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THEATER REVIEW: "Seduced" is a critique on American desires, dreams

Published: Saturday, September 26, 2015 at 9:00 p.m.

Although many know Sam Shepard best as a film actor — Chuck Yeager in "The Right Stuff," opposite longtime partner Jessica Lange in "Crimes of the Heart," in Terrence Malick's "Days of Heaven" and more — he built his reputation primarily as a writer.

Even while carving out an eclectic career verging from counterculture to mainstream, Shepard wrote his most famous trio of plays — "True West," "Curse of the Starving Class" and "Buried Child," a Pulitzer Prize winner — in the late '70s and early '80s, about the same time he created "Seduced," playing now in the Allen Bales Theatre as part of the University of Alabama Department of Theatre and Dance's season.

Shepard's plays are challenges at best, with wild, anarchic blends of myth, dark humor, sparse language and harsh realities, but director Raines Carr has pulled together a dimensional, disturbing creation, shadowy with edges protruding. It's led by a stellar central performance from Matt Gabbard as Henry, a Howard Hughes-ish recluse gabbling, exploding and imploding in his later years.

Garrett Walsh's set, an aviator's graveyard dimpled by an OCD navel, helps Gabbard hunker at the central chaos of a crash-down life, an effect nicely assisted by shifting tones in a tawny, sometimes- harsh lighting design by Amanda Harris. It's desert and oasis, man and machine, ugly reality and dismantled fantasy.

"Seduced" opens musically, with the elegiac title track to Randy Newman's 1972 classic, "Sail Away," which, despite the seeming incongruity, sets the course. Newman's sardonic, backhanded assaults deeply influenced Shepard: The songs are written into the script.

The thing some who only know Newman as writer of "Toy Story" hits miss is that his sweet melodies often hide satiric twists, such as in "Short People," one of the more widely misunderstood anti-discrimination hits, or in "I Love L.A.," "Rednecks," or "Birmingham," a song both tongue-in-cheek and not, which is always slightly disturbing to see Magic City folks sing along with.

"Sail Away" seems, on the surface, to be about the dream of flying off for better shores, but is in actuality a hymn-like melody overlaying the song of slavers, urging Africans to climb aboard: "In America you'll get food to eat / Won't have to run through the jungle / And scuff up your feet / You'll just sing about Jesus and drink wine all day / It's great to be an American."

"Lonely at the Top," from the same disc, states the "Seduced" theme succinctly: "I've been around the world / Had my pick of any girl / You'd think I'd be happy / But I'm not." Be careful what you dream for, Americans. Henry once flew, literally, an imaginative, adventurous aviator, engineer and inventor, winning fortunes, sleeping with numberless beautiful women, earning the admiration of all who hope to self-make their way to the top, forgetting that gravity sucks.

"Seduced" picks up as Henry's devolved to the stage of out-of-control hair and nails, wearing Kleenex boxes on his feet. Mental illness and pain — some caused by aircraft crashes — drove Hughes to madness. Henry's got the same symptoms, but Shepard's suggesting it was the dream of America, getting everything and finding you desire nothing — or nothing that's left — that did him in.

Gabbard, while 50 years too young to be thoroughly Hughes-ian, made the smart choice, with Carr, to play it less decrepit and senior, but no less pained and wracked. Gabbard's physicality, both in the shuffling and staggering, and in the way his flesh seems to revolt from all but the tenderest touches, sells the suffering, creating an empathy that might have been burned away by the harshness of his language, his severe treatment of loyal bodyguard/manservant Raul (Ross Birdsong), and dismissive turns toward two of his past lovers, Luna (Molly Penny) and Miami (Marie Videau), summoned in an effort to help heal him.

Henry is past help, and in his more lucid moments — flickering in and out like a moth circling a bulb — seems to realize it. But anyone who's flown so high isn't about to relinquish controls and auger in.

Make of their names what you will — Luna as moon, what the moth never reaches, and root of "lunacy;" Miami as one of the tribes native to America before the white man came and named it "America" — the women are types, yet nicely fleshed out by Penny as the slinky sophisticate, and Videau as the brassy broad. Each brings a relief, of sorts, comic, silly, sweet and human, to the unrelenting assault of Henry, though no possible production of "Seduced" is going to be a bellyful of laughs.

Birdsong does exceptional work himself, as the almost-cipher Raul, tightly under control yet verging on losing it, suggesting the simmer but letting the boil arise when it will.

While it's never going to be major-league Shepard, "Seduced" is the kind of work you hope to see more of in the theater, as opposed to rehashed classics, butts-in-seats comfort food. It's great for the students, of course, something to stretch and grow from, and a treat for audiences who don't buy tickets to be patted on the back for perfect attendance. There are puzzles to ponder, about rot at the roots of America, about whether our priorities are healthy, about course corrections before crash.

Though, honestly, what you might think will be: Geez, even Randy Newman lightened up.