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A Lie of the Mind
by Sam Shepard
2002-2003 Season - Spring Production
February 21, 22, 23 and
March 1,2, 2003
View Photos
from the production
Read our Press Coverage:
Preview Articles: (pdf)
Lie of the Mind -
from the State Journal-Register
Lie of the Mind -
from the Illinois Times
Play Description
(from the Dramatists Play Service, Inc. catalogue)
Winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Outer Critics
Circle Award and the Drama Desk Award.
THE STORY: Involves two desparate families connected by the
marriage of
the son of one (Jake) to the daughter of the other (Beth). As the play
begins Beth, brain-damaged from a savage beating that Jake has given
her, is being tended by her parents, Baylor and Meg. Jake sends his
brother, Frankie, to Montana to see if she is dead or alive, but Beth's
father, mistaking Frankie for a poacher, shoots him in the leg and
takes
him prisoner. Thereafter the tensions and enmities that motivate the
two
families grow increasingly disturbing and dangerous. Frankie falls
in
love with Beth, but her brother, Mike, is bitterly determined that
she
no longer have anything to do with her husband or his loathsome family.
Meanwhile the distraught, hysterical Jake, back home in California,
is
nursed by his possessive mother, Lorraine, and his sister, Sally,
to
whom Lorraine is openly hostile. Having gotten Jake back from Beth,
Lorraine is determined to keep him with her forever, but Jake soon
recovers and sets out to regain his wife. In the end, however, his
will
fails, and he allows Beth to stay with Frankie; Lorraine burns down
her
house and departs for Ireland with Sally; and Jake, bereft and alone,
seeks communication with his dead father by gently dispersing his
ashes
into the moonlight-hoping to find order and meaning in the present
by
coming to terms with the haunting spectres of the past.
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