It's pretty hard to compete with John Malkovich and Gary Sinese.) The American accents were a bit overdone, and the acting style might have played better on stage but seems exaggerated in this format. But hey, it was free. show less

I like it. I like when the canny, streetwise older brother talks his way into the big score, confronts us with our smallness and his potency in that cliche way, and then fails hard because what the fuck does he know about scriptwriting. I like the way the successful yet emasculated younger brother gets his own back, and then turns out to have much weirder desires in him than we'd ever suspect. I like how neither of them ever win. I don't know that I totally liked the unfinishedness--not in a catharsis sense, but it felt like a sketch and needed a last scene where they chase each other through the desert. As it is, there's a tonne of pressure on the actor playing the mom to make the ending mean something--like, we've seen Lee and Austin show more do their thing already, so any emotional revelations have to come from her. But yeah, this is tight. show less

A well-crafted work. The juxtaposition of the characters was intriguing as the brothers eventually became each other and then merged into one entity, as it were (retaining only the worst characteristics of each). The humor was black and very effective in moving along the story. Unlikable characters, but at least they seemed rooted in reality.

I enjoyed Shepard's depiction of a dysfunctional sibling relationship which takes on shape in fits and starts through their constant chaotic arguments. Though this was a stage play and fared pretty well on audio, it made me want to hear actual radio plays from the past and imagine playwrights of the future writing specifically for audio (and will there be differences from writing for radio?)

I saw this as a play many years ago and enjoyed being surprised by the usurpation and slow build disaster of the plot which visually expressed itself in the destroyed set. This audio presentation with a great performance by Kit Harington similarly took me in and delivered. This is a great document of a live theater production of True West was performed in 2019 at the Vaudeville Theatre in London, United Kingdom.

I can't say I enjoyed it at all. I'm not sure if it is because I couldn't relate to the characters, or the authors voice, or if I just felt the entire scenario was unrealistic. Thank God the audiobook was only an hour an a half because I was bored out of my mind.

Another little play I read for class. I liked this, but the whole time I was getting a really creepy vibe of Miller's Loman brothers in Death of a Salesman. I got this weird feeling that Lee and Austin were like Happy and Biff if they had been psychotically reincarnated in modern Hollywood. That side, it was an interesting little piece, and I wouldn't mind giving it a go in production.