Theatre in Review: Heartless (Signature Theatre)

	Gary Cole and Julianne Nicholson. Photo: Joan Marcus.

Sam Shepard surely has the strangest imagination of any contemporary playwright. Maddeningly elusive one moment and thuddingly obvious the next, he seems to be engaged in a game of hide-and-seek with his audiences. Trouble is, too often the game is rigged; each time you think you're approaching clarity, he moves the bar, leaving you feeling like you've been dispatched back to square one. At the same time, his metaphors are so literal, so earthbound that you can barely credit them. This has always been the case, but it has become glaringly obvious in his recent works. Eyes for Consuela ends with the lead character unpacking his baggage, both physically and psychologically, gaining spiritual freedom by parting with certain possessions. Kicking a Dead Horse gave us Stephen Rea and, well, a dead horse, the play's title red-flagging its themes of obsession and futility. Now comes Heartless, and I might as well tell you right away that two of the characters have enormous vertical scars on their chests, along with a shared past that involves cardiac surgery. You won't be surprised to hear that love is in short supply in this fractured family drama.

As many have noted, Heartless marks something of a departure from other Shepard works in depicting an all-female household beset by a male intruder. The man is Roscoe, a middle-aged academic -- his specialty is Cervantes -- who, having abandoned his wife and family, has taken up with Sally, a sullen, evasive young woman with a big secret that relates to that surgical scar. The two have embarked on a video project, making a documentary about Roscoe, the point of which is never made clear. (Shepard is equally silent on the reasons for Roscoe's midlife free fall.) Roscoe and Sally have repaired to the home of Mable, Sally's mother, high in the hills above Los Angeles. Mable is a withered old crone -- confined to a wheelchair, her hands deformed by arthritis -- who is attended to by Lucy, her drab, spinsterish daughter. Mable is also cared for by Liz, a, young, stunningly beautiful nurse, who declines to speak and who shares a secret with Sally -- remember that title -- that provides the play's big plot twist. The latter makes no sense, but, as it happens, it is the least of Heartless' problems.

Indeed, Heartless is most notable for the air of enervation that prevails. Sally and Lucy bicker at length, engaging in childish games of one-upmanship -- when Lucy spies a doughnut on the breakfast table, Sally furiously stuffs it into her mouth, rather than let her sister have it -- although we never really learn what makes them claw at each other. Mable wheels around the stage, furiously interrogating Roscoe ("Don't call me ma'am. It makes me feel like I'm in Gone with the goddamned Wind.") and dispensing not-terribly-inventive aphorisms ("Remarkable how we can't face what is in front of us."). Later, announcing "I'd like to gaze out into the abyss for a while," she looks out over the City of Angels, contemplating, like a ruined goddess, the wasteland laid out before her. There are squabbles; bitchy-but-halfhearted jokes ("He's a highly respected man of letters!" "So was the Marquis de Sade!"); plenty of monologues (including an account of Mable's crippling accident, in which she fell out of a tree, located outside a drive-in theatre, from which she was watching a James Dean film); and scenes of family chaos. The action purposely doesn't track. If Mable became an invalid in the 1950s, how did she give birth to Lucy and Sally? We are first told that Liz is from England; five minutes later, she is a native Nebraskan. One character comes back from a walk with bleeding feet; another leaps off a cliff and returns a few minutes later, perfectly fit. One character is apparently dead; regarding that, you're on your own.

None of this would matter -- a certain mysterious, dreamlike quality is central to most of Shepard's best plays -- if there was some underlying resonance, a feeling that Heartless was headed somewhere, anywhere. But the play feels stuck in neutral throughout, spinning its wheels while the author recycles some of his familiar themes (the awfulness of Los Angeles, the emptiness of the American heartland, the bear-trap nature of family life) before settling in on an unsurprising meditation on mortality.

Daniel Aukin's production can't impose coherence where none exists, but at least he has assembled an enthusiastic cast. Lois Smith gives everything she has, and a little bit extra, as Mable, mowing down all opposition with her scalding observations and oracular pronouncements. In a funny way, her ferocity has the unintended effect of exposing the flatness of Shepard's words, but she is a formidable presence nonetheless. Gary Cole is suitably baffled as Roscoe, although he develops an upper-body tic in the later scenes that becomes distracting. Julianne Nicholson's typically flat-affect approach to Sally is probably the way to go; it seems especially right next to Jenny Bacon, whose performance as Lucy is a series of mannerisms in search of a character. The character of Liz is underwritten to the vanishing point, so Betty Gilpin settles for being a cryptic, occasionally teasing, presence.

Eugene Lee's wide-ranging setting, distinguished by a sharply raked upstage floor, convinces us that the action is taking place high above sea level; it's a neat bit of spatial sleight-of-hand, aided by Tyler Micoleau's understated lighting. Kay Voyce's costumes and Eric Shimelonis' sound design are also fine. Nevertheless, even if you think of it as a late-career chamber piece, Heartless remains desperately in need of a heartbeat. In its willingness to dispense with everything but the sound of the author's voice, it is reminiscent of Tennessee Williams' later plays; this may please hard-core Shepard fans, but will most likely leave everyone else scratching their heads.--David Barbour