True West

Sam Shepard's True West, though seeming to be his most traditional play, is a good example of a postmodern play that rejects the realistic plot with its stable characters. 

Shepard says that his plays are not linear; each play is a collage (an assembly of diverse fragments made into artistic composition).  True West  is symmetrical.  Austin, the sophisticated but sterile screen writer, and Lee, the crude but vital loner who lives on the desert and steals television sets, exchange roles about half way through the play.  Each character tells a story which is symmetrical with the other's. 

Lee tells his story to Saul, Austin's agent, who "really liked it.  It's the first authentic western to come along in a long time."  But the story turns out to be a parody of the "authentic western":  two men in the panhandle of Texas, each thinking he is chasing the other in tractor-trailers, one of them discovers he's out of gas--and this is when the story ends.  And Austin becomes Lee's screen writer.

Lee tells the story of their father, who he visited on the desert.  The old man's teeth have been falling out, one by one.  He can't afford to have the rest  extracted and a new set of false teeth made, so he walks all the way to Mexico on the hot macadam highways.  The doctor takes all his money.  When Austin takes him out for a night on the town, he takes his teeth out to eat and puts them in a doggie bag--which he later leaves in a bar.

Each story parodies the "authentic western" and the convention of the realistic plot, since it's about a loner on the range and doesn't get anywhere.  The symmetry of the stories leads to the symmetry of Shepard's overall plot, for Lee and Austin change roles,  Austin types Lee's manuscript, while he mocks the way Lee drinks.  He goes out to prove that  he too can be a thief, comes back with a dozen toasters, which end up all over his mother's living room floor.  Getting drunker and drunker he ties a rope around one of them and leads one along, singing "Get along little doggie," while making it leap over objects.  He then parodies Lee's violence and destroys the toasters with a golf club.  And he asks Lee to take him out to the desert, though Lee wants to stay in Hollywood and become a successful screen writer.

In the end, their mother comes home from Alaska, reduces them both to little boys trying to clean themselves up and excuse what is now a surrealistic mess, and then leaves to check into a motel.   Before she leaves they start a murderous fight.  The play ends with them staring at each other from across the room in a tableau parodying the Western shootout.

Given the parodic symmetry of the plot, we should not try to explain the play as if it were "realistic"; that is,  explain a characters motivation or how a character develops.  Rather we should see how Shepard works with the dramatic elements in his collage.  Shepard creates a frame of reference for us by titling his play True West, setting it in the Hollywood suburbs (the false myth of the true west was created by Hollywood), situating the father and older brother on the desert, making the younger brother a screen writer, and ending the play with a tableau of a shootout.

In the first half of the play, for instance, the set is an orderly suburban living room, where Lee is house sitting for his mother, with suburban night sounds outside; Lee, unpredictably intrudes into that world.  In the second half of the play, we hear wild coyotes howling and the living room is almost entirely destroyed.

Opposed to the suburban set is the desert, which is offstage; it becomes a dramatic presence in the dialogue.

One theme of the play is the hold that Hollywood's myth of the true west has over our consciousness.  Another is the role of the family, with the father, an old drunk living alone on the desert and the mother, a caricature of a middle-class suburban housewife who goes to Alaska and, when she comes back, wants to take her boys to meet Picasso.   According to the newspaper, he will be in the museum that afternoon.

Rather than focus on and explain what happens in the story, or plot, begin by describing the collage.  (You may come up with a different description than mine.)  You can then place your scene within the context of the play and interpret, not the story, but the composition.  What sense can you make of the American themes that are being exposed through Shepard's parodic arrangement?  Other topics may suggest themselves.  One student has written about male bonding--very appropriate in relation to the myth of the west--which can be developed more fully and in a way that makes more use of the full scope of the play by coming to grips with the play's arrangement, rather than reducing it to a realistic plot line.  You might also consider the way the relation between the brothers works out to suggest a divided modern American male self, with his vital energies, shaped by the myth of the west and repressed into his unconscious.  There are lots of potential themes available within the framework this postmodern play provides.