Killer’s Head/The Unseen Hand
Reviewed by Stephen Fife
Odyssey Theatre Ensemble
Through March 8
As part of its 50th year celebration, Odyssey Theatre is presenting Killer’s Head and The Unseen Hand, two rarely seen plays by the great Sam Shepard, both directed by Darrell Larson, a terrific actor and longtime standout of the Los Angeles theater scene.
Several of Shepard’s well-known works are frequently performed in the Los Angeles area — Fool For Love, True West and Buried Child foremost among them. Along with Curse of the Starving Class and Lie of the Mind, they mark Shepard’s take on the “family play,” the staple of American dramaturgy. But before he went down this path in the late 1970s, Shepard had already written a score of others, most of them featuring a lost young man, much like the author himself. These were abstract, non-linear, stream-of-consciousness ramblings, taking place in some nowhere-everywhere zone in the playwright’s mind and featuring loners, drifters, seekers, poets, drunks, fools and other denizens of society’s fringe. They were adventurous, unpredictable screams into the void, and a middle finger to the classics of the greatest generation, with their tidy beginnings, middles and ends.
These plays of crazy yearning and uncorked rage were the envy of me and every other playwright I knew who came of age in the 1970s. We too hankered for their freedom to make a mess, to cut loose, to be bad, rude, disrespectful, uncensored and true to our contradictions — and somehow end up making beautiful poetry in the process. All of us wanted to break the code, learn this formula — but none of us could because it came from deep inside Shepard, from his unconscious, to which he seemed to have unlimited access. But times change, contexts shift, and I came to this production very eager to see if these early plays still kept their magic.
Killer’s Head is a 10-minute monologue, the last thoughts of a man strapped to an electric chair and about to be executed. These thoughts have nothing to do with any crime he may have committed, nor do they tell us anything about who he is or why he is here. What are we to make of his Western male chatter about pickup trucks and horses? Director Larson provides an interpretation in the program notes, but — like Shepard himself — I leave it to audience members to come to their own conclusions.
A series of actors take turns with the role of the condemned man, including LA theater veteran Jeff Kober and film veteran Dermot Mulroney. The opening night performer was Steve Howey, instantly recognizable to any viewer of Shameless on Showtime. I have enjoyed his work on that show, but I found him quite underwhelming here. He depends completely on the electric chair to provide a sense of danger. Very possibly the problem lies with the director, who plays into what I believe to be the Beckettian trap in the work.
The Unseen Hand is a wilder play, which finds Shepard on the familiar terrain of the Old West. In fact, it takes place just down the road in Azusa, which Shepard’s lead character never tires of telling us is “A to Z in the USA.” This character, Blue Morphan (Carl Weintraub), is a 120-year-old drifter who has been living for the last 20 years in the husk of a 1951 Chevy (which dominates the stage). He rambles on about his two long-gone brothers and his fear of violence from bullies in fast cars — until he is interrupted by a visit from a space alien named Willie (Matt Curtin) with the branding of a human hand on his forehead. Willie is here to bring back saviors who can help overthrow the oppressive masters on his home planet of Nogoland. Soon Willie has conjured Blue’s two brothers (Jordan Morgan and Chris Payne Gilbert) for that purpose. And then the last character appears, an Azusa high school cheerleader (Andrew Morrison) who has been-abused by jocks from another school and dumped out here.
The play proves to be surprisingly funny, with the opening night audience often whooping with laughter from Shepard’s zig-zagging inventiveness, the huge risks that he keeps taking. All the actors are good, with Morgan especially outstanding as a Wild West outlaw. Morrison is badly miscast as the cheerleader, whom Shepard wrote as an All-American guy — he’s literally called “The Kid” — but who comes off here as sensitive and highly stylized. (Morrison dances ballet with the Colburn Conservatory, which is evident in how elegantly he moves.)
With its improvisatory energy and unpredictable shifts, Shepard’s play depends on the performers being on the same wavelength, and this error in casting throws it off balance, bringing in questions of sexual identity that don’t arise from anything in the script. The play also depends on a sense of danger to be effective, and there isn’t much of that here. This makes it feel like Shepard-Lite — amusing, entertaining, but not as consequential as it could be. Certainly not as much as I remember it being many years ago in Downtown NYC.
Then again, maybe life has simply caught up with it, giving us so many other sources of danger. I was glad to see it again — any chance to catch Shepard’s dazzling early work done well is something to be grateful for.
Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd; Sawtelle; Wed., 8 p.m. (Feb. 5 & Mar. 4.); Thurs., 8 p.m. (Feb. 20 only); Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; through Mar. 8; (310) 477-2055, ext. 2 or www.odysseytheatre.com. Running time: one hour and 40 minutes with no intermission.
