Kicking A Dead Horse

photo: Joan Marcus

A dead horse, an open grave and a man struggling to put the former into the latter: this is Sam Shepard's Beckett-like eighty minute one-act in which the playwright seems to be moaning about his own work through the metaphor of a disillusioned New York art dealer in search of "authenticity". Essentially a monologue, the play is spiked with dark deadpan humor which only occasionally lands as intended: for too much of the play we're inpatient for the inevitable (and obvious) conclusion and wondering why Shepard wrote the piece for Irish actor Stephen Rea, whose effortful try at an American accent is unconvincing and distracting.