Looking for What’s True in ‘West’

After 37 years in the theater (more if you count her upbringing in a theatrical family), Hope Alexander has learned to expect that the intense dash toward opening night will be made even more difficult by some mishap that has nothing to do with the production at hand.

A father’s heart attack. A son’s illness. A relationship’s downfall. Alexander, director of South Coast Repertory’s Second Stage production of Sam Shepard’s 1980 drama, “True West,” says she has experienced them all during the final week of preparation for a play.

This time it was avocados.

Making a brisk entrance for one of the final rehearsals before Friday’s opening, Alexander announced her excuse for being a bit late: “There were avocados all over the 5.”

Car trouble, followed by a Santa Ana Freeway delay because of an avocado spill, plus the pressure of delivering a vivid production of a standard work of the contemporary theater--this would seem to be a formula for grouchiness, at the very least.

But after all these years, Alexander, 52, has her way of coping.

“I breathe, and I laugh,” said the actress-director, whose professional knack for the well-measured spoken effect spills into her conversation in a way that’s enjoyably stagy, not overbearing. “I’m a great believer in breathing and laughter.”

Exploration of Myth

For “True West” to work, Alexander and her cast and crew need to make the audience laugh frequently through what could be characterized as a dark comedy--but also to make it lose its collective breath during explosive outbursts that punctuate this rendering of a fierce, primal rivalry between brothers.

It’s a taut yet elusive tale in which one resonant passage speaks of a doomed pet dog being lured into the San Gabriel foothills by a pack of coyotes.

Cameron Dye’s Austin is the domesticated, Ivy League-educated careerist, a Hollywood screenwriter on the verge of his big breakthrough. Older brother Lee, played by Paul Perri, is a human coyote, a scruffy itinerant, a thief and a hustler, who stalks the stage with feral energy, bursting with a need to dominate his civilized brother.

The program notes quote Shepard about the play’s study of duality and its exploration of myth (connections can be drawn to Western Civilization’s first tale of brotherly rivalry--the biblical narrative of Cain and Abel).

Alexander, who had not read or seen “True West” before she took the assignment, said the crux of her job is to let those themes and symbolic currents stir deep inside the play without calling them to the surface.

“You can’t play mythology, even if you’re doing the Greeks. You have to play the truth of a human being.”

The play ends with murder in the air--a final frozen image of the brothers squared off in a suburban kitchen like gladiators in a pit.

“I think they love each other,” Alexander said.

For her, the foremost challenge is helping Dye and Perri find nuances that deepen and complicate the struggle. Lee can’t be just a bully. Austin, who cowers through the first act, avoiding his brother’s contemptuous gaze like a man facing a big, angry dog he hopes will just go away, must give some hint of the man who in Act 2 becomes an anger- and booze-fueled near-double of Lee.

“I always tell actors to follow the fear, because most of us are driven by fear,” Alexander said.

Perri, a veteran film, television and stage actor, was almost too scary during his audition.

“I thought he was crazy,” Alexander said. I had to call somebody [who knew him] to see if he was truly psychotic or not. He was so out there, it scared me.” She finds that, when not inhabiting Lee, “he’s a sweet guy.”

If Perri indeed had turned out to be an inspired near-psychotic, she would have moved on and found somebody else for the role. Alexander said it is not worth hiring actors who may be right for a part but don’t pass muster as decent, cooperative colleagues.

“My life is too short,” she said. “If it’s not fun, I don’t want to do it. I would take an actor a little less brilliant to have a pleasant four weeks.”

The nuances of Lee would be one of the main focuses of final rehearsals. The night before, Perri had exploded through a rage-filled, shirt-grabbing outburst with a sustained bellow that would have prompted the neighbors to call 911.

As the scene played in rehearsal, Alexander cut in. Yell the first line, not the whole speech, she said. Let go of Austin’s shirt, back off, then simmer the remaining lines instead of letting them boil over. “The less you yell, the more you just own the power you have, the better off we are,” she counseled.

Alexander was dressed for a working day in white tennis shoes and a loosely fitting blouse and slacks. As the rehearsal began, she called for sustenance: a plastic barrel of red licorice strings that she offered around.

She had the manner of an expert schoolteacher who can make a point with tart humor that’s inclusive, not biting, conveying both the separation from her students required by her position, and the fond regard she has for them.

