True West was first produced at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco in 1980 and published by Doubleday in 1981. It is Shepard’s most popular play — revived constantly, studied in every American drama course, twice adapted for television — and his simplest: two men, one room, one night, and the question of which version of American masculinity is “true.”
Austin is a screenwriter: educated, married, successful, house-sitting his mother’s suburban home while working on a deal with a Hollywood producer. Lee is his older brother: a drifter, a petty thief, a desert rat who lives in the Mojave with nothing but a dog and a stolen television. Lee arrives uninvited and disrupts Austin’s orderly life — first by stealing from the neighbors, then by pitching his own screenplay idea to Austin’s producer, then by taking over Austin’s project entirely.
As the play progresses, the brothers exchange positions: Lee sits at the typewriter, struggling to articulate his “true-to-life” western; Austin drinks, rages, steals toasters from the neighbors, becomes the wild man his brother was. The exchange is complete by the final image: two men facing each other in a destroyed kitchen, neither able to leave, neither willing to yield, locked in a relationship that is simultaneously fraternal love and mortal combat.
The play’s title is deliberately ironic: there is no “true” West — no authentic American masculinity beneath the performance. Both brothers are performing roles (the intellectual performs civility; the drifter performs wildness) and each envies the other’s act. The “true” thing, Shepard suggests, is the violence beneath both performances — the aggression that American manhood cannot express through either civilization or wilderness and that therefore explodes when the performances collapse.
Collecting True West
First edition (Doubleday, New York, 1981): Hardcover. Also in Seven Plays (Bantam, 1981).
Market values:
- Doubleday first edition in dust jacket: $30–$80
- Signed first edition: $75–$200
- Seven Plays (Bantam hardcover, 1981): $20–$50
Shepard’s most frequently revived play. The 2000 Broadway production with Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly (who alternated roles nightly) renewed interest in all Shepard first editions.