When Ethan Hawke relieving himself onto a houseplant becomes one of the most noteworthy moments in a Broadway show, it’s safe to say it’s been a soggy night of theater.
That’s what awaits at this intermittently involving, often tedious take on “True West,” Sam Shepard’s much-admired 1980 dark comedy of savage sibling rivalry and role reversal.
In this Roundabout revival, which opened Thursday, Hawke plays Lee, a mangy drifter and small-time criminal. He’s a lowlife who lives in the desert, chain-chugs beers and gets off on mocking his estranged brother, whom he joins, uninvited, at the Southern California home of their vacationing mom.
Paul Dano plays Lee’s younger sibling, Austin, an Ivy League-educated family man and screenwriter who’s this close to selling a project to Hollywood. Buttoned-up and even-keeled, Austin’s everything Lee isn’t. Or is he?
When Lee persuades Saul, a producer, over an unseen game of golf, to buy his movie idea for a Western instead of Austin’s love story, everything switcheroos. Saul “thinks we’re the same person,” Austin tells his brother. And the Tinseltown honcho may be right.
Factor in surreal touches, such as a long-winded and bloody tale about a man losing his teeth, and a fleet of stolen toasters, and that’s pretty much the play. With the right actors, that’s all it takes to compel and combust. Which it did in the 2000 Tony-nominated revival with Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly, who alternated roles and set off sparks in each.
This new version, directed by James Macdonald, could use a high-voltage power infusion. As is, the staging taps Shepard’s sly humor but lacks energy and fizzles as a battle royale.
Snarling and sneering, Hawke conjures the right kind of feral menace, much like the coyotes heard howling outside the home. But Dano, blank-faced and bland, offers next to nothing to play or punch against. The “Escape at Dannemora” star fades into the scenery even when Lee pounds his typewriter to pieces with a golf club.
In the end, the brawling brothers have wrecked their mom’s cheery kitchen and are on the verge of killing each other. By then, you’re less likely to wonder what brought them to this or why their loopy mother (Marylouise Burke), who enters late in the action, is babbling on about Picasso.
You’re more apt to pity the crew who has to clean up the mess after every show.