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Sam Shepard November 5, 1943-
Nationality: American Genre(s): Short stories; Autobiographies; Plays; Poetry; Domestic drama; Letters (Correspondence); Film scripts
Biographical and Critical Essay
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Although Sam Shepard has written more than forty plays and five screenplays, including collaborating on Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (1970) and Wim Wenders's Paris, Texas (1984); has directed two movies based on his scripts, Far North (1988) and Silent Tongue (1993); and has won a Pulitzer Prize for Buried Child (1978) and more than ten Village Voice Obie Awards, he is perhaps better known for his lean good looks as an actor in several movies, including Days of Heaven (1978), Resurrection (1980), Raggedy Man (1981), Frances (1982), The Right Stuff (1983), Fool for Love (1985), Baby Boom (1987), Crimes of the Heart (1987), Thunderheart (1992), and Streets of Laredo (1996). Between 1986 and 1997 Shepard wrote only two new full-length plays, States of Shock (1991) and Sympatico (1994), both of which received mixed reviews, but for the 1996-1997 season the Signature Theatre Company in New York selected Shepard's plays for a full season of retrospectives, which the company previously did for Edward Albee, Horton Foote, and Adrienne Kennedy. Early in 1998, a new Shepard play, Eyes for Consuela, opened at the Manhattan Theater Club. Shepard has also published three collections, Hawk Moon: A Book of Short Stories, Poems, and Monologues (1972), Motel Chronicles (1982), and Cruising Paradise: Tales (1996), anthologies of fiction, vignettes, tales, poems, songs, and autobiographical musings. Before he gained renown as an actor, Shepard was widely regarded as the most important playwright of his generation. He was featured on the covers of Newsweek (11 November 1985) and Esquire (November 1988), as well as in a special issue of Modern Drama (March 1993). Richard Gilman, in his introduction to Seven Plays (1981), declared, "Not many critics would dispute the proposition that Sam Shepard is our most interesting and exciting playwright." By the end of 1997, The Modern Language Association International Bibliography listed almost 240 entries for Shepard, testimony to the amount of scholarly interest his work has generated. As a popular-culture icon, Shepard is also the subject of several World Wide Web sites. Throughout his plays Shepard demonstrates a concern that plagues American writers who mine the mythic lode. "It's one thing to have a dream," Shepard remarked to Newsweek. "It's another thing to be killed by it." The exploration of this curious paradox of American life makes Shepard's plays riveting and helps account for his appeal. His plays demonstrate over and over again the two sides of the American myth: the hope and promise of the dream of regeneration on the American frontier and the recognition that the dream has often been violent and destructive, that it is an entrapping "lie of the mind," as the title of his 1986 play implies. Samuel Shepard Rogers III was born in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, on 5 November 1943, the son of Samuel and Elaine Schook Rogers, but he grew up in Duarte, California, where he was influenced by life close to the earth. His family owned an avocado ranch, and "Steve" (as he was called while growing up) once had the grand champion yearling ram at the Los Angeles County Fair. He planned to be a veterinarian, majoring in agricultural science at Mount Saint Antonio Junior College from 1961 to 1963. Instead, Shepard headed east in 1963 to New York City and transformed himself from Steve Rogers into Sam Shepard. First he became a waiter at the Village Gate, a popular jazz club, where he met Ralph Cook, the founder of New York City's Theater Genesis. Cook encouraged Shepard to write, and Shepard's two one-act plays, Cowboys and The Rock Garden, were presented by Theater Genesis at St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery in October 1964. In 1969 Shepard married O-Lan Johnson, an actress in Theater Genesis, and the couple had a child, Jesse Mojo, in May 1970. Shepard's energy as a playwright stems from his mythic imagination and concern with the loss of heroic ideals and consistent values that the American West formerly represented. Often in dazzling, absurdist fashion, Shepard presents a world that has fallen or is falling away from something vast. Shepard's plays emphasize the atomization of a world searching for characters who can continue to embody positive mythic values in new ways. Legendary Western figures such as Pecos Bill, Mickey Free, Paul Bunyan, and Jesse James appear in Shepard's plays; other characters are recognizable Western types: the title characters in Cowboys and its revision, Cowboys #2 (1967), the Morphan brothers in The Unseen Hand (1969), the old prospector in Operation Sidewinder (1970), Slim in Cowboy Mouth (1971), Hoss in The Tooth of Crime (1972), Cody in Geography of a Horse Dreamer (1974), the cowboy side of Niles in Suicide in B-Flat (1976), and