‘True West’ Broadway Review: Ethan Hawke, Paul Dano Find Direction In Sam Shepard Classic Of Brotherly Hate

As Sam Shepard’s True West brothers grim, Ethan Hawke and Paul Dano dig deep into the loamy earth of that macho post-hippie neo-cowboy near-masterpiece, mucking about the desert-edge-of-suburbia drama and surviving (we assume) to face another tequila sunrise. Shepard’s 1980 near-Pulitzer elegy for an authentically brutal frontier that’s faded into a brutally make-believe dreamland might not carry the same are we not real men urgency of the panicky sensitive-male era in which the playwright first mourned his mythologized West, but its apparent appeal for a certain type of meat-seeking actor persists.

All of which is to say, Hawke and Dano are well-suited in both temperament and talent for the Roundabout’s Broadway revival of Shepard’s once-shocking blast of new wave absurdism, opening tonight at the American Airlines Theatre.