True West

2010 season · Production archive

Austin is a stable and successful Hollywood screenwriter; Lee is his menacing vagabond brother; and True West is the story of their attempt to trade lives. A classic of the contemporary American stage, it is one of Shepard’s funniest plays as well as one of his most brutal — an intense, touching, yet comedic look at sibling rivalry.

Written by

Sam Shepard

Directed by

Terry Dodd

Ran

May 7 – June 26, 2010

Cast

Nils Swanson · Brian Brooks · Terry Burnsed · Linda Suttle

About the production

True West ends with a kitchen destroyed, a toaster fire and two brothers circling each other on a floor covered in wreckage. Staging that eight feet from the front row, six nights a fortnight for seven weeks, is a scenery and safety problem before it is an acting problem, and it is the most physically demanding thing in the Vic’s archive.

It is also among the last major straight plays the house produced. The theatre had one more full season after this one; within a year the building was sold and the stage removed. The production was covered on local television and its trailer circulated online — by 2010 the Vic was promoting itself through video and an online ticketing service, which is not how a theatre behaves when it expects to close.

What the press said

“Few playwrights capture so eloquently and yet with such brute force the dreadful angst of what it means to be kin…a menacingly dark — and, granted, darkly funny — play…the show is a keeper”

“Director (Terry) Dodd (is) a master of bringing the playgoer’s brain and solar plexus into alignment…If you like gutsy plays with lots of underlying thematic subtext this is the one for you…get set to be riveted!”

Where it sat in the season

It was production 3 of 7 in the Vic’s 2010 season. It followed The Creation of the World and Other Business (Mar 5 – Apr 24, 2010) and was followed by Tomfoolery (Jul 23 – Sep 11, 2010). The full year is set out on the season calendars page, and every production the theatre staged between 2005 and 2011 is indexed in the production archive.

The house’s standard pattern was Friday and Saturday evenings at 7.30 with a Sunday matinee, over a run of six to eight weeks. With seventy-five seats, a full eight-week run put roughly 1,800 people through the room — which a 500-seat theatre does in four nights, and which is the single fact that explains most of what the Vic chose to programme.

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This page is part of the production archive of the Denver Victorian Playhouse, a seventy-five-seat theatre in the basement of a northwest Denver house that staged its last performance in 2011. Details here are restored from the theatre’s own records as they were published at the time; press quotations are reproduced with their original attributions and nothing has been added to them.