Warning: You could be injured by a flying beer can or something else at "True West," Sam Shepard's drama of besotted, spluttering conflict. Director David Mann has given Shepard's California-set play a risk-filled realization at the Minneapolis Theatre Garage, where it opened over the weekend in a Torch Theater production.

The drama stars Peter Hansen and John Skelley as Lee and Austin, brothers who are just a murder shy of Cain and Abel. The paths of the two young men have diverged drastically. Lee is an unpredictable, ornery drifter and petty thief. He may strike his brother at any moment.

Clean-shaven Austin is an up-and-coming screenwriter with an important date with a producer, Saul (shades-wearing, slightly oily John Middleton). The brothers meet, unexpectedly, in their mother's home, as she's on vacation in Alaska and Austin is house-sitting.

When the lights come up, Austin is banging away at a typewriter, working on his script. He's not alone. In dim light upstage, Lee sits atop the dated refrigerator. He jumps off the fridge, gets a can of beer, and starts in on his brother, whom he resents.

From there, the play builds into a blistering physicality, with coyote howls and crickets for background noise and with beer cans and toasters crowding the set. The tension is sometimes broken by moments of quiet tenderness, and by the laughter of the tired and drunk.

Hansen and Skelley are like a pair of dancers in a late-night honkytonk, trying to find their steps as they reel and change places. The two actors are physical opposites -- Hansen is rough, Skelley has a sweet face. But they plumb their characters' fears with gusto.

"True West" premiered in 1980, before personal computers and cell phones were in wide usage. Unlike in some recent productions elsewhere, these props have not been updated in this production, which has the depressing drab period furniture and look.

At the Theatre Garage, dialogue often dies as actors compete with the ambient hum of traffic. Director Mann and his cast overcompensate for this by ramping up the vocals and action of the play. The show is dominated by big gestures. And instead of seeming like they're trying too hard, the two actors hit the proverbial nail where it counts.

In fact, there were times when I wanted to tell one character not to hurt the other. In one of those moments, with neck veins popping out and with the conflict blocked to move all about the stage, I wanted to ask them to tone it down a bit. I'm only five feet away in the audience and I can see everything just fine. I don't want them to slip on beer cans, which resound under their feet and bodies, or in the suds on the floor, evidence of a piece of work that'll leave a hangover.