08/31/2026
Thank you The Current and Zeta McCaskill for the awesome article on the show! We truly appreciate the support and we had a total blast performing it! Thank you!!
Everyone loves a good Western. The tales of rugged, horse-mounted outlaws finding love, friendship and redemption, and battling with the choice whether to live in civilization or anarchy. But what if those stories don’t paint a true picture of what it’s really like to live in the West? What if the true-to-life stories of the West are trapped in the memories of those living in solitude out on the Mojave Desert, with only crickets, coyotes and cacti to keep them company?
“True West,” the original play by American playwright and actor Sam Shepard, is not one of the old tales of gunslinging lawless cowboys chewing to***co and saddling up their horses. Instead, it’s a portrait of a different kind of West, a story of two brothers as they battle self-identity, sibling rivalry, alcoholism and their definition of success in 1980s California.
This weekend, Joseph Vidibill, a UL Lafayette theater student, continues to make his directing debut with “True West,” in the second and last set of performances at Cité des Arts.
Vidibill directs Michael Bunker as Austin, a clean-cut, successful screenwriter, who is house-sitting at his mother Rosemary’s home in the California desert while she is on vacation in Alaska.
Opposite him, like two gunslingers in a duel, is his older estranged brother, Lee, a reckless, flaky and domestically abusive alcoholic played by local actor, acting coach and director Cooper Helm, who barges in on his brother’s supposed safe haven.
In a nod to the Western genre, Austin is in the midst of writing a screenplay for one he hopes will be his next big hit and ticket to financial security, at least for a while.
What follows is a blur of memories and emotions as dangerous and destructive as a raging tornado.
Read more at thecurrentla.com/2026/trust-west-where-brotherly-love-goes-to-die/
