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"true," as he claims (and even if so, is it a work of genius or a piece of
trash?), and is it "true," as Austin claims, that the producer has
agreed to buy it not because it's good but only because Lee has
threatened him? Neither mystery is resolved. But ultimately the
mysteries are metaphysical. What is the relationship between truth
and art? between vision and power? between authenticity and cor–
ruption? between experience and expression? between identity and
blood? What, in fact, is the relationship between brothers? Or are
Austin and Lee two aspects of a single character, seeking to reconcile
or to annihilate contradictory halves of a divided personality?
The truth of
True West
lies in these unresolved mysteries them–
selves-which come together in a final visceral image, a final flash of
light, one of Shepard's great
coups de theatre.
At the very end of the
play, we see the two brothers silhouetted in the darkness, hunched
over, arms spread, confronting one another in rage and fear,
squared off in murderous threat and terrified self-protection, each
stalking the other in an electric moment frozen in time. "Lights go
slowly to black as the afterimage of the brothers pulses in the dark."
Second Edition,
Revised and Enlarged
Joyce
Annotated
Notes for
Dubliners
and A Portrait of the
Artist
as a
Young Man
by
Don Gifford
This new edition of Gifford's
standard notes puts an en–
cyclopedic knowledge of life
in nineteenth- and twentieth–
century Dublin at the disposal
of all readers.
$26.50 at bookstores
University of
California Press
Berkeley 94720
