Understanding Sam Shepard
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Understanding Sam Shepard

James A. Crank, Linda Wagner-Martin

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Understanding Sam Shepard

James A. Crank, Linda Wagner-Martin

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About This Book

An ideal introduction into the complex and compelling dramas of the acclaimed playwright

Understanding Sam Shepard investigates the notoriously complex and confusing dramatic world of Sam Shepard, one of America's most prolific, thoughtful, and challenging contemporary playwrights. During his nearly fifty-year career as a writer, actor, director, and producer, Shepard has consistently focused his work on the ever-changing American cultural landscape. James A. Crank's comprehensive study of Shepard offers scholars and students of the dramatist a means of understanding Shephard's frequent experimentation with language, setting, characters, and theme.

Beginning with a brief biography of Shepard, Crank shows how experiences in Shepard's life eventually resonate in his work by exploring the major themes, unique style, and history of Shepard's productions. Focusing first on Shepard's early plays, which showcase highly experimental, frenetic explorations of fractured worlds, Crank discusses how the techniques from these works evolve and translate into the major works in his "family trilogy": Curse of the Starving Class, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Buried Child, and True West. Shepard often uses elements from his past—his relationship with his father, his struggle for control within the family, and the breakdown of the suburban American dream—as major starting points in his plays.

Shepard is a recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, eleven Obie Awards, and a Chicago Tribune Literary Prize for Lifetime Achievement. Augmented with an extensive bibliography, Understanding Sam Shepard is an ideal point of entrance into complex and compelling dramas of this acclaimed playwright.