She didn’t say “action,” or “begin” to launch a scene; she said, “rock and roll.” Meticulously, she ran through the play’s opening moments, trying to develop a flow of lighting effects and gestures that would crystallize the mood and the brothers’ relationship from the start.

“If you could do something that’s annoying, I’d appreciate it,” she told Perri, leaving it to him to come up with a truly annoying knock-knock-knocking of his feet against a kitchen cabinet while Dye’s Austin is trying to write.

Cast member Martha McFarland made a suggestion about how to deploy the flickering candle that is the first object seen in the play, and Alexander adopted it. They ran the sequence, then ran it again until the timing worked.

“That,” Alexander pronounced, “was a thing of beauty and a joy for [expletive] ever.”

Women for the Jobs

Forever, in SCR terms, is about how far back Alexander’s association with the theater goes.

David Emmes and Martin Benson, who founded the company in 1964, gave Alexander her first leading role the following year, in a production of “Ring Round the Moon,” a comedy by Jean Anouilh. Alexander celebrated her 18th birthday during the play’s run.

“I don’t remember it,” she said. “I think we all got drunk.”

“She was very precocious, in the best sense of the word,” recalled Emmes, who played opposite Alexander. “Inquisitive and energetic, and a great sense of humor. She had a good sense of herself and a strong commitment to living a life in the theater.”

She built her acting career in San Francisco, where she had been raised by an actress mother and a father who had been a theater critic. By the early ‘90s, she had moved to Los Angeles and appeared in the short-lived television series, “The New WKRP in Cincinnati.”

Five or six years ago, Alexander began to focus more on directing than acting. She reconnected with SCR as an actress in 1996, then began systematically pitching Emmes and Benson for a directing job.

“I called them twice a month for 2 1/2 years,” she said. “Finally they gave me my shot.”

Emmes said he and Benson scouted plays Alexander was directing in Los Angeles--including several by playwright Israel Horovitz that enjoyed successful runs--before offering her the director’s job last spring for “Play Strindberg” by Friedrich Durrenmatt.

“Hope is a very forthright and bold and uninhibited person, and that play needed a kind of boldness,” Emmes said. It was reflected in her introduction of a boxing motif to the staging.

Emmes said Alexander seemed a good match for “True West” because of her strong acting background: “This is a play that requires tremendous focus on the acting to tell the story.”

He and Benson also were interested in what might come of a woman’s perspective on “such a manly play.”

Women are underrepresented as directors, Alexander said. “Of course, I don’t want to be hired just because I’m a woman, but we have to be vocal and put [the issue] out there.

“This season there are three women directing at this theater,” she noted. The others are Julliette Carrillo in “References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot,” a new play by Jose Rivera, and Seret Scott in August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson.”

“That’s wonderful,” she said. “Our voices should be heard. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find another theater in the country with three women directors.”

Shades of Dark and Light

Being previously unacquainted with a famous play, as she was with “True West,” can be an advantage, Alexander said.

“It’s great to be working on material this well-known, and to experience it as something new,” she said. “Any play that had a [sustained] life should be approached as if it had just been written. Otherwise you create replicas, museum theater, which is not alive.”

Alexander confesses that directing “True West” has not instilled in her any craving to do more Shepard, although she appreciates him as “one of our great writers.”

Her temperament runs to works that “celebrate the human spirit,” she said, emphasizing courage and endurance in the face of trials.

“Shepard’s plays live in a very dark world,” she said. “You can’t have [celebration] in every play you direct, though.

“I’m still a business person,” she added. “If I just waited for the perfect play, my mortgage company would be very unhappy. It’s also important to put people in touch with their dark side, because what we don’t acknowledge is dangerous.”

Much of life is lived in shades of dark and light, of course--as the humor that runs through “True West” makes clear.

Asked whether she views the play as comedy or tragedy, Alexander reached back 14 years, to the days before her father’s death at 86.

“I’d never seen him weak before. It was very frightening for him and me,” she said. “I was fighting back tears.” Her father, who was living at her home in San Francisco, returned from the hospital and asked for some water to wash down his pills. Alexander obliged, unwittingly, with a leaky glass, a novelty item somebody had given her years before as a joke.

“It drenched him, and we both started laughing. He died a week later,” she said. “Is that comedy, or tragedy?”

* “True West,” by Sam Shepard, at South Coast Repertory’s Second Stage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. 7:45 tonight. $26-$45. Through Oct. 24. (714) 708-5555.