An avatar of authenticity
Sam Shepard’s award-winning plays explored Americana and his own life
In many of my plays, there was a kind of autobiographical character, in the form of a son or young man.
Sam Shepard’s plays never ambled. They rumbled and buckled and undulated, like patches of parched earth cracking open to allow hot gases to escape and scald everything in their paths.
His stage was always a space of agitation, rife with evidence of blight and decay, often couched as a mourning for a disappeared American West and the pioneering spirit that once defined it. In Curse of the Starving Class (1978), the extinguishing of that spirit took the satirical form of a kitchen appliance, a refrigerator that, no matter how many times the members of a family opened it, was always bare. In Fool for Love (1983), set in a fleabag motel in the California desert, a cowboy tried vainly to win back the love of a woman who knows he’s destined to repeat the patterns of his alcoholic father. In Tooth of Crime (1972), an aging rocker engaged in musical combat with a fiery upstart; a battle reiterating one of the playwright’s favourite themes — authentic America under siege.
He was himself an avatar of authenticity: a quintessential poet of off-Broadway, an instinctual writer whose earliest plays were born in converted (or actual) garages on the Lower East Side in Manhattan in the 1960s. Influenced by absurdist masters such as Samuel Beckett (“I think Endgame is just a jewel,” he told me during a 1996 interview), Shepard became one himself, earning a Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for Buried Child. It will certainly go down as one of the great works of 20th-century drama, a scathing endgame for American values and emblematic of Shepard’s lifelong fascination with the harrowing fragility of family bonds.
His recent death at age 73, from complications of Lou Gehrig’s disease, comes as a shock. Not only because of his prolific output (he wrote nearly 50 plays), but also because his etched-in-granite profile was so recognizable.
His acting career owed more to his Marlboro Man visage than to emotive depths, although his range of roles encompassed lyrical drama (Days of Heaven), comedy (Baby Boom), military thriller (Black Hawk Down), history (The Right Stuff ) and romance (The Notebook). In a 2004 New York production of Caryl Churchill’s A Number, he looked uncomfortable; he acknowledged in an interview with the New York Times that theatre wasn’t his favourite mode for acting.
Which is kind of amusing, considering the fearlessness of his dramatic writing. He’s revered in theatre circles for that bravery, for remaining true to his artistic voice and never being overly concerned with the commercial success of his plays. On Broadway, his work, more idiosyncratic and language-rich than driven by plot, had a hard time finding an audience; his biggest success was a 2000 revival of the raucous True West that ran for 154 performances, with Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly playing brothers and each night, famously, switching roles. It would be another 15 years before his work would be seen on Broadway again, in a revival of Fool for Love.
“It’s not that I’m going to start writing plays for Broadway,” Shepard told me in ’96, after a revival of Buried Child had opened to ecstatic reviews. He was eager to talk about his career and reveal that self-discovery was what he was after. Eschewing laptops, he said, he wrote in little notebooks, and the person he was most frequently drawn to putting into those notebooks was none other than Sam Shepard.
“In many of my plays, there was a kind of autobiographical character, in the form of a son or young man. The purpose of it was to write about myself,” Shepard said, adding that the character “was always the least fully realized.”
Enigmatic is often a word used to describe his most influential pieces. As the years went by, he sometimes departed from that wonderful mysteriousness and in more prosaic offerings, such as The God of Hell (2004) — a protest play responding to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in Iraq — resorted to agitprop. Maybe he’d lost patience as he grew older, for one was more accustomed on an evening with Shepard to have one’s expectations exploded, not confirmed. When you ventured into Shepard’s darkness, you were joyfully encountering an artist groping for the truth in the thickest mists.