LIE OF THE MIND, A

by Shepard, Sam

After savagely beating his wife Beth to the brink of death, Jake returns to his mother’s home in California. He is convinced that he has killed her, and his guilt begins to erode his sanity. Jake’s brother Frankie goes to Beth’s family in search of the truth and finds her alive but badly brain damaged from Jake’s beating. Frankie is accidentally shot by Beth’s father who has mistaken him for a deer, and during a blizzard he effectively becomes a ‘prisoner’ of the household. Thereafter the tensions and enmities which motivate the two families grow disturbing and dangerous, as the border between fantasy and reality becomes increasingly blurred and as truth and lies become one and the same. “Shepard’s most ambitious, most accessible and most successful drama to date.” [Drama] “Shepard is surely the only dramatist alive 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.” [The New Yorker]