The Heart Don't Lie

  The good news about The New Group’s revival of Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind is that when your attention flags (and it will), you can while away the minutes examining Derek McLane’s elaborate set. Piling end tables, desks, chairs, suitcases and the assorted ephemera of any middle-class garage or attic, McLane’s design serves as a reminder of just how ugly mid-century furniture could be.  

Of course, it’s also supposed to serve as a reminder of the things that hold us back, the clutter that fills our lives and hems us in. Everyone in A Lie of the Mind seems to be buried beneath his own emotional rubble. Jake (Alessandro Nivola) retreats to his mother’s house after beating up his wife, Beth (Marin Ireland), so badly he’s sure she’s dead, thrilling his unstable mother (a mesmerizing and annoying Karen Young, slipping her dialogue out of a zipped-up mouth and adding a speech impediment for good measure) who wants to baby him all over again. Jake’s brother Frankie (Josh Hamilton) and sister Sally (Maggie Siff) are concerned and terrified, respectively. Frankie jumps in a car and drives to Beth’s family’s house to ascertain whether or not she’s dead. But despite her fear and disgust with Jake and her mother, Sally finds herself unable to stay away from home.

Beth, meanwhile, is now living at home with her parents and brother, seemingly the only sane person in the house despite being severely brain-damaged by Jake’s attack. And when Frankie arrives just before a blizzard traps them all in, all hell breaks loose.

At times, Ethan Hawke’s production is as tough and funny and moving as any Platonic ideal of a Sam Shepard play should be. But great stretches of A Lie of the Mind are both static and dull (not to mention Shepard’s bizarre climax that chips away at our fonder memories of the show), with the actors standing motionless and hurling their perceived hurts and slights at one another. And the yelling! My God, the yelling seems to never end in the second act. Comic yelling, angry yelling, truthful yelling; no one involved in the production seems to have learned the lesson that, sometimes, speaking angrily in a quiet voice is far more effective than screeching.

The play benefits enormously from Nivola (still best known for his role in the film Junebug) and the always-welcome pros Laurie Metcalf and Keith Carradine, as Beth’s parents. Nivola takes Jake’s fragile stability and makes hay of it, giving a physical performance that is genuinely frightening at times. Eyes darting, voice rising unpredictably, Nivola seems entirely capa ble

of being so in love with someone that he beats the living daylights out of her— especially when he spends most of act two clad only in boxers and a leather jacket, revealing a toned and muscular body. And though Carradine and Metcalf both provide off-kilter, funny performances, Metcalf’s is ultimately undermined by the strange turn the play takes at the end. Tough and slightly scattered, nothing she has done has prepared us for the heavyhanded, politically tinged final scene that involves an American flag in a tableau.

In the thankless roles of the siblings, Siff and Hamilton each have their moments, though Siff’s character allows for a wider range of emotions. And as Beth’s brother, Frank Whaley is both outraged and exasperated. He’s adept at both, but there’s not much else to his performance. And though there are hints that there’s more to the play than the pain that can accompany love—between lovers, between mothers and children, between siblings— this production never quite fulfills that promise. In the end, A Lie of the Mind seems to say, quite loudly, that love is a screaming affair that will always end in a bang, not a whimper.

-- A Lie of the Mind Through Mar. 20, Theatre Row, 410 W. 42nd St. (betw. 9th & 10th Aves.), 212-279-4200; $60.