52 pages • 1-hour read
A Lie Of The Mind: A Play in Three Acts
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Act IChapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of mental illness, cursing, illness or death, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and domestic violence.
Act I, Scene 1 Summary
A man named Jake calls to his brother, Frankie, from a payphone on Highway 2. Jake is distressed and keeps slamming the phone into the receiver. Frankie asks Jake to calm down and give him the phone number, so he can call Jake back if they get disconnected. Jake cannot see the number in the dark. He says Beth is with him, which confuses Frankie, but Jake says Beth cannot “pull outa this one” (10), adding that she is red, black, and blue. Frankie does not understand, and Jake repeats that he did not see his violent episode coming. Jake says Beth is dead and hangs up the phone. Frankie yells Jake’s name in frustration.
Act I, Scene 2 Summary
Beth is in a hospital room with bandages on her face and head. Her brother, Mike, comforts her, and she struggles to speak. Beth starts removing bandages, and Mike tries to stop her, insisting she needs to rest. Beth is confused and asks Mike how far underground they are. Her speech is slurred. She says she is not dead, so they need to dig her up. Mike explains that they are in a hospital, and Beth gets angry, demanding to know who “fell” her. She recognizes Mike, calling him a dog and saying they left him to bring her back. Beth spits in Mike’s face, but he continues to comfort her. Beth does not want Mike to take her anywhere, and he says he will stay with her until she feels better. Beth struggles to remember who hurt her, and Mike says he is gone.
Act I, Scene 3 Summary
Frankie and Jake are in a motel room, and Frankie keeps trying to apply ice to Jake’s neck. Jake pushes Frankie away and explains what happened with Beth. Beth was acting in a play, and Jake complains that she went to rehearsals every day. She would put on oils and perfumes, and the smells would wake Jake up. He knew she was getting ready for another man. She started wearing less clothing, and Jake told her to start dressing more modestly. He insisted she wear a bra and underwear, but she ignored him. Frankie notes that Beth never wore underwear, and Jake claims he never told Frankie that detail, turning his anger toward Frankie. Frankie redirects Jake’s anger back to his story, and Jake continues his explanation, getting angrier.
Beth was rehearsing for a play about a woman who wants to sleep with a man who has been ignoring her for years. Jake emphasizes how actors pretend to become the characters they play, which means Beth must have been having sex with the actor playing her romantic interest in the play. Frankie does not believe it, but Jake says there are ways a man knows when a woman is pulling away from him. Beth said Jake was crazy, but he is confident that Beth was having an affair. Jake says acting is not real work, and Frankie thinks Jake is being unreasonable.
Jake says he killed Beth, but he did not check to see if she was dead. Frankie says Jake should have called the police, but Jake says Beth deserved it. Frankie recalls how Jake blames everyone else for his temper, noting a time Jake kicked their milk goat for stepping on his foot. Jake remembers the goat, but he claims he loved it and never kicked it. Jake collapses but refuses to let Frankie get a doctor. Jake becomes solemn and laments losing Beth. He asks Frankie why he misses Beth now, but he never missed her when she was with him. Jake grows more desperate and feels like he will die without Beth. Frankie goes to get Jake a blanket, but Jake stops him, asking Frankie to sit with him in silence.
Act I, Scene 4 Summary
Mike helps Beth practice walking. She is still bandaged, and her speech is slurred. Mike encourages Beth to walk instead of trying to talk, but Beth claims she and Jake are like children. Mike yells at Beth to stop talking about Jake, and Beth folds over. Mike apologizes and says Beth needs to recover and come home to their parents, but Beth yells at him to stop pushing her. Mike steps back, and Beth stands still. Beth tells Mike to take a step, and she laughs when Mike steps forward. Mike tries to encourage Beth, who insists she is not a child. Beth says Jake killed her and himself. Mike angrily asks how Beth can still want to be with Jake after he hurt her so severely, and Beth says Jake is her heart.
Act I, Scene 5 Summary
Frankie and Jake’s sister, Sally, and their mother, Lorraine, come to the motel room. Jake is unconscious on a couch, and Frankie tries to explain what happened. Jake is sick, and he refuses to eat. Lorraine does not remember Beth, and Sally reminds her that Beth is Jake’s wife. Lorraine says any woman who decides to live with Jake deserves to be beaten, and she claims Jake is only pretending to be sick. As a child, Jake would mope until Lorraine splashed him with cold water.
