Shooter, Lupe, Liza and Jeep are having Christmas Dinner. They set dishes on a card table. Napkins but no flatware. Water comes from a well. They eat with their fingers. No vegetables or bread. Before Lupe brings out the beautifully browned turkey, Jeep is telling an anecdote about a dancing bear. Shooter pulls his sweater way over his head, making paws of his hands, enacting the story.
Jeep then talks about the poet: Walt Whitman. Overcome with empathy and tenderness, Whitman nursed civil war soldiers, among the disarticulated limbs and carnage. Intersection of the grotesque and sacred. Jeep has a rather short fuse. He splinters chairs in these moments. Eventually Lupe must remind him when they’re down to the last chair. Jeep discloses a monologue, while he washes his hands, over and over. They never get clean.
There’s something vaguely rhetorical, searching, in their dialogue. You can buy a cow for twenty-five bucks, but nobody who’s selling. They have only one book, and compulsively search for a passage they never find. Liza might be the Scholar. She’s rigid about propriety, and sometimes breaks out in rage. Jeep, I think is the Artist, speaking sublimely about the day he’ll become himself in actuality. His voice almost shines. Lupe, the Hearth Keeper, is very calm. She takes things in hand. The childlike Shooter is the Laborer. Like the four astronauts we sometimes discuss in the abstract, they might be chosen to habitate a better planet. They all make their contribution.
The four assemble a family. Yearning to salvage sympathy, reasoning, the refined. They respect these ideals. Honor them. There are outbreaks of frustration, anger, destitution. There’s chaos and mess and groping and the ridiculous. But once we see their predicament (for a lack of a better word) we get the contained desperation. This square table, north, south, east and west, where meals are shared, participants engage and converse. Where they try to preserve the privilege of humanity. It might be the only place left, where recovery begins and ends.
Director Christina Cranshaw arranges the performers with skill and intuition. The rhythms of silence and tension, ticking and breakdown and exhaustion fall into place. Effective but unnerving. Taylor Harris (Shooter) a grand, tall, formidable guy, manages with humor and a kind of pathos. Caleb Mosley (Jeep) has that verve of the touchy creator, busy with energy and fascination. Sienna Castaneda Abbott (Lupe) in her eye-catching, festive holiday apron, is the rod that contains the lightning. Mikaela Baker (Liza) seems testy at times. She’s searching for higher truth, but knows you can’t have order without rules.
The Undermain launches their 42nd Season, with Action, by Sam Shepard, one of America’s preeminent playwrights (may God speed). Doubtlessly and sadly relevant to the present world and life we endure, Action is a marvel of bedlam, tragedy, and characters feverish with longing. They creep into your head, and know just where you live. They slyly wield the shock of recognition.
Undermain Theatre presents Sam Shepard’s Action, playing November 6th-December 7th, 2025. 3200 Main Street, Dallas, Texas 75223. 214-747-5515. Undermain.org