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It is said none of us really knows a subject unless we can teach it tosomeone else.

How about knowing a character and a script so well you can alternate playing one of the two central roles?

David Mandel, a local boy made good in both New York and Los Angeles, and R.W. Smith, late of Chicago, do exactly that as the two brothers in Sam Shepard's "True West."

Opening Thursday night at their versatile space at Port City Center, Pure Theatre continues in its second season to bring incisive quality drama to Charleston.

Co-founder (with husband Rodney Lee Rogers) Sharon Graci directed this four-character piece that exposes with uncompromising honesty complex relationships in one unforgettable family.

Before the first word is spoken, the tension between the brothers, Lee and Austin, is coming off the furniture - a supremely period set screaming 1970s in browns and greens and oranges.

Lee, played Thursday night by Mandel, is a thief and a bounder, a loser, a braggart. He never got that Ivy League degree as did Austin, the brother who has apparently made it as a screenwriter and family man.

While Mom is on vacation, the two meet up at her house in the desert east of La-La Land. The resulting confrontations are sensitively, even sensuously, crafted into riveting scenes growing in intensity and violence.

The challenge of literal role reversal reflects the ironic role reversal of the characters in the play, underscoring as nothing else could the dynamics of putting the fun back in dysfunctional.

Two other skilled veteran actors fulfill with comedy and authenticity two peripheral, and essential, roles. Stephen White got down to his cracking gum Hollywood producer Saul Kimmer, while Kay Shroka wanders in toward the end of the play as Mom, ideally addled and perfectly underplayed.