"That's the last time we're having toast." It's the best line Sam Shepard never wrote, and made for one of the better moments of theatre I've seen in a long time. The most famous scene in this 1980 play involves the newly demented character Austin channelling his drifter brother Lee by stealing a dozen toasters and using them to make a wacked-out breakfast. On the opening night of Jimmy Fay's Lyric Theatre production, one of the toasters malfunctioned, and started to smoke and spark behind the actors' backs. When it took flame, actor Declan Conlon calmly fetched a small blanket, put out the fire, and improvised the line - all totally in character, provoking a spontaneous, whooping ovation from the audience. And from that moment on, what had been a solid but underengaged production became much more interesting: the real-life danger added the edge the play needs.
The problem up to that point was definitively not Conlon: from the first moments he delivered a convincing, brilliantly wrought interpretation of the manipulative Lee, from his feral physicality, to his canny surveillance of all the action around him, to his spot-on southern American accent - a revelatory performance. By contrast, it was regulating his accent that seemed to stifle any spontaneity in Luke Griffin's Austin: for the first hour we saw an actor delivering lines, not a character interacting with his environment.
This inability to help his actors deliver even performances foiled Fay's otherwise intelligent interpretation of the play, which started out as fairly straight-on naturalism - as indicated by Ferdia Murphy's remarkably detailed ranch-home set - and became increasingly frenetic and exaggerated as the psychodrama between the brothers jacked up.
Another problem was Philip Judge's too-plastic early cameo as the producer Saul Carol Moore's deadpan Mom, on the other hand, fitted right into the madness of the production's - ahem - electrifying final 20 minutes.
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