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A Guide to Modern Playwrights, Plays, and Productions |
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Sam Shepard Sam Shepard’s works, especially those concerning
the American family, have been growing in popularity. Once considered too far out, these plays are
becoming more and more “Buried Child” at the National Theatre, as impressively
directed by Matthew Warchus, is both haunting and hilarious, with
Shepard’s view of the When Vince departs in search of whiskey for his
grandfather, Shelly is left on her own with leering Dodge, simple-minded
Tilden, who loves to stroke her rabbit fur coat, and belligerent
Bradley, who finds sexual pleasure by sticking his fingers in her
mouth. Timid and frightened at first, she gains strength in these
encounters, and even defends herself from Bradley by grabbing away
his prosthetic leg while he thrashes on the floor Despite the surprises, like the infertile field suddenly seen to be bursting with crops, and the hilarity, like grandma searching the minister’s trouser pockets for a whiskey flask, there is a mythic overtone that lifts the action to another level. The macho image of the hard-drinking American male and his fixation upon sex, sports, shooting, and tools, prevails in the household. Death and birth -- the mystery of the buried child – are recurring themes in this surrealist microcosm of middle America. No matter how strange the individual members of this dysfunctional group, or how weird their actions, the family bond is all-important. That Vince realizes this is apparent in his determination to stay on the farm, willed to him orally by Dodge just before he dies, insisting there is no such thing as heritage, just “a long line of corpses! There’s not a living soul behind me. Not a one. Who’s holding me in their memory? Who gives a damn about bones in the ground?” Despite his cynicism and nihilism, the recumbent Dodge tells Shelley, “There’s nothing a man can’t do. You dream it up and he can do it. Anything.” To which she replies, ”You’ve tried, I guess.” Life and Works Samuel Shepard Rogers III was born on November
5, 1943 in Fort Sheridan, Illinois,
while his father, Samuel Rogers, an officer in the Army Air
Corps, was stationed in Italy, later serving in Guam and the Philippines
before settling with the family in Duarte, California. As Shepard
describes his father as “a drinking man, a dedicated alcoholic,”
it is easy to see how the absent father becomes a fixture in Shepard’s
plays. The playwright recounts
that his father “was full of terrifying anger,” that “he had a tough
life – had to support his mother and brother at a very young age
when his dad’s farm collapsed. You
could see his suffering, his terrible suffering, living a life that
was disappointing and looking for another one.” Young Sam attended high school in Texas and junior
college in California, becoming impressed there with the works of
Samuel Beckett and with jazz and abstract art.
He answered an ad in a local newspaper and joined a touring
repertory group, the Bishop’s Company.
Arriving in New York, he decided to stay, finding work as
a bus boy at the Village Gate, in Greenwich Village, where the off-Broadway
movement was beginning to flourish. The headwaiter at the Gate,
Ralph Cook, opened such a theater at St. Marks in the Bowery, where
Shepard’s first play, “Cowboys,” was staged. A number of works followed, including his first
full-length play, “La Turista,” based on a vacation he and actresss
Joyce Aaron took in Mexico, spent in a “sweltering motel room in
the Yucatan.” After touring as a drummer with the Holy Modal
Rounders and co-writing the film “Zabriskie Point,” he wrote a rock
opera about cowboys, “The Unseen Hand.” (1969). Married to actress O-Lan Johnson in 1969, he became the father of a son Jesse
(for Jesse James) but soon began a relationship with Patti Smith,
and the two collaborated on “Cowboy Mouth” during their nine-month
affair. After the work opened, he went to England, where
he wrote “The Tooth of Crime,” which
was produced in 1972 at the Open Space Theatre, and “Geography
of a Horse Dreamer,” premiering in 1984 at the Royal Court, with
Shepard directing Stephen Rea and Bob Hoskins. Returning to the
U.S., Shepard and his family settled on a 20-acre ranch in Mill
Valley, California. Here he began to write seriously. “It suddenly occurred to me that I was mainly
avoiding a territory that I needed to investigate, which was the
family. I was a little afraid of it, particularly in
relation to my old man and all of that emotion.
