Theater: Acorn Theatre / 410 West 42nd Street, New York, NY, 10036
Synopsis:
Blinded by jealousy and rage, Jake believes he may have murdered his wife. While seeking refuge in the home of his abusively unstable mother, his brother Frankie goes to investigate and finds himself caught in the confusing currents of revenge and longing.
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February 19, 2010: A scary, splendid clarity radiates from the terminally confused kinfolk who are running wild at the Acorn Theater. That’s where the New Group revival of “A Lie of the Mind,” Sam Shepard’s gorgeous play from 1985 about families in meltdown, opened Thursday night in a production that connoisseurs of precision acting will be savoring for years to come.
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February 19, 2010: The New Group's hypnotic production of Sam Shepard'sA Lie of the Mind, currently at Theater Row, achieves a cumulative haunting power thanks to several exceptional performances and the fine, judicious direction by Ethan Hawke. The play itself, however, isn't always consistently fascinating, even in this revision which condenses three acts to two and is an hour shorter than the play's original 1985 Off-Broadway incarnation.
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February 18, 2010: Derek McLane's set for the New Group's corrosive revival of Sam Shepard's "A Lie of the Mind" is both abstract and atmospherically specific. It assembles several flea markets' worth of shoddy furniture, bric-a-brac and busted mementos, piled high around the walls and across the ceiling over the characters' heads. This dark, tangled enclosure has an airlessness that finds no relief in the large window through which a blizzard outside, a lonely highway or a distant fire are indicated. And in the searing performances of director Ethan Hawke's first-rate cast, there's a matching sense of being embedded deep in the violent, hallucinatory world of a play that remains ferociously original 25 years after its premiere.
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March 18, 2010: Your first view of Ethan Hawke’s new production of A Lie of the Mind, which The New Group is presenting at the Acorn Theatre, is of the disjointed space in which it will play. The stage itself seems real enough - chairs, a bed, the usual accouterments. But as Derek McLane’s set stretches upward into the flies, it transforms into a proscenium arch and backdrop of stools, desks, dressers, and found objects as diverse as birdhouses and neon beer signs. This universe, Hawke and McLane tell us before the actors have spoken a word, is one of pure, cluttered imagination.
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February 18, 2010: Ethan Hawke directs this pungent portrait of two troubled American families, and, by extension, of a dysfunctional America itself. When a character drapes himself in a U.S. flag, it's safe bet that's what the author's going for.
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