Lee in True West (1980). When he was asked by a Theatre Quarterly interviewer in 1974 why he wrote about cowboys, Shepard replied: "Cowboys are really interesting to me--these guys, most of them really young, about sixteen or seventeen, 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." In fact, throughout Shepard's work the mythic West of cowboys--the wide-open landscape offering limitless freedom and potential for individual self-realization--enters and provides the disharmony. Many of Shepard's characters wish to manifest the persona of the cowboy, but the discordant world in which they live offers little possibility of fulfillment. The cowboy is an anachronism; those who wish to remake themselves in his mythic image are thwarted in their attempts. An altered world requires new images, but the chaos of contemporary life provides no compelling ones to replace the cowboy. As Shepard explained to Carol Rosen in 1993: "Myth served as a story in which people should connect themselves in time to the past. And thereby connect themselves to the present and the future. Because they were hooked up with the lineage of myth. It was so powerful and so strong that it acted as a thread in culture. And that's been destroyed." In Cowboys #2, Stu and Chet, reminiscent of Samuel Beckett's Didi and Gogo in Waiting for Godot (1952), act out a stereotypical Indian fight. As the play ends, with horse sounds clashing against car horns in the background, two suited men begin to read the play's script over again in monotone. Here, Shepard emphasizes the way that old images become crutches to support the contemporary world. In each embodiment, however, the gap between the original and the copy grows wider, suggesting that old images need to be transmuted rather than duplicated. In Cowboy Mouth, Cavale has kidnapped Slim, planning to make him into a rock-and-roll star. What the world needs, she exclaims, is a "saint . . . , a rock-and-roll Jesus with a cowboy mouth." Slim provides no redemption, but Mickey Free in Operation Sidewinder is able to transform an air force computer made in the form of a gigantic sidewinder rattlesnake--representing the industrial, violent world--into an Indian god who points toward an apocalyptic redemption. Even if the old images have to be altered, their strengths need to be recognized and retained. Niles, the musician who executes various aspects of his former self in order to begin anew, praises the cowboy in Suicide in B-Flat: "He discovered a whole way of life. He ate rattlesnakes for breakfast. Chicago wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for him. He drove cattle right to Chicago's front door. Towns sprang up wherever he stopped to wet his whistle. Crime flourished all around him. The law was a joke to him." In his confusion, though, Niles cannot distinguish between freedom and anarchy. In Shepard's plays, aspects from an older world should be retained, but his characters have trouble recognizing exactly what those characteristics are or how they can be achieved. Niles's emphasis on taking new forms may have foreshadowed Shepard's own changes. Toward the end of the 1970s Shepard began movie acting, often with Jessica Lange, for whom he left O-Lan Shepard in 1982. (Shepard and O-Lan divorced in 1984.) Shepard and Lange have two children, Hannah Jane and Samuel Walker. His plays written during that time, Curse of the Starving Class (1976), Buried Child, and True West, are much more realistic than his earlier work. More accessible and less irreverent, they nonetheless confront similar themes. These plays dramatically explore the effects of the past, especially on families. The mythic West calls for independent isolation, but the family, often in strangling, enervating ways, remains connected to the present, as Austin in True West discovers. How does one establish his own identity with past images looming so large in the imagination? The old West, the "looks within" place, is dead, Austin concludes in True West: "There's no such thing as the West anymore. It's a dead issue!" What will replace it is ambiguous, but as the fertile field behind the house in Buried Child suggests, possibility and opportunity still exist: they simply must be perceived through the fog of the present. One of the most compelling aspects of Shepard's plays derives from his continuing use of the conventions of frontier gothic as he examines various aspects of American myth. Images of dark, mysterious forces originally captured the American imagination as the early settlers contemplated the frightening wilderness and its principal inhabitant, the Indian. As a result, gothic images became integral to that earliest of American stories, the captivity narrative. Shepard's plays include most of the elements of frontier gothic: Indians, captured women, strong hints of evil, mystery, a conflict between the old and the new, incest, doubling, decaying houses, and, most importantly, a confrontation that leads to a transformation of consciousness. Consequently, Shepard's plays abound with magic and mystery. Perhaps the most significant element of frontier