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CHAPTER 1

Understanding Sam Shepard

“It seems that the more you write, the harder it gets, because you’re not so easily fooled by yourself anymore,” wrote Sam Shepard. “Even so, writing becomes more and more interesting as you go along, and it starts to open up some of its secrets. One thing I’m sure of, though. That I’ll never get to the bottom of it.”1 In writing about his process of composition, dramatist Sam Shepard expressed the central ideas of his plays: exposing secrets, opening up hidden spaces to understand one’s identity, and searching endlessly for satisfying conclusions. His plays investigate complicated worlds that seem to deepen with each new performance. For the uninitiated, his work may appear dense and rough: characters in his plays may speak, act, or move spontaneously and illogically. Shepard’s language, including his copious stage directions, can seem stylized and needlessly complex; his dialogue is alternately lyrical and elaborate without context or exposition; and his realistic characters frequently interact unexpectedly and inexplicably with imaginary figures. Consequently he may frustrate readers more used to linear plots and realistic characters. Sam Shepard is, in short, a difficult playwright to understand.
But scholars, students, directors, actors, and dramaturges who approach the man and his work thoughtfully discover an incredibly rewarding and focused vision, one that has enthralled audiences and critics alike since his plays first exploded onto stages in New York during the 1960s. During his nearly fifty-year career, Sam Shepard’s work has consistently documented the ever-changing cultural landscape of America: from its obsessions with rock ’n’ roll and a mythic West to the realities of its class consciousness and broken families. He frequently challenges Americans’ self-perceptions by exposing lies and secrets inherent in them, and his plays reexamine solved mysteries of the theatrical world—language, form, myth, narration, spectator, character—and defy audiences’ expectations by violating their conventions.
Now, nearly a half century after the premiere of his first play, Sam Shepard still remains at the forefront of the American theatrical scene as one of our most prolific, thoughtful, and challenging living playwrights. Shepard has written nearly fifty plays while thriving as an actor, director, and producer for the stage, television, and cinema. Theater critics have proclaimed him “the most ruthlessly experimental and uncompromising” American playwright and “the greatest American playwright of his generation.” His plays articulate America’s anxieties and fears during very specific historical and cultural moments. Yet, like the works of the great American playwrights before him, Shepard’s plays find new audiences in successive generations. They are admired by scholars and actors alike. Literary critics admire the structure of his works, and some of the finest stage and screen actors, including John Malkovich, Gary Sinise, and Kathy Bates, have been eager to play parts in them because the emotional evolution of his characters provides opportunities for experimentation.
Although watching a Sam Shepard play is engaging, reading his plays for the first time may prove daunting. Because Shepard is clearly influenced by the theater of the absurd dramatists (such as Pirandello, Beckett, and Ionesco), his work can seem dense and incomprehensible to first-time readers without an understanding of absurdist techniques. This study introduces scholars, students, and directors to the challenging issues taken up in Shepard’s plays, including experiments with language, setting, and characters. One key to understanding the works of Sam Shepard is his life. To a greater degree than those of most other American dramatists of his generation, his plays are largely autobiographical. Consequently information about his life facilitates understanding of his art. Because many of his plays focus on the American family, understanding Shepard’s early family life becomes even more important in unlocking the mystery of his craft.
Samuel Shepard Rogers III was born in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, in 1943 to U.S. Army Air Force pilot Samuel Shepard Rogers II and Jane Elaine Shepard. Shepard remembers the town as “a real fort, where army mothers had their babies” while the men were stationed abroad. Their time in Illinois was short, however, because the family moved often throughout the United States—to South Dakota, Utah, and Florida. Eventually the family settled on an American base in Guam. Shepard’s memories of his time there revolve around his discovery that language has political import and can have the potentiality for violence: “There were a lot of Japanese on the island, who had been forced back into living in the caves, and they would come down and steal clothes off the clothes-lines, and food and stuff. All the women were issued army Lugers, and I remember my mother shooting at them. At that time everyone referred to Oriental people or Philippino [sic] people as gooks, and it wasn’t until the Vietnam War that I realized that gook was a derogatory term—it had just been part of the army jargon, all the kids called them gooks, too.”2 The turbulence of his life abroad with his father gave way to a more normal calm when his family settled in Pasadena, a suburb that in some ways resembled a small town but stood in the shadow of Los Angeles, the largest city in the American West.
There Shepard would come to find one of his great muses: the interior world of the white, middle-class American family. Shepard remarked that Pasadena was “not all that rich, but very proud of the municipal swimming plunge and the ice-skating rink, and all that small-town-America-type stuff.” The young Sam Shepard (known as “Steve” to family and friends) lived in Pasadena from ages five to eleven. At home his father bordered on being a despot. Shepard recalls his being “very strict, 
 very aware of the need for discipline, so-called,” and the boy felt his creativity threatened often by his father. “It was really like being jailed,” he once said of his father’s demanding rules.3 As he moved into his teenage years, he and his father constantly butted heads in power struggles in front of the whole family. Sam’s sister, remembering their relationship, said they were “like two pit bulls” vying to see who was the alpha dog: “You put two virile men in a room and they’re going to test each other.”4 Ruthless struggles for power within the family would later appear in Shepard’s plays where characters fight for some measure of autonomy within suffocating family structures.
Eventually Shepard’s family moved from the picturesque, sleepy town to a much more rugged life on an avocado ranch in Duarte, California, fifteen miles from their old address. The move suited Sam, who felt more at ease in the country and away from the stuffy suburban atmosphere of Pasadena: “I really liked being in contact with animals and the whole agricultural thing. 
 It was a funny community, divided into three very distinct social groups. There were the very wealthy people, who had ranches up in the mountains with white-faced Hereford cattle roaming around, and swimming-pools and Cadillacs. And then you’d get these very straight middle-class communities, people who sold encyclopedias and stuff like that.” Shepard was amazed at the division between the middle class and the working poor, who were mostly black or Mexican and who, like the “gooks” of Guam, were segregated from the rest of the community: “It was the first place where I understood what it meant to be born on the wrong side of the tracks, because the railroad tracks cut right down through the middle of this place: and below the tracks were the blacks and Mexicans.”5
Sam was a good student at school, though he admitted to experimenting with Benzedrine and hanging out with the wrong crowd. Despite his bravado he had a deep love for animals and considered becoming a veterinarian. Outside school he was a member of the 4-H club, and a ram he raised placed first in the Los Angeles County Fair. Although his adolescence was far from ideal, he would come to reminisce fondly about his “pastoral” years in Duarte and would use the settings and characters from his boyhood and adolescence in plays such as Curse of the Starving Class, The Tooth of Crime, and The Unseen Hand. He would also plumb the depths of his power struggles with his father to create some of the most compelling moments in his oeuvre.
