Conversations with Sam Shepard

Jackson R. Bryer, Robert M. Dowling, Mary C. Hartig, Jackson R. Bryer, Robert M. Dowling, Mary C. Hartig

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781496837110
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Biographies littéraires

A prolific playwright, Sam Shepard (1943–2017) wrote fifty-six produced plays, for which he won many awards, including a Pulitzer Prize. He was also a compelling, Oscar-nominated film actor, appearing in scores of films. Shepard also published eight books of prose and poetry and was a director (directing the premiere productions of ten of his plays as well as two films); a musician (a drummer in three rock bands); a horseman; and a plain-spoken intellectual. The famously private Shepard gave a significant number of interviews over the course of his public life, and the interviewers who respected his boundaries found him to be generous with his time and forthcoming on a wide range of topics. The selected interviews in Conversations with Sam Shepard begin in 1969 when Shepard, already a multiple Obie winner, was twenty-six and end in 2016, eighteen months before his death from complications of ALS at age seventy-three. In the interim, the voice, the writer, and the man evolved, but there are themes that echo throughout these conversations: the indelibility of family; his respect for stage acting versus what he saw as far easier film acting; and the importance of music to his work. He also speaks candidly of his youth in California, his early days as a playwright in New York City, his professionally formative time in London, his interests and influences, the mythology of the American Dream, his own plays, and more. In Conversations with Sam Shepard, the playwright reveals himself in his own words.

Sam Shepard

Mel Gussow / 2002

Transcript of interview conducted on September 27, 2002. Container 139.3, Mel Gussow Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas. Reprinted by permission of Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

Sam Shepard, in town to read from his new book of stories, Great Dream of Heaven, is staying with Jessica Lange at the Mercer Hotel. We plan to meet at Tribeca Grill at noon. I arrive early and he is sitting on the step outside of the restaurant having his picture taken. He has taken off his jacket, and looks, as usual, like a cowboy in the city. He smiles and greets me warmly. Inside, he joins me at a corner table in the rear and orders an iced tea, and later a cappuccino (and has a few cookies). He relaxes and seems to be in a friendly mood. He is still terse and laconic, but occasionally becomes almost expansive.

Mel Gussow: You don’t like having your picture taken.

Sam Shepard: It’s always felt uncomfortable. It hasn’t gotten much easier. Still photography is quite different from a movie camera. I don’t know why.

MG: I read the stories. Several of them, dialogues and monologues, could also be regarded as plays.

SS: Sometimes one crosses over into the other.

MG: What is the crossover? What makes a play, what makes a story?

SS: I love this thing of suddenly being able to discover raw dialogue without any stage directions or any indication where the characters are or who they are, which is one of the things I’ve always felt uncomfortable with in plays. You have to stop and describe stuff. I much prefer going with the dialogue. So in this situation you can virtually just write dialogue and have it exist on its own, have it live on its own.

MG: With several of the stories, you read them and wonder at first, who is speaking, which is a man, which is a woman.

SS: Then it settles in after a while. You understand. It’s kind of a luxury to be able to do that kind of dialogue. You don’t have to laboriously put in all the stage directions.

MG: They could be one-act sketches.

SS: They could. I wouldn’t even mind if somebody decided to do them like that. I think somebody has from Cruising Paradise. Cruising Paradise had more of those straight dialogue things. There’s only one in this one that’s pure dialogue.

MG: There are others that are close to it, and several that could serve as monologues.

SS: Yeah. “Foreigners.”

MG: I’ve always felt that with Beckett, his plays and his fiction are all of a piece, although he could be rigid about not wanting people to stage his prose. I felt that reading your stories, that the plays and stories are also all of a piece.

SS: They’re all connected.

MG: The characters, the themes …

SS: Yeah.

MG: Did you write many of them while acting in movies?

SS: I did with Cruising Paradise, but this one was mostly written on its own. With Cruising Paradise, there were a lot of movie locations, especially down in Texas. Sittin’ in a trailer [laugh].

MG: You could also write a play while sitting in a trailer.

SS: Story’s very different. It’s such a relief to be writing stories after so many years of plays. A brand-new form, and exciting to enter into.

MG: What else does it allow you to do?

SS: The great excitement with plays when I first started was the one-act form because I felt like there was an immediate attraction to that form because it was so quick, in a way, and accessible. And the same thing with the short story. There is an accessibility to it and a suddenness and a presence. I know I could never write a novel.

MG: I was going to ask that next.

SS: I’m unable to sustain interest for months or years or whatever it takes to do that. But the shorter form, it seems to me you can explode into it and exist with it for its duration and when it’s finished go on to the next one.

MG: With plays, you started with one-acts, and they led to full-length plays. A Lie of the Mind was close to four hours.

SS: [Laughs] I think originally it was six.

MG: It was the equivalent of a novel.

SS: Horrendous length.

MG: Short things appeal to you more.