Lorraine claims Jake is strange because the doctor dropped him on his head after he was born. When Lorraine tries to wake Jake up, his face is pale. Confused, Jake sees Sally and thinks she is Beth. He grabs Sally’s wrist, remembering a time he tied Beth to him to keep her from leaving. Sally tells Jake to let go, and Lorraine hits Jake with her shoe. Frankie pulls Lorraine off Jake, and she hits Frankie instead. Lorraine insists that Frankie should not give Jake alcohol, adding that Jake always tried to keep pace with his father.
Frankie says he has not given Jake any alcohol, but Lorraine continues to insist. Jake pulls Sally closer to him before collapsing, and Frankie says they need to find out what happened to Beth. Lorraine wants to bring Jake home, claiming the motel is the cause of Jake’s illness. Sally thinks Jake is “crazy” and threatens to leave if Lorraine tries to bring him home. To Lorraine, Jake is just a child, and she needs to help him.
Act I, Scene 6 Summary
Mike and Beth’s parents, Meg and Baylor, come to the hospital while Beth is asleep. Mike explains that the doctors think Beth has brain damage from Jake’s beating. Baylor does not understand what brain damage is, and Meg does not seem to remember Jake. Mike says Meg was at Jake and Beth’s wedding, and Meg recalls that they do not talk to Jake’s family anymore. Baylor, who did not go to the wedding, disdainfully calls Jake’s family “Oakies.” Mike does not think they should wake Beth without talking to the doctors, which upsets Baylor. He does not want to talk to any “college boys” and claims the doctors are holding Beth against her will. Meg remembers being held in a hospital against her will once, but Baylor says that was Meg’s mother, not Meg.
A farmer, Baylor plans to sell two of his mules at a nearby fairground. Mike is shocked that Baylor would try to do business while his daughter is in the hospital; Meg says she was ashamed to bring the mules through the city. Mike asks Baylor to just wait an hour, but Baylor gets offended, saying sarcastically that he is a “dumb rancher,” who would not understand anything the doctors would tell him anyway. Baylor decides to leave and tells Meg to come with him, but Mike wants Meg to stay. Baylor claims that “watching out for” two women is more than one man can handle, but Mike says there are nurses and doctors helping Beth. Meg wants to stay, but Baylor goes to get her jacket. Finally, Beth wakes up and sees Meg.
Act I, Scene 7 Summary
Jake lies in bed at his childhood home in Southern California. Lorraine tries to feed him broccoli soup, pretending it is a helicopter. The room is the same as when Jake was young, and model World War II airplanes hang from the ceiling. Lorraine tries to comfort Jake, saying he is well-built like his father and can easily find another woman. Jake smacks the spoon down, jumps up, and grabs the bowl of soup. He dumps it on the bed and stomps on it. Lorraine spent hours making the soup, and she yells at him, but Jake tells her to back away. Jake is agitated and does not recognize his room. Lorraine tries to tell him that Sally left and Frankie went to find Beth’s family. Suspicious, Jake tries to go after Frankie, claiming Frankie is sneaking around with Beth. Jake suddenly asks about his family’s past, and Lorraine tells him how the family spent a long time following Jake’s father, who was in the military. Jake wonders if his father was lying to them. He remembers his father using made-up codes on the phone, saying he worked for the government. Jake wants to see his father’s ashes, and Lorraine says they are under the bed with his leather jacket and some medals.
Jake examines the ashes and belongings, which Lorraine kept for him. Jake asks how his father died, and Lorraine says he “burned up.” Jake wonders if his father’s plane crashed, but Lorraine says he died in a car accident when he was driving under the influence of alcohol. Lorraine claims Jake already knows how his father died, which upsets Jake, but Lorraine reminds him that he was there when the accident happened. Before leaving, Lorraine tells Jake to rest. Jake looks into the distance and hallucinates Beth, partially undressed and rubbing oil on herself. She disappears when Jake moves toward her, and he blows on his father’s ashes.
