Heartless

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In Sam Shepard territory, “we never know who’s telling the truth,” said Jeremy Gerard in Bloomberg.com. His latest “spookily engrossing” drama presents a tale so twisted by family secretsand private agendas that none of the characters can be trusted. Not Roscoe (Gary Cole), an aging professor who recently left his wife and children. Not his paramour, Sally (Julianne Nicholson), a young woman obsessed with death. And certainly not Sally’s oddball family, headed by a very hostile mother (Lois Smith). Though Shepard denies us a credible guide to this dysfunctional household, it’s obvious that it harbors some sinister secret.

Eventually, though, it’s not clear which of Shepard’s characters are alive, said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. The production plants “big, glaring clues to tantalize us, like those long, angry scars running down a couple of chests and stomachs.” Shepard and director Daniel Aukin seem too intent on calling attention to the play’s metaphysical themes. That’s not to say that there aren’t some genuinely thrilling moments; most of them involve Smith’s “cutting loose to delightful effect.” It is she who gets the inevitable Shepard soliloquy, and while the lines written for her are over the top, Smith gives them “rapt, visceral immediacy.” The speech is a burst of light in a production that’s frustratingly abstract. It’s one thing for Shepard to insist that home and identity are illusory, but he’s said that before, “and with more dramatic urgency and clarity.”