Theater: What the Hay?

Until now, on the roster of American playwrights that can be expected to assault audiences with heavy-handed metaphor, Sam Shepard has always ranked dead last. Yet in the puzzling wake of Kicking a Dead Horse, the playwright’s first new work to premiere at the Public Theater since Simpatico 14 years ago, he’s shooting to the top of the list.

With his trademark opaqueness, Shepard peripherally tells the tale of Hobart Strother (Stephen Rea), a swaggering, embittered emblem of Western values, and of the sleek horse that expired most inopportunely on him in the bone-dry American desert. Perhaps only this dramatist, here acting as his own director, could craft an opening image that is as breathtakingly exquisite as it is balls-to-the-wall bathetic. As music is heard, a silk sheet draped across the stage is slowly retracted toward the upstage wall, as if gliding on a path toward an invisible gutter. Uncovered are comical-looking earth mounds—miniature versions of the mountainous dirt piles Samuel Beckett decreed as the set for his play Happy Days. Nearby is a bundle of props, including a cowboy hat big enough to enliven a rodeo crowd, a gorgeous saddle and shiny spurs. Not far away is the titular horse: once very beautiful, it’s now drained of life.

For the next hour or so, as Strother fitfully unfurls his biography, everything is rather ethereal. One is never sure where this man is or why he’s there, although he frequently expounds on the paucity of “authenticity” in the world and the imperative to correct it. Not long ago, he was an art dealer of repute in the glass-and-granite canyons of Manhattan, but that cutthroat universe proved less than providential to his soul. His instinct now is to ground himself in terra firma, to become hitched to the unchangeable forces of nature—to the skies, to the heavens. Good thing he packed a tent in case it rains, which it eventually does.

Mostly, though, Strother wants to properly bury the horse—hence the foreboding pit at center stage. In between efforts to lift the horse and push it into the gaping hole, he muses, confesses, sings and generally rails against our nation’s poor, doleful state. He calls Crazy Horse, a 19th-century Native American warrior, a “true American hero.” He directly references America’s violation of another land’s sovereignty. (Get it?)

Strother also has many fits of pique that impel him to march over to the horse and kick it in the ribs. At one point, he manages to lift the horse so it’s balanced on its spine before falling over with a thud. Each kick is greeted with offstage timpani, echoing Strother’s growing frustration. Unlike most Shepard plays, in which heightened realism is the matchstick-igniting sibling or family tension, his anger is what is trapped inside of him. It’s also what prevents the play from warming to our emotions.

For all of the play’s metaphors, visual or spoken (watch Strother hurl the props into the pit and argue it represents anything but American decline), Rea’s performance is incandescent. It’s lucid, honest, giving—even when a mysterious woman, played by Elissa Piszel in a sheer slip, rises from the pit and gently places the cowboy hat back on Strother’s head.

Kick, timpani, kick, timpani and more ethereal commentary follow. I won’t give away the ending, but you can see it coming—metaphorically—far away. “Ladies and gentlemen,” we might as well have heard, “we’re gathered here today to mourn America, which perished when a B-52 dropped an atomic metaphor.” Actually, had we heard that, it wouldn’t have surprised a soul.

Through Aug. 10. Public Theater, 425 Lafayette St. (near Astor Place), 212-967-7555; $50.