I didn’t really want to tiptoe in there and then I said,
‘well, maybe I better.’” His family plays that resulted are considered his
best: “Curse of the Starving Class” (1978), “Buried Child,” awarded
the Pulitzer Prize in 1979, and “True West”(1980).
Recently revived on Broadway, “True West” concerns two brothers,
one a tough, thieving drifter and the other an up-tight Hollywood
writer. In the topsy-turvy world of Hollywood, the drifter
sells his idea for a Western to a producer who initially arrives
to option the work of the writer brother.
Part of the hilarity that results is the drifter’s dictation
of his story to his brother, though their vicious fight at the end
is more serious than comic. Their
mother entering and surveying her ruined kitchen while they fight
calmly suggests, as she had done when they were little, that they
take their fight out of doors. It is currently being revived in
the U.K., at the Bristol Old Vic. “A Lie of the Mind,” staged
recently by London’s Donmar Theatre, presents two dysfunctional
families. In one, the mother
(Sinead Cusack) keeps her son (on whom she may have designs other
than maternal) in bed by hiding his pants.
However when his brother is in trouble for having beaten
his wife, the bed-confined brother escapes to help him, using, in
place of trousers, the American flag given the family when their
military hero father died. He
heads for the second family, that of the victim, who has lost her
mind. The head of that family
is more interested in deer hunting than in family matters, for it
is the last day of the deer-hunting season and he is determined
to shoot a deer – but by mistake shoots the rescuing brother. (“He
should have been wearing red.”) His wife encourages him to refrain
from shooting any more quarry, for the freezer is full of venison,
and besides, “I can get all I want from the nearby supermarket.” Shepard as an actor has made his mark in Hollywood,
with an impressive appearance as test pilot Chuck Yeager in “The
Right Stuff” (1983), adapted from Tom Wolfe’s book about the first
astronauts and the birth of the space program , and in “Frances”
(1982), in which Jessica Lange portrays actress Frances Farmer.
The film “Paris, Texas,” which he wrote, directed by Wim Wenders,
is about a man who drops out of life for four years because of his
fears for his relationship with his wife, and the events that ensue
when he tries to reestablish contact, helped by the family and his
child. Meeting Ms. Lange when they worked together
on ”Frances,” they were immediately drawn to each other, and have
been together since that time. They
have a daughter and a son. Shepard’s later plays include “States of Shock” (`1991), a response to the Gulf War, “Simpatico” (1994), and “When the World was Green,” with Joseph Chaikin (1996). “God of
Hell,” which premiered in New York in November 2004 he describes
as “a takeoff on Republican fascism.”
Randy Quaid and his wife J. Smith-Cameron live on a Wisconsin
dairy farm, the only one in their vicinity, since the government
began paying their neighbors not to farm. Their old friend Haynes
(Frank Wood) is sleeping in their basement, a fugitive from a government
research project. Somehow,
when he touches another person, a flash of lightning ensues. When a smooth-talking
G-man named Welch (Tim Roth) arrives with a briefcase, selling patriotic
paraphernalia like cookies in the shape and color of an American
flag, it is apparent that there is more here than meets the eye. Sure enough, plutonium is the issue, hence the
play’s title, as Pluto is the ruler of Hell. After hanging strings of American flags around
the room, Welch asks why there is no flag on the farm’s flagpole. “It’s empty,” he complains. “Barren. Just
the raw wind slapping the naked ropes around….Sickening sound.” |
significant,
especially as it is recognized that while they may look naturalistic,
American
family far from the picture depicted in advertisements or a Norman
Rockwell cover, to which the skeletal homestead is compared. The
comparison is made by the girlfriend of hip musician Vince (Sam
Troughton), who is bringing his sexy partner Shelly (Lauren Ambrose)
home to the decrepit family farm in