'True West' With Ethan Hawke and Paul Dano: Which Brother Are You? You're Always Both.

NOBODY HAS TO EXPLAIN the message of Sam Shepard’s “True West” to me. It’s about how fragile identity is. Maybe it’s about how fragile everything is.

What you have here are two brothers, house-sitting and plant-watering in Southern California for their vacationing mom. One of them, Austin (Paul Dano in the current revival at the American Airlines Theater), has done well for himself. He’s a successful writer with a big Hollywood deal in the works and a (presumably loving) wife and children back home.

The other brother, Lee (Ethan Hawke with a young-Marlon-Brando ignorant-slob look and demeanor), is morally useless. He’s a drifter who appears to make ends meet by breaking into people’s homes and stealing their television sets. But during the two hours and 15 minutes of this 1980 drama, those solid differences begin to break down, melt and blur. Eventually, physical violence erupts. (Photo: John Malkovich, on floor, and Gary Sinise in the 1982 Off Broadway production at the Cherry Lane Theater.)

So the big plot twist comes when Lee interrupts a dining-nook meeting between Austin and Saul Kimmer (Gary Wilmes), a Hollywood producer, and manages to intrigue Saul with a western yarn he may be spinning off the top of his head. The next thing you know, Lee the con man has a screenplay to do, and of course Austin, the responsible (and literate) one, has to do most of the work.

Back in 2000, Philip Seymour Hoffmam and John C. Reilly, in poster photo, starred in a revival at Circle in the Square and alternated roles. Both actors were nominated for the best actor Tony.

What do the critics think? The New York Times (Ben Brantley) made this new revival a Critic’s Choice pick and called it “a play that seems to grow in disturbing depth every time it comes back to haunt us.”

Variety (Marilyn Stasio) disagreed. “If there’s one thing a production of ‘True West’ must have, it’s that haunting sense of the two brothers being one person at war with himself,” she wrote. “That’s exactly what director James Macdonald’s new Broadway production doesn’t have. “

The Washington Post (Peter Marks) praised the production’s “tickling rewards” but found Act II disappointing.

New York magazine (Sara Holdren, Vulture) found Mr. Dano’s performance lacking. “He’s so recessive for so long that Lee has nothing much to push against.”

Yes, Hawke is the flashy one here, and I’ve never believed him more or been more afraid of him. But I defend Dano’s performance. After all, Austin has spent his adult years learning other skills and aspects of human interaction. Sometimes that old joke about graduating from “the school of hard knocks” rings true. Lee knows how to grab an opportunity and seize it. Some would say steal it.

As for Shepard (in black-and-white photo), I have to confess that I loved him as a film actor (“The Right Stuff,” “Days of Heaven” and — another confession — “Baby Boom”) just as much as I admired him for his plays. I loved-hated the heavy-handedness of works like “Fool in Love” and “Buried Child.” But “True West” had me at hello, partly because of the personal-parallel factor.

I grew up as an only child in the blue-collar Deep South. What might a sibling of mine have been like? Who would I have been if I hadn’t run away to New York to become a writer? Who would I be if I returned? Thank goodness the works of Shepard, who died in 2017, are still around to help me reflect.

It’s lovely to see the Broadway veteran Marylouise Burke in her scene at the end as Mom, returning from her Alaskan cruise.

Kudos to my press-night guest, SS, who noticed that the plants were dead in Act II long before I did.

TRUE WEST, American Airlines Theater, 227 West 42nd Street, 212-719-1300, roundabouttheatre.org. 2 hours 15 minutes. Limited run: Closes on March 17.