Just a few days after its premiere (09 October 2024), the play directed by Elena Karakouli at Chora Theatre, based on one of the most important works of Sam Shepard (1943-2017), “True West“, is continuously sold-out and captivates the audience with the performances of its stars, Nikos Psaras and Markos Papadokonstantakis. Written in 1980, the play by the important American playwright and actor is characterized by its raw realism, the mixture of the tragic and the comic and the dialogues that are a challenge for every great performer.

Seeking to make a comment on the notions of the American family and the big Hollywood dream, Sam Shepard places his two main characters, Lee and Austin, in a suffocating, heated environment in which it won’t be long before the complexities, weaknesses and the inversion of power roles that we often find in Shepard’s theatre come to the surface.

©Patroklos_Skafidas

Lee, an adventurous petty thief and older brother of a family carrying the burden of a bankrupt father lost in the wilderness, intrudes with his noisy presence into the mother’s house. There dwells, enclosed in a world of untended plants, literature and writing, Austin, a writer of film scripts. At first he reacts almost passively to his brother’s every crude and verbal outburst, until the final conflict that will erupt between them when the great Hollywood producer Saul declares his preference for the screenplay idea Lee has in mind.

Elena Karakoulis’ direction managed to highlight the stage design of Konstantinos Skourletis, which is so important for the dramaturgy, and to create the conditions between the two protagonists so that what takes place in front of the viewer’s eyes goes beyond simple representation and delivers a “slice of life”. Nikos Psara’s Lee pulsates with the patriarchal values of the trespasser of the Old West and is in fact the western analogue of Stanley Kowalski (“A Streetcar Named Desire”, Tennessee Williams). On the other hand, Markos Papadokonstantakis’ Austin leads to the big twist in the play. When the structure and the narrative of great opportunity has now collapsed, the basic instincts of survival and the reproduction of patriarchal patterns that have progressively plunged an entire house into chaos and eventual ruin will surface. For whatever comedy lies within the most insane moments of Sam Shepard’s play, the tragedy of everyday life is waiting in the opposite corner, now equal to match the passions and power struggles of the Ancient Greeks.

©Patroklos_Skafidas

In a memorable staging in every respect, the dreamlike quality within the sibling conflict is brought by the roles of Saul and the mother. Nestor Kopsidas has worked correctly on the thin line of satire with which Shepard surrounds the Hollywood producer, while Alexandra Pantelaki as the mother in the final image of the play is so otherworldly, ethereal, as if she has returned directly from the childhood fantasy of the two leads. Mikis Pantelous, as the on-stage musician, completes a strong group and augments the American-Mexican atmosphere of the performance with his interventions and musical accompaniments.