In the first Broadway revival of Sam Shepard’s 1980 play, Ethan Hawke portrays Lee, a drifter, a drinker, and a thief who disrupts the life of his younger brother, Paul Dano’s Austin, an Ivy League educated writer and family man, in the kitchen of their mother’s home, where Austin is house-sitting and working on a screenplay. Halfway through the play, the brothers in effect switch identities – and descend into chaos, trashing their mother’s home and locking into unwinnable combat.
Hawke and Dano are both wonderful actors….Yet it’s hard to feel a visceral connection between the two, or take the show of menace seriously…
