Men behaving badly Sam Shepard’s Ages of the Moon
SAM SHEPARD’S AGES OF THE MOON
“Operator, please connect me with 1982 I need to make apologies for what I didn’t do I sure do need to tell her that I’ve thought the whole thing through And now it’s clear that she is what I should have held on to.” Randy Travis, “1982” (Song written by Buddy Blackmon and Vip Vipperman)
a 2009 play by Sam Shepard, two men in their sixties sit on a Kentucky porch one summer afternoon, awaiting a total eclipse of the moon while they listen to country music, drink too much bourbon, and argue. Regret and intermittent rage dominate their long day’s journey into night. Memories of other times and places surface haphazardly — most notably, we learn of a 1982 New Mexico sojourn in which Mr. “King of the Road” himself, Roger Miller, is said to have made an appearance. Late in the evening, a 12-gauge shotgun goes off.
It’s all vintage — if late-career — Shepard, and the play’s staging by the New Mexico Actors Lab a I summer after the playwright’s 2017 passing from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is no accident. “He is one of the authentic voices that make up the cultural identity of American theater,” said director Robert Benedetti. “We really wanted to do a Shepard play in this year after his death. And especially since he spent so much time in Santa Fe.” Shepard lived in the capital city on and off between 1983 and 1986, and again from around 2010 to 2015.
In which runs Thursdays to Sundays at Teatro Paraguas through July 22, the harddrinking Ames (Nicholas Ballas) has summoned his friend of 50 years, Byron (Paul Blott), to a remote fishing cabin. It is August 2007, and the play begins in afternoon sunlight as the two old buddies rehash Ames’ recent split from his wife, which has occurred because of some half-forgotten indiscretion on Ames’ part. Night descends, and with it, a bit of madness from that old devil moon.
which was commissioned by Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, was written for actors Stephen Rea (Ames) and Sean McGinley (Byron). In 2010, Shepard told
of the play, which clocks in at fewer than 80 minutes: “I’ve come to feel that if I can’t make something happen in under an hour and a half, it’s not going to happen in a compelling way in a threehour play.” He said he was fond of especially its honest relationship to the ravages of alcohol, which Shepard admitted had taken a toll on his own life.
is like a Porsche,” he said. “It’s sleek, it does exactly what you want it to do, and it can speed up but also shows off great brakes.”
Ballas said he met Shepard more than 30 years ago, when Ballas moved to town after studying acting under Benedetti at the California Institute of the Arts. “It was kind of in the good ol’ days, the halcyon days of bad boys in Santa Fe. It was a fun time, the early ’80s. I was managing a restaurant here, a notorious watering hole called Lone Wolf Café on Galisteo Street. And Sam took a liking to the restaurant — it became his hangout — and later Harry Dean Stanton, when he was in town doing would hang there also. I got to know Sam as a customer and as a playwright. I actually saved his life one night on the street when somebody grabbed a knife and went for him in the midst of a very complicated bar fight.”
In Ames, Ballas recognized some aspects of Shepard himself. “I got to realize that he was a bit of a tortured
soul. And that comes out in the show a lot. The character of Ames, it could be Sam talking about [his longtime partner] Jessica Lange,” he said. “You know, that’s not being pulled out of thin air by Shepard.”
Neither is the Roger Miller plot point, or a protracted comic argument about what exactly the village of Chimayó is famous for. “Sam does a wonderful job of kind of twisting the myth of Chimayó,” Ballas said. “I also met Roger Miller during that time as well. He lived out in Tesuque. This is all pulled in with purpose. One of the reasons we’re pulling in Randy Travis as the pre-show music is that he lived here, too. So there’s not just an homage to Shepard we’re doing, but also to Santa Fe — who it draws here and the local legends. It’s a wonderfully fecund place, and Sam knows that, and he’s playing around with it.”
The play treads familiar Shepardian ground: the literal and figurative trappings of (often toxic) masculinity, the relative unknowability of women, the eternal battle between the self and the external world. Audience members interested in probing the subconscious of the badly behaved man may, in parsing the rapid-fire, semi-batty dialogue, gain some insights — or some guffaws. As Ames and Byron discuss the purported age-old connection that women have to the moon, Byron admits, “I’m glad I’m on the other side of the fence. … More — rooted — … To the ground, I mean.” The airy, hopping and skipping nature of the conversation underlines the absurdity of his pronouncement. Elsewhere in the play, a tussle and the deployment of the gun provide a telling — even timely — glimpse at the violence lurking under the surface of the unstable male ego.
“The concept of this eclipse is that darkness is covering the moon, the moon being the feminine,” Ballas said. “There is something monstrous about actions that we do as men that can occlude the feminine, and I think on some level, Sam is acknowledging that.” Benedetti added, “They’re left with a world in which the feminine has been eclipsed, diminished.”
Blott, whose weathered, smoky voice embodies a Shepard archetype, stressed the strong, if sorrow-tinged, bond between the two old friends. “They’re both characters in desolation. Byron comes out to visit, but he needs this as much as Ames does,” he said. “Byron’s not complete anymore. He needs this comfort, he needs this solace from Ames. No matter what Ames tells him, he’s here and he needs to hear his voice. Because he’s lost.” Ballas continued, “It’s classic Shepard, you know, two men in opposition who are very much joined at the hip by need, by disappointment, by love. And that’s kind of the beauty of it. Sam knows the male psyche — and he creates it — like nobody’s business.”
Despite the play’s bourbon-fueled chauvinism — the men digress on topics that include erectile function and the sexiness of women on bicycles — it boils down to what Benedetti called “two different faces of lost love,” referring to the different ways in which women have abandoned both characters. “Men live with this little reservoir of regret on relationships that went wrong, that didn’t fulfill their promise,” he said. Ballas added, “Any woman kind of scratching her head and asking, ‘Why are men that way?’ Well, this is a primer. This is a tutorial on what makes some certain types of men tick. What makes them get up in the morning? Why do they drink? All of these questions are answered. It’s a passionate aria to love itself.”