Vinnie and Carter are in tune, in league, simpatico – but in every devious, depraved way you can imagine. They subsist on greed, Black Bush Whiskey (well, at least Vinnie does; for Carter, it’s a bête noir), dirty money and deception. Ah yes, deception. These two lowlifes elevate lying to high art.

In Simpatico,New Village Arts Theatre’s production of Sam Shepard’s 1993 drama, everyone gets into the act of stretching, or mangling, the truth: Rosie, the woman in Vinnie’s past and Carter’s present (or is it the other way around?); Simms, the disgraced horse-racing commissioner, a victim of Vinnie and Carter’s (and Rosie’s) sex-laced sting operation; and even Cecilia, a seemingly artless girl from the ranks of a Safeway store. There are so many versions of “the truth” flying around, Simpatico could be Rashomon set alternately in bluegrass Kentucky and the nowheresville of Cucamonga, Calif.

Throughout the breadth of Shepard’s lengthy but tightly strung play, directed at NVA by Lisa Berger, fabrications become incongruities, which become grim revelations, which become deceits … before it all comes full circle. Or does it? The answers, which are never clear-cut, are embedded in Shepard’s rich and uncompromising language. Whether writing about man’s inhumanity to man (a subject not confined to just this Shepard play or just to Vinnie and Carter) or horse racing (Carter’s description of Kentucky Derby Day at Churchill Downs, in Act 2, is stirring), Shepard pushes all the right buttons, even those that make us uneasy. His Simpatico successfully grinds out two-and-a-half compelling hours on the NVA stage in Carlsbad with the help of Berger’s taut direction, a creative multi-level set by Tim Wallace and a worthy cast, fronted by Manny Fernandes as Vinnie and Mike Sears as Carter.

Simpatico is more immorality play than morality play. It’s driven by its audacity, by its eruptions and by its absence of tenderness. Vinnie and Carter have been connected since childhood, but they are neither friends nor adversaries in the clear-cut sense. Their connective tissue is manipulation, of others and of themselves.

Fifteen years after pulling a scheme to swap the identity of two Thoroughbreds, followed by their frame of racing official Simms (Jack Missett), Vinnie and Carter are playing a blackmail endgame into which they’ve drawn not only their former sting target (now going by the handle Ames), but Rosie in Kentucky and Cecilia in Cucamonga. Their machinations leave behind them the stench of exploitation and betrayal, but like those in their sphere of bad influence, they are bound by their delusions. The specter of retribution, if not punishment, looms over both men, and while the play’s murky conclusion fails to foreshadow Vinnie’s and Carter’s fate, it does validate each grifter’s survivability.

Fernandes and Sears hold nothing back on stage, especially in the play’s first and final scenes, by which time their two characters have swapped cockiness and desperation. Neither actor hesitates to inhabit, and convey, degradation. Both Missett and Kim Strassburger as Cecilia manage to elicit degrees of sympathy, and their “payoff” scene together in Act 3 is funny and borderline affecting. Terri Park’s one-scene appearance as Rosie, confronted at home by a slick-looking Vinnie, feels undermined by competing and confusing motivations. But she’s got the requisite sexiness and the understandable wariness of her ex’s scarcely veiled propositions.

All the sparring – and two intermissions – make Simpatico a long sit, as they say, but Berger and her brave ensemble keep things moving. There are no conspicuous dead spots in Simpatico. Just a lot of dead dreams.