First performed in 1980, "True West," one of Shepard's most popular plays, only last year made its appearance on Broadway, probably because it is no way like a typical Broadway comedy. It is possible to enjoy the play solely for its increasingly hilarious situations, but the play also demands that the audience think about what underlies the actions witnessed.

The play begins with a silent stand-off between two brothers--Austin, who, after an Ivy League education has become a Hollywood screenwriter, and Lee, a drifter and thief, who has just spent three months lying low in the California desert. Austin has left his wife and family to housesit his mother's suburban home while she is away on a trip to Alaska. In the first scenes, Shepard builds up a strong, Pinteresque sense of menace as the loutish Lee seems to threaten more than just the solitude and concentration of his fastidious brother. The turning point in the play comes when Lee manages to convince Austin's agent, Saul Kimmer, that he knows a true story for a modern Western that deserved to be filmed. When Kimmer rejects the screenplay Austin has been working on for Lee's story outline, the brothers begin to take on each other's roles--Lee pulling himself together to try to write his own screenplay while Austin quite hilariously descends into alcoholism and theft. All the while, the pristine kitchen where the action occurs increasingly comes to resemble a trash heap of papers, beer cans and household utensils.

Shepard has said that he wrote the play "to give a taste of what it feels like to be two-sided." On one level, Austin and Lee can be seen as two sides of the same person. Austin is neat and civilized, whose security comes from institutions, whether universities, marriage or writing contracts. Lee is slovenly and uncivilized, educated by experience, getting sex when he needs it, stealing when he needs money. Both brothers say explicitly that they long for the way of life of the other. Yet both need each other to create anything worthwhile, even a screenplay. Austin needs Lee's raw experience for material; Lee needs Austin's facility with language.

This duality can represent the paradox of writing--the more one writes the less one experiences life. But, as is usual in Shepard, this duality can represent the paradox in the American psyche--on the one hand believing in untrammeled freedom, on the other upholding laws and institutions to rein in such freedom. It is an insoluble problem and Shepard presents it as such.

The great merit of the Ausable production, designed and directed by Michael Semple, is that the subtext of the play shines through the funny, scary surface action with such clarity. He does this by slackening the pace ever so slightly whenever one of the many speeches occurs that point to this subtext. Still, he keeps the surface action on a firmly realistic plane even when the implications of the plot spiral into myth. Semple wisely avoids the temptation I have seen in other productions to play up the surreal aspects of the play. To do this destroys the tension between what we see and what the play means that Shepard is so keen to maintain. Given this incisive