Shepard's 'Lie of the Mind': Bleak and Blue

Rep Stage's production of Sam Shepard's "A Lie of the Mind" opens with a thunderous crash that's followed by panicked voices in dim light, with a lug named Jake bellowing into a phone that he thinks he's killed his wife.

Beth, the wife, isn't dead, but she's brain-damaged from the beating Jake gave her. Yet she still wants to see him, and she speaks, with great effort, in broken but uncannily profound sentences about the twisted, unbreakable ties that bind people together.

The drama hovers in this weird space that Shepard creates between life and death, and between close relations -- and director Xerxes Mehta manages the trick of letting this sprawling, gritty-lyric play create its own weightiness. The actors are free to howl their characters' mighty aches or to wax poetic as a tender mood strikes, and they do it on a dark, divided stage, with Beth's Montana on one side and Jake's California on the other.

Shepard being Shepard, the Bard of the American West, there's open sky at the back of Elena Zlotescu's intelligently uncluttered set, and an American flag gets wrapped around various characters -- Jake especially -- as they seek various versions of solace. "A Lie of the Mind" hovers on the edge of melodramatic sap; the characters go on at length with portentous speeches about how their identities bleed into each other, how their needs are gnawing them to death. By the time Shepard wrote this and directed the four-hour New York premiere in 1985, this pregnant terrain seemed prepared (or exhausted) by his more concentrated "Buried Child," "Fool for Love" and "True West."

Yet as the play swirls amid the banged-up kinships that drive so many American plays (which might explain the flag as well as anything else), it refuses to lapse into anything repetitive or trite. Shepard is savvy about what can be acted, and Mehta's cast sinks its teeth into this raw material like a hungry pack of wolves.

The performances are more compelling on Beth's side of the dividing line, where the characters tend to be more blunt. Cliff Williams III strikes the necessary no-nonsense chords as Beth's brother, Mike, who can't believe she's still in love with the violent Jake. Timothy Andrés Pabon is plausibly funny and terrified as Jake's brother, Frankie, who ventures to Beth's family looking to broker peace but gets himself shot for his troubles. Dan Manning and Maureen Kerrigan keep the long show lively well into the third act with their splendid comic salvos as Beth's almost stereotypically fussing parents.

The rants on Jake's side of the border still feel slightly conventional at times, as if Tim Getman (as Jake) and Valerie Leonard (as his tough mother) haven't quite burrowed all the way into the nonrealistic battleground that Shepard has staked out. But like Gina Alvarado's moaning and keening Beth, they bring a forcefulness to the performance that Shepard's play can't do without.

Yet Mehta is careful not to push anything too hard -- neither the acting nor the celebrated Shepard sense of imagery. The pictures steal up on you, whether they have to do with the gun, a carcass or a dead man's ashes gently blown into the air. The play blows hot and long, and Mehta doesn't fan it. Sensibly, he just lets it burn.

A Lie of the Mind, by Sam Shepard. Directed by Xerxes Mehta. Lighting, Judith Daitsman; costumes, Elena Zlotescu; sound, Chas Marsh. With Natasha Staley. About 3 hours 15 minutes. Through March 1 at Howard Community College, 10901 Little Patuxent Pkwy., Columbia. Call 410-772-4900 or visit http://www.repstage.org.