Act I Analysis
Act I begins by establishing the physical and emotional distance between the characters. Jake is on the highway, Frankie is at home in Southern California, Beth is in the hospital in Montana, and Meg, Baylor, Lorraine, and Sally are traveling to meet their respective family members. This introduces the theme of The Collapse of the American Family. The characters’ distance represents their loss of connection to each other. Jake’s act of domestic violence, which opens the play and puts Beth in the hospital, is the catalyst that throws each family into chaos. In the opening scenes, Shepard highlights how these characters were already separate from each other prior to this event. Only at the end of Act I are the members of Jake’s family gathered in their own home in Southern California, and only at the beginning of Act II does Beth’s family congregate in Montana.
The play opens with a sense of psychological fragmentation and disarray. Frankie does not know where Jake is, Jake is not sure if Beth is alive, Meg has lapses in memory, Baylor is more interested in selling his animals than helping his daughter, and Beth is suffering from brain injury that impairs her speech and cognition. These details, which play out in the first scenes, reveal dysfunction and confusion, with the different characters struggling to make sense of the situation, each other, and themselves.
In Act I, Mike and Frankie are quickly established as the most rational characters of the play. Frankie focuses on concrete events. He wants to know exactly what Jake did to Beth and what they can do moving forward. When Jake starts to slip into a depression, Frankie offers practical solutions, asking: “You want me to get a doctor for you?” and offering: “I could go to her folks place. They’d know what happened to her” (17). The suggestion of getting a doctor provides an early link between Mike and Frankie, as Mike tries to emphasize the importance of medical care, while the idea of going to Montana to see if Beth is alright provides a rational solution to Jake’s confusion and anger.
Mike focuses on helping Beth regardless of Baylor and Meg’s scattered commentary. They are each more interested in their own internal dramas than they are with their daughter’s wellbeing. Mike struggles to explain Beth’s medical care to Baylor, who is resentful and defensive. Mike assures his father: “Nobody’s interested in making a fool out of you, Dad. Beth’s sick. She needs attention. And everybody here is doing the best they can for her” (27). Mike’s short sentences and rational train of thought set him apart from the angry Baylor and the confused Meg and Beth. Together, Mike and Frankie are making efforts to repair their families, though with limited success.
These relationships highlight the theme of The Fragmentation of Memory and Identity. Both families come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and appear to have limited educations. They are precisely the kind of families that were left behind in the US’s turn toward conservative financial policy. They speak in dialect, and their lines have an edge. This dynamic comes through in the mothers, Lorraine and Meg. In addition to their general confusion, both Lorraine and Meg forget their children’s wedding. As Mike and Frankie establish a sense of rationality within their respective families, Lorraine and Meg disrupt events with their disconnected dialogue. When Sally mentions Beth to Lorraine, Lorraine responds: “Never heard a’ her,” following up by saying: “No. Why should I? I don’t keep track of his bimbos” (22). Not only does Lorraine forget who Beth is, she also groups together any woman who might have dated or married Jake under the derogatory term “bimbos.” While Meg does not insult Jake, she responds similarly, telling Mike: “Wasn’t he the son of those people we don’t talk to anymore?” (26), struggling to remember Jake even as Mike reminds her that she was at Jake and Beth’s wedding.
Lorraine and Meg both forget Jake and Beth’s marriage because it does not align with their beliefs about their families’ identities. Lorraine resents Jake for marrying Beth and leaving home, while Meg, taking into account Baylor’s comment on Jake being an “Oakie,” does not see Jake as a good man to welcome into their family. In the moment that Lorraine and Meg see their children, they regress to an earlier stage of being parents. Meg is coming to the hospital to help Beth, which assumes a certain infantilization of Beth. It contradicts the fact that Beth is an adult, married woman. Likewise, Lorraine infantilizes Jake, acting like he is a toddler again. This feeds her fantasy of an idealized past, when the children were young and Jake’s father was alive.
Jake’s room is filled with military memorabilia, from the model World War II airplanes to his father’s jacket, medals, and American flag. These objects evoke patriarchal military authority while also harkening back to the immediate post-war economic boom. The objects are intended to bring out nostalgia for the contentedness of American middle-class society at that time, which is embodied in the spirit of patriotism that lingered after World War II prior to the cultural upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s. When Jake asks how his father died, he specifically asks: “His plane crashed?” (33), implying that his father died during the war. However, Lorraine responds: “No. He was no hero. Got hit by a truck. Drunk as a snake out in the middle of the highway” (34). This exchange sets the idealized past against the difficult reality of their current lives.
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