Anything is possible in a family, the psychotherapeutic cliché has it. But surely not this. Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind is a work of art, but it’s made from Jerry Springer, movie-of-the-week stuff: Jake is married to Beth, and he calls his brother from a roadside phone booth late at night to confess that he has beaten her to death. He hasn’t: He’s merely beaten her into a brain-damaged stupor. Jake’s Freudian nightmare of a mother dismisses the crime without a second thought, saying that the woman must have had it coming. His slightly more put-together brother, Frankie, however, doubts the story and decides to investigate—and possibly to make amends, to the extent that such a thing is possible. So he tracks Beth down at her family’s remote Montana home. Alternating between incoherence and lucidity, she maintains that she still loves Jake but attempts to seduce Frankie, whom she takes to be a less homicidal and therefore more desirable version of his wayward brother. And that’s just the set-up for the degeneracy that follows.

Hollywood-grade celebrity has its uses, and Ethan Hawke has leveraged his to launch and direct the first major off-Broadway revival of Shepard’s harrowing exploration of what one would call “dysfunctional families”—except that “dysfunctional” says too little and “families” says too much. If there’s not a handy term for “gangs of genetically and legally related persons victimizing each other in various unspeakable ways,” then Mr. Shepard owes it to us to coin