Critical Essay | Critical Review by Gerald Weales

Critical Review by Gerald Weales

SOURCE: Weales, Gerald. “Great Divide: Shepard's Lie of the Mind.” Commonweal 63, no. 3 (14 February 1986): 86-7.

In the following review, Weales criticizes A Lie of the Mind, objecting to the “cartoon atmosphere” of the play.

Sam Shepard's new play, A Lie of the Mind, runs for more than four hours, but its length does not herald structural innovation in his drama. He is still working in short scenes, as he has been since he turned up off-off-Broadway in the 1960s. In the new play, he cuts back and forth between two families and their homes on opposite ends of the stage, jumping from one painful or comic sequence to the next. The play, as one expects with Shepard, is absorbing, but a kind of attenuation has set in. It has no images as sharp and compelling as the corn shucking in Buried Child or the nude man with...
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