Livingston’s Blue Slipper Theatre will continue its new season with A Lie of the Mind this month, from Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist Sam Shepard. Performances are set for November 10th–12th and 17th–19th. Friday and Saturday shows will begin at 8pm, with Sunday matinees to follow at 3pm.
Winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for the best play of the year in 1985, A Lie of the Mind is an eight-character play involving two desperate families connected by the marriage of the son of one to the daughter of the other. One family from Southern California and other from rural Montana. At its heart, A Lie of the Mind is about how the fragile need between men and women can devolve into dysfunction when their differences are exploited rather than celebrated. How an act of violence splinters apart two families rendering them into their basest forms. It offers an unforgettable example of Sam Shepard’s genius in creating characters who are at once intensely, immediately real yet archetypal in dimension.
Jack Kroll of Newsweek wrote of the play, “Vibrant dialogue… mad, gutbucket humor… mythic resonance … Shepard is the great poet of our theater.” A reviewer for The New Yorker added, “Sam Shepard is surely the only dramatist who could tell a story as sad and frightening as this one and make such a funny play of it without ever skimping on its emotional depth.”
Directed by Daniel Erickson, the local cast features Kate Britton, Jenna Ciralli, John Henry Haseltine, Alex Miller, Mary Orr, Shanen Seale and BB Webb.
Tickets for A Lie of the Mind are $20 or $15 for students/seniors and are available at www.blueslipper.org. Seating at the Blue Slipper, located at 113 E Callender St, is limited. Please call (406) 222-7720 for more information. •