During his time at the small junior college Mount San Antonio in Walnut, California, he first began experimenting with the theater. He acted in the school’s productions of Harvey and The Skin of Our Teeth and even wrote his first play, “a sort of Tennessee Williams imitation, about some girl who got raped in a barn and her father getting mad at her or something.”6 Shortly after his first experiment writing a play, Shepard got involved as an actor in the Bishop’s Company Repertory Players, with whom he toured the East Coast putting on one-night productions of plays in churches. In the traveling company, Shepard learned a valuable lesson that he would come back to throughout his career: “Anybody can make theater. You don’t need to be affiliated with anybody. You just make it with a bunch of people.”7 Shepard followed his new passion for theater all the way to New York City, where he tried unsuccessfully to become a professional actor. There he found himself involved with a “really exciting music scene. The world I was living in was the most interesting thing to me, and I thought the best thing I could do maybe would be to write about it, so I started writing plays.”8
In 1964, while working at the nightclub Village Gate, Shepard wrote the first of his plays ever to be produced. The play owed a debt to experimental theater, to the theater of the absurd, and to an early exposure to the works of Samuel Beckett, which had changed his writing style. When he first encountered the playwright’s Waiting for Godot, he said it was “like nothing I’d ever read before. 
 And I thought, what’s this guy talking about, what is this?”9 From the influence of Beckett’s aesthetic, Shepard wrote the short, semi-absurdist one-act Cowboys, so titled because he and his close friend Charles “used to run around the streets playing cowboys in New York. We’d both had the experience of growing up in California, in that special kind of environment, and between the two of us there was a kind of camaraderie, in the midst of all these people who were going to work and riding the buses.” Cowboys became a powerful meditation on youth, innocence, and the incessant need for adventure—things to which the young Sam Shepard, as a new immigrant from California, could easily relate. Because of his roots in the West, he was also acutely aware of the cowboy’s mythic hold on the American popular imagination: “Cowboys are really interesting to me—these guys, most of them really young, about 16 or 17, who decided they didn’t want to have anything to do with the East Coast, with that way of life, and took on this immense country, and didn’t have any real rules.”10 As a stranger in a far away land without rules, Shepard felt a deep connection with the image of the cowboy.
The idea that anyone would perform his plays initially frightened Shepard, but when the headwaiter at the Village Gate nightclub told him that he was looking for fresh material for a new venture he called Theatre Genesis, Sam showed him the draft of his play about cowboys. During rehearsals for Cowboys, Shepard decided to add another short one-act play, The Rock Garden, to the evening’s bill. Despite some early, negative reviews, critic Michael Smith of the Village Voice validated Shepard’s decision to move to New York; Smith wrote that Shepard explored new territory for the American dramatist, “an area between ritual and naturalism, where character transcends psychology, fantasy breaks down literalism, and the patterns of ordinariness have their own lives. His is a gestalt theater which evokes the existence behind behavior.”11 The high praise from one of the most influential critics in New York won Shepard instant credibility and fame.
Following the modest success of his two one-acts, Sam Shepard began writing plays at a feverish pace and often wrote countless plays in a week’s time. “I used to write very fast,” he admitted to an interviewer. “The stuff would just come out, and I wasn’t really trying to shape it or make it into any big thing. 
 I would have like a picture, and just start from there. A picture of a guy in a bathtub, or of two guys on stage with a sign blinking—you know, things like that.”12 Shepard’s prolific period happened to coincide with the emergence of the “off-off-Broadway” movement of the early 1960s in the wake of which small, avant-garde plays were capturing the imagination of audiences. The more intimate productions provided an alternative to the huge, expansive Broadway pieces running at the time. Shepard remembers the movement as full of possibilities: “On the Lower East Side there was a special sort of culture developing. 
 I mean nobody knew what was happening, but there was a sense that something was going on.”13 Because he wrote so many compelling plays in such a short period, some of which were running simultaneously, he quickly found a place beside LeRoi Jones, Edward Albee, and Lanford Wilson, the major American playwrights at that time.
Shepard’s plays in the mid-1960s drew enthusiastic crowds and impressed critics. Up to Thursday, Dog, Rocking Chair, Three and Melons, 4-H Club, Chicago, Icarus’s Mother, and Red Cross all opened during the first part of the decade. The latter three earned him his first Obie awards. The one-acts shared the same stripped-down aesthetic and nonnaturalistic expression that would come to be recognized as hallmarks of his early work. One critic noted the difference between a conventional play, where “the characters stay pretty much the same over the time span of the play, which could be two days or twenty years,” and Shepard’s early, experimental plays, where characters frequently shift personalities from one monologue to the next. And the language they speak is specific, too. Each character engages in “purposefully banal dialogue to stitch together images, actions, and comically/poetically extended monologues which puncture the surface of the theatrical event.”14 Each early one-act contains a heightened expressionistic style that draws upon his experiences, from his childhood and adolescence to his more recent move across the country to live in abject poverty surrounded by bohemians and artists. Shepard later explained why his early writing draws so much from his past: the plays “come from all kinds of things, they come from the country, they come from that particular sort of temporary society that you find in Southern California, where nothing is permanent, where everything could be knocked down and it wouldn’t be missed, and the feeling of impermanence that comes from that—that you don’t belong to any particular culture[,] 
 the more distant you are from [where you grew up], the more the implications of what you grew up with start to emerge.”15 Shepard’s short, early one-acts were also heavily influenced by his new friendship with Joe Chaikin, the founding father of the experimental Open Theater, whose repertory cast included Shepard’s then girlfriend Joyce Aaron. Chaikin’s group sought to explore “techniques for performing nonnaturalistic material, the Brechtian plays and verse dramas that irresistibly attract the avant-garde.”16 Chaikin and Shepard’s friendship flourished because of their shared interest in the avant-garde.
Shepard later admitted that he found it difficult “to remain with a certain attachment” to his early, experimental plays: “I write plays before I get to another kind of play, and each play may be a sort of evolution to something else. I always feel like leaving behind rather than hanging on to them.”17 Shepard’s evolution manifested itself in the form of his first full-length piece, entitled La Turista (1966), which was performed at the famous American Place Theater. The play explored cultural myths about America and Mexico and contained a subtle satire on the persistence of stereotypes about indigenous people. After it was performed, Shepard’s interest shifted f...

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