A Lie of the Mind opens with someone shouting desperately into a phone, "Just tell me where you are!" The man on the other end has no idea. This is Sam Shepard's territory, where location is crucial and everyone is lost. Frankie is trying to reach Jake, his brother, who sits in a nondescript small hotel room in a nondescript small town somewhere along Highway Two. What state? 
    "They're all the same," Jake mumbles. As another character later observes, "This is a country full of towns." Towns that no one recognizes.
     Sooner or later, Shepard's characters are driven back to the one place they know. "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in," wrote Robert Frost. A Lie of the Mind shows how that might happen. Paranoid and prone to violence, Jake convinced himself that his wife, Beth, was cheating on him with another actor in a play she is working on. He beat her to unconsciousness, then fled, sure that she is dead. Once Frankie finds his brother, he takes Jake back to the southern-California house where their mother, Lorraine, and sister, Sally, guard an already-uneasy peace. Accustomed to men who walk away, Lorraine is overjoyed that Jake has returned: "You never should have left in the first place," she tells him. But Jake's delusional rants soon accuse his mother, too, of working against him. He wants the truth of his father's death, of Beth's condition, of his family's "code." Sally he counts as an ally, but Sally has her own demons to chase, and she is less than thrilled at her brother's homecoming. "Everything's kind of shattered now," Sally observes. "Now?" Jake asks her. "When wasn't it shattered?"
     The play's steady exposition of the past proves that things have been shattered among Jake, Frankie, Sally, and Lorraine for a long time. But as Beth says, when "something's broken... parts still float." Beth's family, too, has plenty of floating parts to attend to. Though mentally and physically brutalized by her husband, Beth is still alive, and she also must go home to recover. Her brother Mike takes her back to Montana and to her parents, Baylor and Meg, who inhabit the same lonely rural house but have not kissed in twenty years. Here, Beth tries to walk, speak, function–and to remember–again. None of this is easy when the supposedly healthy relatives around her are having just as much trouble as she is. "Soon as it gets normal, we'll talk normal," Baylor tells his wife when she tells him to stop shouting. It never gets normal.
     Jake and Beth meet again only after three long acts of less and less normalcy, and when they do, they cross a literal divide: the stage area is split between houses, emphasizing the similarly fraught drama of the two families. The small space of the Donmar Warehouse magnifies and intensifies every exchange. So does the staging, with its subtly devastating lighting and excellent set. Props are important to this play, and Wilson Milam's production gets them all right. But the audience's attention is never long distracted from the actors. Some of Shepard's scenes could become wearying, as dialogues begin fully charged and then get more so, adding more themes, images, or revelations-from-the-past than it seems one play could hold. Fortunately, this company of eight maintains a pacing that shades every high and low. Each character is granted his or her moment and space. As Lorraine and Sally, Sinéad Cusack and Nicola Walker both seem a little too frantic at first, but by their final scenes together, their lines are among the play's most moving. In playing Meg, Anna Calder-Marshall walks the line between humor and tragedy without ever making her long-suffering, half-crazy character pathetic. (Neither she nor Cusack appear old enough for their roles, however.) Andrew Tiernan's portrayal of Mike, perhaps the play's most difficult part, is more uneven: he creates the right combination of frustration and concern in his early conversations with Beth ("How can you still want a man who tried to kill you?"), but his later crack-up is less convincing.
     If this ensemble work has a single focus, it is Beth. She has some of the most difficult lines: "Love is dead for him." "Did they bury me in a tree?" "I know what love is. You never forget that." Many of her speeches could sound pretentiously gnomic, or ramblingly incoherent. Catherine McCormack's performance avoids all such pitfalls, creating dramatic ambiguities that are neither frustrating nor pat. McCormack has the right frail beauty for the part, and she uses her physicality to good effect. "How can you know this thought in me?" Beth asks at one moment–and points to her scar. To Shepard, mental, emotional, and bodily hurt are inseparable, and McCormack's outstanding performance recognizes this. As Jake, Andy Serkis knows it too; he conveys rage whenever he moves. It is terrifying and exhilarating to watch his Jake as he moves closer and closer to the edge of psychosis.
     The whole play flirts with that boundary. Shepard's script destroys so many props of normal interpersonal relations–speech, trust, definite identity–and so many niceties of normal family life, that almost any sane resolution would seem ridiculous. The final scene, which uses six of the characters, along with a gunshot wound, a bloody American flag, a wedding proposal, and a snowstorm, can easily spin out of control. Or it can seem a tightly-calibrated demonstration of just how far these people have fallen. This cast and this production prove their superiority again here and serve the script well, neither overplaying the melodrama or underemphasizing the pain.
     Ultimately, going home only makes that pain worse. When Sally and Lorraine plan, at last, to be the ones running away rather than the ones waiting, Sally is worried that they're "not going to have any place to come back to". As Lorraine replies, "Who's coming back?"
Siobhan Peiffer