Muscular, gritty, blistering — they’ve all been used often to define Chicago theater. And while they might be cliche, Raven Theatre’s incendiary production of Sam Shepard’s violently intense “A Lie of the Mind” is definitely all three.
Running through March 22, the Edgewater staging that opened Wednesday night is a rip-roaring barnburner, where a perfect storm of extreme domestic violence, mental illness, past trauma and a loaded rifle form an all-consuming vortex of destruction and passion that’s impossible to look away from.
Directed with a sure hand by Azar Kazemi, the cast digs into “A Lie of the Mind” with the force of a dozen jackhammers, as the story of two families stuck together like syncretic parasites hurtles to its stark final moment. “A Lie of the Mind” is also often hilarious, although the humor is darker than a black hole and as cutting as a warehouse full of steak knives.
The 1985 drama’s plot is centered on Beth (Gloria Imseih Petrelli) and her lethally abusive husband, Jake (Ian Maryfield). Raven bills the piece as a re-imagined revival. Look carefully at Lauren M. Nichols’ set and Sally Dolembo’s costuming — both contain clues of a culture clash that deepens and complicates the story. A taxidermied deer head and a rifle mount on the wall clash with a crimson, woven rug and an altar-like table of photos. An ornate dressing gown worn by Beth’s mother Meg (Joan Nahid) contrasts with the camouflage favored by Jake. The details speak to a collision of cultures: Shepard’s rural West, and a place never explicitly named but that seems thousands of miles removed from Montana.
At lights up, Jake is shouting desperately into a pay phone: He’s beaten Beth — seemingly to death — Jake tells his brother Frankie (John Drea), and he can’t live without her. It’s a conversation the brothers have had before, as it turns out. Beth, however, isn’t dead (not a spoiler, we see her early on), but the beating left her with profound brain damage.
Beth’s brother Mike takes her to recover with their parents. Jake, too, returns to his family home where his mother Lorraine (Meighan Gerachis) infantilizes and pampers him, spoon-feeding him soup and insisting the near-death beating was Beth’s fault.
As Shepard’s fractious, ever-spiraling plot rockets forward, it becomes unnervingly apparent that untreated mental illness — paranoia, delusion, addiction, unceasing rage — is running through both families’ DNA. Eventually, the families collide with meteoric force and disastrous consequences.
The cast is uniformly remarkable. Petrelli’s luminous Beth has lost her command of language as a result of the beating. When Petrelli speaks, it’s as if Beth’s words are glass shards, their meaning jumbled and refracted but uncannily coherent nonetheless.
Maryfield’s Jake is terrifying, the product of a gruesome trauma and possibly guilty of patricide. He’s defined by rage and recklessness, the latter propelling him to run through Montana’s frozen tundras in little more than a pair of boxing shorts. Jake’s machismo and propensity for savageness roil with a potency you can almost smell.
Truth and perception are twined slippery eels in “A Lie of the Mind.” Baylor (Meg’s flag-waving, manchild husband played by Rom Barkhordar), Lorraine and Meg don’t recall Jake’s wedding or who he married. The specifics of a horrific accident years earlier — if it was an accident — change depending on who’s talking about it. Words go missing, meanings get tangled yet the events and the emotions of “A Lie of the Mind” are always crystal-clear, albeit with language that feels filtered through a fun-house mirror.
Gerachis’ Lorraine is a standout among standouts, merging tragedy, willful ignorance and comedy into a single, unforgettable character that ably shows precisely why she’s long been a force in the theatrosphere.
As Mike, Arash Fakhrabadi is equal parts protective and controlling, dragging dead deer through the house with the same fervor he applies to keeping his sister away from Jake.
In the end, the denizens of “A Lie of the Mind” don’t exit so much as then vanish, walking slowly through a green, hazy limbo that makes things feel like a dream which might be nightmare.
There’s a mini-Shepard fest going on in Chicago, with “Fool for Love” in a revival at Steppenwolf, which made its name with a now-iconic production of “True West” in 1982. Raven’s “A Lie of the Mind” is a similarly spectacular entry to Chicago’s storied theater history.