SS: They do, yes. They’re less laborious. There’s less of a feeling of trying to create some Work of Art.

MG: What are you trying to create? Is it still telling a story?

SS: I’m really looking for this experience, I guess, for lack of a better word, of the material suddenly speaking for itself. I think even in plays my best stuff has been when I’ve had that experience—of the material just speaking without me manipulating it so much. That’s what I think these short stories—hopefully that’s what I’m trying to get to.

MG: What plays are you thinking about when you say that?

SS: Well, there were some plays that came very quickly. They kind of exploded. Like True West. Not for Fool for Love—I struggled over that one. But Curse of the Starving Class. Things like that, that more or less told themselves. And told them in a relatively short period of time. And there are other plays that I labored over extensively.

MG: And once you wrote them, you didn’t change them much.

SS: No. That’s true. They pretty much stayed what they came out. Like Tooth of Crime I’ve rewritten countless times. It still doesn’t work [hearty laugh]. Major rewrites.

MG: Tennessee Williams kept rewriting his plays.

SS: Did he? I didn’t know that. I used to hate it but now I can see the point of it. I don’t mind rewriting so much. I think it’s a brand-new effort in itself. It’s like another kind of writing. Where before I just thought it was labor.

MG: Some of those stories are absolutely complete—like short novels. For example, the title story, “Great Dream of Heaven.” You get a full picture of those two men.

SS: Hopefully.

MG: Could you trace the genesis of that story?

SS: I actually started it in London, which is weird. I don’t know why. I don’t know why it started there. Then I set it aside for quite a while. Jessica was doing Streetcar over there and I was there with her. It was very dreary, rainy London weather as usual. I sat down and started writing this thing. I set it aside and left it and came back to it more than a year later, and picked it up, and started working with it.

MG: Do you often find you write about something in a setting totally alien to the piece?

SS: Yeah, yeah. Almost as though you’re yearning for the place. Right. London is a great place to write because it makes you want to be out of there [big smile]. I wrote Tooth of Crime there, in London.

MG: And also Geography of a Horse Dreamer and Suicide in B Flat.

SS: Uh-huh.

MG: Good place to write.

SS: That’s what I’m saying. The climate inspires you to transport yourself.

MG: When I read that story “Great Dream of Heaven,” I imagined you sitting there in that diner. You stopped your car on the road and you sat there and you heard someone say something, and you saw a waitress.

SS: I had those two characters kicking around. I had at one time spent quite a while on the desert in a little place out by Indio that their house is sort of modeled after. It was quite remote. It was out in the middle of the desert. The great thing about it was that it was surrounded by quail, so every morning you get up and there’d be this covey of quail. It was quite fantastic—middle of the desert. So the place came back to me that way, but I wasn’t in the place when I was writing it.

MG: As I see it, the principal theme of that story is betrayal.

SS: I don’t know if it’s actually betrayal, or if it’s the perception of betrayal. Paranoid betrayal. Yeah. And also a kind of honor.

MG: Is honor the opposite of betrayal?

SS: Yeah, yeah. There seems to be an honor that exists unspoken between the two of them, and then it’s broken by this very dubious—whether he actually crosses the line or not, I don’t know. The thing that’s always amazed me in deep relationships, especially long-term relationships, is how suddenly something will be interpreted in a very subtle way and it causes the upheaval of everything. Some very small, tiny thing that is construed as being huge and it causes the downfall of everything, without either party understanding exactly what took place.

MG: One of the memorable images of that story was of the two Stetsons being put down upside down. That’s the ritual of both men.

SS: That actually was a thing. A long time ago, there were men who believed it would cause bad luck to turn your hat over. You didn’t do it. You took your hat off and had to set it right. It’s like the horseshoe. You place the horseshoe and the horseshoe has to be upright in order to catch luck. Turn the horseshoe over like that and it dumps it out. Little things like that.

MG: Do you believe in that?

SS: I’d like to say no, but there are superstitions that I still hold to. For instance, hawks, the flight of hawks. Hawks passing from right to left in front of you are good luck, left to right in front of you are bad luck.

MG: Seen any hawks lately?

SS: Oh, I see hawks all the time.

MG: How are they passing these days?

SS: So far, they’re pretty good. I don’t know why that’s always stuck with

me. The passage of birds. In Greek lore, there was actually terminology for

the patterns of bird flights, divining which ways birds flew, and migrating.

Stuff like that. Whether the crops were going to die.

MG: What other superstitions do you hold to?

SS: It’s not that I hold to them so much. Hawks’ flights is the big one.

MG: The image of hawks appears frequently in your work.

SS: The hawk is the most extraordinary animal—amazing to watch. I’ve

got a pair of them on my place that hunt together, and you rarely see hawks

hunting together.

MG: There’s that strange story in the book, “Blinking Eye,” about the

woman who finds a hawk on the road and wraps it up and it attacks her.

SS...