Kicking a Dead Horse

Kicking a Dead Horse

Public Theater, New York

(212) 967-7555

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For the last several decades, Sam Shepard has been exploring the psychological deserts of the American West, said Joe Dziemianowicz in the New York Daily News. Kicking a Dead Horse, his first piece in four years, “finds the acclaimed cowboy-playwright in familiar territory.” Hobart Struther, a world-weary Manhattan art dealer on a soul-searching solo trip through the badlands of Wyoming, finds himself in a desperate predicament when his horse dies. Stranded and resolved to bury his dead mount, Struther launches into extended reflections on life, art, and redemption. The 80-minute monologue plays like a summary of the themes that have shaped Shepard’s career, and the playwright at times seems determined to put to rest certain metaphors once and for all.

Problem is, the piece is “all metaphor and no drama,” said Marilyn Stasio in Variety. It’s not hard to see where Shepard is going with his heavy-handed symbolism. But he omits his usual heartfelt anger and wry humor, leaving the production with its own dead weight to drag around. Struther’s self-described “quest for authenticity”—the trip on horseback—proves to be anything but. His idea of the American West comes to seem rife with the same corruption and inauthenticity he was so desperately trying to flee. Struther ends up burying not only horse but also his hat, spurs, and other cowboy accoutrements, dismissing them as “sentimental claptrap.”

The play would be a lost cause if not for the terrific Irish actor Stephen Rea as Struther, said Eric Grode in The New York Sun. Rea’s “logy eyes and creaky gait effectively convey a city slicker who has grown nostalgic” for an idyllic version of the past. Rea’s American accent at times seems a bit undernourished, and he unforgivably slips into his own Irish brogue. But the actor deserves plaudits for creating a sense of introspection that gives “Hobart’s he-said–he-said arguments a spark of irony or meaning or something.” Otherwise Shepard’s writing would seem, uncharacteristically, as dry and lifeless as its desert setting.