Joan Marcus Stephen Rea as a Manhattan art dealer looking for "authenticity" in "Kicking a Dead Horse." As the lights rise on a landscape of dusty earth and distant buttes, a tarp slides from the stage to reveal the majestic corpse of a horse lying supine. Just in front of the body is a horse-size hole in the ground. All is silent for a moment as honky-tonk music fades, and then a spray of earth flies up from the hole. Another follows a few seconds later. Out jumps a shovel, followed by the grave-digger himself, a bedraggled, angry-looking, mud-smeared fellow in a bolo tie, played by the terrific Irish actor Stephen Rea. That opening tableau — dead horse, yawning grave, merciless sky, peevish shovelfuls of dirt arcing across the stage — is funny, macabre and somehow crushingly sad. Mr. Shepard's writing strikes all those chords too, as Mr. Rea's character, Hobart Struther, recounts the events that have led him to this sorry pass. But nothing in the play really improves upon that starkly eloquent initial image, which seems to announce with nary a word that Mr. Shepard, who has drawn on visions of the West, mythic and real, for decades now, is about ready to give up the game, to intone the last rites over a galloping symbol of freedom, possibility, redemption. Although it provides a fine showcase for the craggily compelling Mr. Rea, "Kicking a Dead Horse" is a disappointingly arid lament for America's lost ideals and despoiled frontiers, a blunt position paper from a playwright whose best writing is rich in mystery and oblique but potent imagery. As Hobart announces plainly up front and repeats more than once, he fled west in a desperate search for "authenticity." He isn't sure where he lost it, or if he ever really had it, but he knows for certain that it's as scarce as sagebrush in the concrete-and-glass canyons of New York City. A spiritual crisis found him heaving lucrative pieces of art out the window and onto the Park Avenue sidewalk in a frenzy of self-disgust. Now Hobart has left career, foundering marriage and all else behind to go back to his roots. Unfortunately his four-legged vehicle of redemption, a beloved old horse, has let him down. "Barely even got started on the Grand Sojourn, and he drops from underneath me," he says with bitter disgust, then gives the poor creature the first of many swift blows to the belly with his boot. Still, Hobart refuses to let the vultures and coyotes and the blazing sun do their worst. He's determined to bury the big, beautiful animal, and as he talks he embarks on a bruising campaign to wrestle the dead horse into his welcoming grave. Mr. Shepard, like most playwrights of the latter half of the 20th century, is an admirer of another playwriting Sam, the great Beckett. In its barren but suggestive landscape, its gallows humor and the defeating near-futility of Hobart's quest, "Horse" feels like a conscious homage to Beckett. The setting recalls the wastelands of "Waiting for Godot" and "Happy Days," those masterly portraits of end-of-days despair laced with mordant comedy. As in those plays, the passage of time lurches and stalls erratically in "Horse," as dusk falls with a flick of a light switch. (Perhaps it is significant, too, that Mr. Shepard chose an Irish actor to create the role of Hobart, and the Abbey Theater of Dublin, co-presenter of the play here, to stage the world premiere.) Although he is known for the long arias that pepper his works, Mr. Shepard's best plays explode with primal conflict between brothers or lovers, fathers and mothers, fathers and sons. With but a single character onstage (save for a mysterious female apparition), Mr. Shepard is forced to employ an unconvincing dramatic device to generate theatrical heat and expose the fissures in Hobart's soul. As he pours forth his story — the loose living out West, the wily purchases of old paintings from back-roads bars that he parlayed into a lucrative career, the desiccated marriage — Hobart conducts a testy argument with an alter ego. Mr. Rea uses a snippy, nasal whine to embody this devil's advocate who challenges his insights and decisions at every turn. At one point this imp-Hobart persuades the other to toss all his cowboy accouterments into the grave — spurs, saddle, hat — and dismisses the noble call of the West as "sentimental claptrap." Hobart protests mightily but ultimately goes along.
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