theater
BY RICK LEVIN
In the Name of Love
Leebrick’s A Lie of the Mind is a triumph
I
n many regards, A Lie of the Mind, now at Lord
Leebrick, is classic mid-career Sam Shepard; arid,
patchy, proletarian and grotesque, the play telegraphs a
confessional tone continually slashed and clotted by several
strata of male violence, be it implied and symbolic or actual
as a heart attack. Like Cormac McCarthy, Shepard is an
elegist of the subdivided open range, of the paranoia and
brutality that result from killing off the buffalo and paving
over the places they once roamed. Ideals and dreams loom
large in this dramatic universe — the ideal of love, the
American dream — but the idyllic is constantly being
choked out by knots in the flow of communication.
Communication, or miscommunication, is ever the wrench
in the system for Shepard, the gremlin in the works.
The play opens in darkness, as Jake (Kato Buss), on the
phone to his brother Frankie (Jacob King), admits to
mindlessly beating his wife Beth (Mary Buss), perhaps to
death. As they retreat into the arms of their respective
families — Jake to his childhood home and wizened,
tough-as-nails mother Lorraine (Rebecca Nachison) and
sister Sally (Michelle Nordella), Beth to her parents
Baylor (Achilles Massahos) and Meg (Gloria Lagalo) and
hothead brother Mike (Mike Hawkins) — the roots of
dysfunction are increasingly flayed open.
Playing psychological empath, Shepard complicates
any quick-and-easy assignments of victimization; by
revealing the demons inhabiting each character, he pushes
the envelope beyond good and evil, seeking deeper, more
insidious causes of the hurt we inflict on those we most
love. If everyone, in the end, is a victim, is no one a
victim? Judge not, Shepard seems to say, but rather look
and listen: They know not what they do in the name of
culture
MIKE HAWKINS AND JACOB KING AT LEEBRICK
their silent desperation, and the circle — of violence, of
resentment, of mistrust — goes unbroken.
The lie that slinks and slithers its way through A Lie of
the Mind is as unavoidable as it is self-perpetuating. That
lie might just be language itself — the way words become
insufficient in the face of want and need, ultimately
warping and undermining exactly what they’re intended to
express. For Shepard, the universal solvent of violence
seeps into every utterance, creating a language that
threatens, with every syllable, to dissolve into despair. The
specter of the past — as the Oedipal ghost of Jake and
Sally’s dead father, as love lost and lost opportunities
mourned — haunts, and in haunting, paralyzes, every
character but one: Beth, whose traumatic head injury
seems, through a kind of erasure, to open her up to
existential reckonings devoid of any emotional immediacy.
What is love? she asks, and Who am I? Why do I hurt so?
A Lie of the Mind is lesser Shepard, nowhere near in scope
and emotional punch to his 1979 Pulitzer-winner Buried
Child, nor can it hold a candle to True West, another inferno
of sibling rivalry and filial detach. But, really, I’d take minor
Shepard over major Ibsen any day, and the greatest virtue of
A Lie is also the reason Leebrick’s production is one of the
finest works to hit local stages in the past five years: This is
an actor’s wet dream, full of smoldering scenes and scathing
dialogue, and the cast ties into it like a theater afire.
In the leads, Kato and Mary Buss are stupendous,
seizing upon their broken characters and filling them with
scorched soul; their performances are mesmerizing,
emotionally seismic but subtly sophisticated. And the
amazing thing is, the rest of the cast keeps right up:
Nachison is a bristling storm of malign motherhood;
veterans Massahos and Lagalo provide a large share of the
play’s humor and emotional anchorage; Hawkins is spot-
on as Beth’s pissed-off pistolwhip of a brother; and
Nordella, newly returned to the stage, is a wonder as Jake’s
younger sister, besieged on all sides by the psychosexual
ooze of ancestral obsession.
These players, each taking her superb spin across the
boards, turn an OK play by a great playwright into an object
lesson in aces-up acting. Get thee to the Leebrick.
ew
A Lie of the Mind plays through June 3 at Lord Leebrick Theatre; lordleebrick.
com 465-1506.
BY DANTE ZUÑIGA-WEST
Burn Baby Burn
Jacob Keeton puts the smackdown on spicy hot wings
28 MAY 17, 2012
EUGENE WEEKLY
PHOTO BY TRASK BEDORTHA
M
onths ago we witnessed EW intern Andrew Hitz
take the Hot Mama’s Wings Kamikaze Challenge
and nearly hemorrhage. In an event that requires
contestants to eat nine unreasonably spicy wings in six
minutes, Hitz destroyed previous records by decimating all
nine wings in two minutes and forty eight seconds. We
were impressed.
But records are made to be broken. And as is the case
with any sport, there is always someone somewhere who
is better than you. No shame in that reality — there are
monsters out there.
Jacob Keeton is a monster. Monday, May 14, he stomped
Hitz’s achievement into the dust of forgotten things. He can
handle spice in a way that defies human limits. He is the lone
Hot Mama’s Wings Kamikaze Smackdown champion.
“At about wing five I felt like shit,” Keeton says. “I
didn’t think I was going to win, but I kept going because
people were yelling at me.”
To put things in perspective, the Hot Mama’s Wings
Kamikaze Challenge differs from the Hot Mama’s Wings
Kamikaze Smackdown in that contestants must eat as
many kamikaze wings as possible within the allotted time-
frame of five minutes. These wings are no joke, slathered
in a sauce made from vinegar, salt, tomato paste, butter,
onion, garlic, habanero peppers, chicken, cayenne pepper
and an extra-spicy ingredient that Hot Mama’s Wings
refuses to disclose, these things will melt your intestinal
tract on the way in and singe your colon on the way out.
“I don’t even like spicy food,” says Keeton. “I hate
spicy food!”
Keeton says he was urged to participate in the event by
CONTESTANTS FACE OFF IN THE KAMIKAZE SMACKDOWN
friends who saw his aptitude for enduring spice when he
first ingested a kamikaze wing. He ate 22 wings and beat
out 11 determined challengers during the Smackdown’s
five-minute time period, and though he did at one point
look as if he might vomit, Keeton hung in there. Toward
the end of the competition, somewhere around the two-
minute warning, the judges told Keeton that his wings
weren’t clean enough. So, like a true champ, Keeton went
back and cleaned the wings, bone after fiery bone.
There is no telling what personal hell Keeton slipped
into hours after his clutch performance at Hot Mama’s
Wings. It is likely that he shut the door of his bathroom and
went to a terrible place.
But pain is temporary, and pride is forever. Keeton won
more than a bad-ass trip to the coast at a hotel that has in-
room Jacuzzis — he won the respect of the many who
watched him eat, and burn and keep eating. We salute him,
and we can’t wait for the next Smackdown.
ew
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