Simple Sam

Shepard's Simpatico stays on the surface

by Bill Rodriguez

SIMPATICO. By Sam Shepard. Directed by Karl Aspelund. With David Tulli, Tom O'Donnell, Tamara Paquette, Brenda Corwin, and Robert C. Frederiksen. At NewGate Theatre through February 7.

Some of Sam Shepard's plays come across with all the force of nature -- human nature, that is. True West, A Lie of the Mind and others lie in wait for us on the stage, pulsing with mythic resonance, ready to swallow us up like great steamy swamps of collective unconscious. Simpatico, despite some energetic performances at NewGate Theatre, doesn't measure up to Shepard's own standards. It's like closing your eyes and getting a description of a dream instead of the dream itself.

Simpatico is accessible, all right, unlike many of Shepard's 40-plus head-scratchers. It's even suspenseful. What information is Vinnie (David Tulli) holding over Carter (Tom O'Donnell) when the play opens and Carter is summoned from Kentucky to Vinnie's squalid southern California apartment? They ran some sort of scam 15 years before, and the well-to-do Carter has been paying Vinnie's monthly bills ever since. Eventually we learn that their connections are deeper, going way back to when they were schoolyard pals. They even married the same woman, the voluptuous Rosie (Tamara Paquette), who left Vinnie for Carter back when the scam fell to pieces. Ever since, Vinnie has been hiding out as a wanted felon, though the FBI probably cares far less about what happened than he does.

Vinnie is a Shepard fool for love of the simplest sort. He has called Carter over simply to get some commiseration about his love life. Tulli plays the scruffy loser with a cagey inner life that makes the schemer interesting to follow, although Vinnie's impulsiveness suggests desperation that would fill the air with more tension than comes across. Vinnie says that he's been arrested for harassing someone he met in a bar, a woman so divine that he promised God that if he could have her he'd never ask for anything again. The guy is that far out there.

O'Donnell starts Carter off all in charge and smug, a worthy complement to Vinnie's forlorn haplessness. Vinnie cant resist stressing to Carter that he has information that could "demolish you." Yet Carter initially feels sufficiently in control that he can still, after 15 years, treat Vinnie like an old friend he's been helping out rather than a blackmailer he's been paying off. Of course, since this is a Sam Shepard play, we know that their roles will shuffle back and forth, if not reverse, by the end. What's at play is the shifting quality of the human condition more than the particular circumstances of these deluded men.

Not that the women here are terribly enlightened. Vinnie's heartthrob, Cecilia (Brenda Corwin), turns out to be a flaky Safeway bagger -- not even a register clerk. Carter goes to her and finds that their relationship is as innocently fleshless as Vinnie described it. (Though Shepard jerks us around a bit by having her speak of their "affair," which consisted of one kiss.) Cecilia is in love with the Kentucky Derby, although she doesn't know what month it happens. This is convenient, because Carter is in the horse racing business, which the old scam involved, so she is quickly recruited as a bagman to deliver hush-money to another co-conspirator in hiding (Robert C. Frederiksen).

As for their ex- and wife Rosie, when we finally meet her it's more out of curiosity than to satisfy any needs of the plot or the audience. Her assistant is a handgun-pointing lesbian ice queen (Joanna Liao), for no perceivable reason but to crank up the hostile women quotient. (Oh, these poor beleaguered men.) Paquette makes Rosie so brassy we squint and can't help but admire her flashiness.

This is all directed by Karl Aspelund at a curiously stuttering pace throughout, although hopefully that will tighten up after opening night. But maybe not; there were plenty of opportunities to make what's unspoken a kind of dance between these denizens of Shepardland, but too often the characters remained flatfooted.

Much of the problem lies with this sow's ear of a play itself, written after a 10-year creative hiatus. Shepard's best work has emerged when he's successfully plunged to his -- and our -- preconscious depths. Conscious, the playwright ain't so hot. Fool for Love enjoyed stunning stagings at Trinity Repertory Company and elsewhere, yet when Shepard adapted it for film and co-starred in Robert Altman's 1986 film version, all the original's evocative subtext drained away like lifeblood. Too much of Simpatico's substance is on the surface. And even though it's nearly three hours long, all that surface doesn't provide enough gems to mine.