gothic as Shepard employs it is the emphasis on a changed consciousness that results from violence in the wilderness. As Richard Slotkin notes in his Regeneration Through Violence (1983), violent change is central to American mythology: "The first colonists saw in America an opportunity to regenerate their fortunes, their spirits, and the power of their church and nation; but the means to that regeneration ultimately became the means of violence, and the myth of regeneration through violence became the structuring metaphor of the American experience." David Mogen points out in "Frontier Myth and American Gothic" (1981) that this "fusion of the traditional gothic theme of psychic disintegration with the larger theme of metamorphosis, or regeneration in the wilderness" is the distinctive aspect of frontier gothic. "As a result," Mogen continues, "the most gruesome horrors in American gothic are often emblems as well of new forms of consciousness emerging from the wilderness experience." Shepard's plays achieve their appeal by concentrating on contemporary characters who reenact this continuing American theme in settings fraught with images drawn from frontier gothic. He dramatizes a world caught between the past and the future. America's violent frontier past lies in the back of his characters' minds, beckoning them back and keeping them from entering the future. Operation Sidewinder, originally presented in 1970, recalls Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove in its concerns for the transformation of both consciousness and American society. In Shepard's play, an American scientist, Dr. Vector, has invented a computer that is supposed to track unidentified flying objects. Drawing on Hopi mythology, Vector builds the computer in the shape of a giant sidewinder rattlesnake. The snake either escapes or Vector sets it free. As the play begins, two American tourists, Honey and Dukie, on their way to Las Vegas to get a divorce, stop to take pictures of the snake. Soon the snake captures Honey, and when Dukie goes for help, he gets involved with "The Young Man," who is trying to use both Billy, an old prospector, and Mickey Free, a half-breed Apache, to spike the reservoir of the air force base with drugs. Shepard's strength derives from his ability to fuse these older elements such as the captured woman, renegade Indian, and old prospector with contemporary ones. The play features elements of the late 1960s: drug trips, Vietnam and military duplicity, and black power. A carhop speaks to the three black characters who are behind the Young Man's activities, Blood, Dude, and Blade, in a way that serves to date the play's historic setting: "Like I can really dig this whole unity thing that you guys are into but it seems like we could be doing something to help bind it all together. You know. I mean you people have such a groovy thing going." The character of Vector and the hint of nuclear apocalypse add to the play's connection with its time. The ultimate transformation merges past and present, however: Mickey Free uses the sidewinder computer to fulfill an ancient Indian prophecy uttered by Spider Woman, a shaman: "A great war is about to begin. It will mark the end of the Fourth World and the preparation for the Emergence to the Fifth. . . . The war will be a spiritual conflict with material things. Material matters will be destroyed by spiritual beings who will remain to create one world and one nation under one power, that of the Creator." Spider Woman goes on to identify the sign that marks the change as the time when the "severed halves of the ancient spirit snake . . . would be joined together again on a night of the great dance." Ironically, Mickey Free begins to worship the escaped sidewinder computer as the fulfillment of the prophecy. He seeks the body of the snake to fulfill the metamorphosis. The play ends in an apocalyptic ceremony, as the Young Man brings the body to Mickey Free's camp shortly before the arrival of military troops seeking the computer. Earlier, Mickey Free had saved the head when he severed it to free Honey from captivity. (In another irony, the white maiden is freed by an Indian.) As the sidewinder is rejoined, Shepard's stage directions suggest his tone toward the ceremonial dance: "The rhythm is slow, deliberate and powerful. Everything about the dance is spiritual and sincere and should not be cartooned or choreographed beyond the unison of the rhythmic patterns." Thus, the ultimate image of the white man's rational, grasping mind--a computer--becomes the element of spiritual metamorphosis on the Western frontier. In this way Shepard fuses the biblical myth of the snake's seduction of Eve that caused Adam's expulsion from Eden with the prevailing American myth that America was a new Garden of Eden where the newly freed Adam could be regenerated. The merging of Indian and European elements recalls several of D. H. Lawrence's comments about America in his Studies in Classic American Literature (1923): "The white man's spirit can never become as the red man's spirit. It doesn't want to. But it can cease to be the