“Behind every great fortune,” Honore de Balzac is supposed to have said but didn’t (what he actually said was nowhere near as pithy), “is a great crime.” In Simpatico, Sam Shepard posits a corollary: that sometimes the great crime amounts to nothing more than a sleazy scam.
Shepard has dealt with track culture before, sort of. His 1974 Geography of a Horse Dreamer is a low-down variation on D.H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” about a young man who’s held prisoner by mobsters because he can predict the outcome of races. But Simpatico, which premiered in 1994, doesn’t have the hallucinatory poetics of Horse Dreamer or Shepard’s other, iconic earlier plays. Stylistically, it’s more of a noir-inflected black comedy a la Elmore Leonard’s roughly contemporaneous Get Shorty—the difference being a considerably heavier emphasis on the blackness than the comedy. For all its oddball characters, its neat one-liners, there’s a deadly serious struggle at the heart of Simpatico. It’s the same one Shepard examined, explosively, a decade and a half earlier, in True West, where estranged brothers Austin and Lee turn vicious over a movie script. For that matter, it’s the same one the Bible examines in Genesis, when Jacob makes his grab for Esau’s birthright. Carter and Vinnie are two souls—or maybe, as has been suggested, two parts of a single soul—playing a zero-sum game, the one trying to hold onto all the things he cheated and stole to get, the other trying to recover all the things he worked just as tirelessly to lose. We don’t get the comprehensive list of what those things are until near the end, yet, thanks to Shepard’s incredibly deft writing, we know in our bones that we should dread finding out.
Through 8/25: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM
A Red Orchid Theatre
1531 N. Wells
312-943-8722aredorchidtheatre.org
$30-$40