opposite and the negative of the red man's spirit. It can open out a new great area of consciousness, in which there is room for the red spirit too." Operation Sidewinder, like many of Shepard's plays, calls for a radical change in American culture, a transformation from the alienated life of contemporary America into something new that combines elements of the old and the new. Vivian M. Patraka and Mark Siegel have pointed to this element in Shepard's plays in their Sam Shepard (1985): "His plays trace the bankruptcy of American culture, in which characters are no longer integrated into their world by adherence to traditional values and norms. Shepard raises the idols of this tradition to send them crashing from a greater height, examines possible but ultimately inadequate strategies for adapting our old culture to new circumstances, or depicts the apocalyptic end of traditional American culture in which long-held values, particularly those glorified in Western American literature, are ritually exorcized to make room for some new, as yet unimagined America." The Tooth of Crime presents a similar confrontation between and fusion of old and new, but where violent metamorphosis is avoided in Operation Sidewinder , it is the ultimate goal in The Tooth of Crime. An imaginative tour de force, The Tooth of Crime is set in a mythic space where rock-and-roll stars control territory like old gunfighters. The old "star," Hoss, a kaleidoscope of pop-culture images--rock star, gunfighter, boxer, race-car driver, science-fiction hero--is pitted against Crow, a young challenger. The frontier, as Frederic Jackson Turner made clear, is that constantly shifting area between old and new, civilization and savagery, society and the individual. The Tooth of Crime concentrates on the inherent violence that arises from this confrontation and underlies many American myths. As the established star, Hoss is no longer outside the establishment; rather, he is the establishment and must attend to the rules of the game. After achieving independence through power, Hoss has accepted the captivity of position. He cannot act without analyzing various external elements: he calls his "Star-man" to see if the moon chart is favorable, but Star-man tells him: "You gotta hold steady, Hoss. This is a tender time. The wrong move'll throw you back a year or more. You can't afford that now. The charts are moving too fast. Every week there's a new star." (The imaginative use of a rock star concerned with stars and charts indicates Shepard's humorous, punning nature as well). Hoss also keeps in mind Becky's constant reminder that "you can't go against the code" until he acknowledges the restrictive nature of his established role: "We're punk chumps cowering under the Keepers and the Refs and the critics and the public eye. We ain't free no more! Goddamnit! We ain't flyin' in the eye of contempt. We've become respectable and safe. Soft, mushy chewable ass lickers. What's happened to our killer heart?" As the representative of the established order, Hoss is challenged by a gypsy killer, Crow, a defiant outsider who owes allegiance to no code. Cruelly amoral, savagely ambitious, Crow comes to their showdown, a battle of verbal style, full of confidence, aware that Hoss is on the verge of burnout. In many ways, Crow is the double of Hoss, a younger version who will enact the terrible drama of son supplanting father. After two rounds the ref calls the match in favor of Crow. Then, in a curious inversion of frontier gothic metamorphosis through violence, Hoss reverts to the "kill" by which he achieved his power and opts for a "true gesture that won't never cheat on itself 'cause it's the last of its kind. It can't be taught or copied or stolen or sold. It's mine. An original. It's my life and my death in one clean shot." With that speech he puts a gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger. Buried Child also uses gothic elements to examine the confrontation between past and present, old and new, but here Shepard uses more of the standard elements of gothic--a rambling old house, long dead mysteries that unfold, and seemingly supernatural events--along with frontier imagery. The most horrifying gothic element--one presented by Edgar Allan Poe in "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839) and by William Faulkner in Absalom, Absalom! (1936)--is incest. In both Buried Child and Fool for Love Shepard uses a past incestuous relationship as the basis for the action of the play, but in both he merges elements of traditional gothic with Western frontier images. In his Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner (1975) John Irwin demonstrates that incest has complex psychological and symbolic suggestions when it appears in literature. Particularly, claims Irwin, it suggests a desire to gain revenge against time, especially incest between mother and son. The son, desiring to replace his father, tries to deny the existence of time, the force that gave his father dominance. Another of Irwin's assertions about incest as a literary motif concerns the relationship between incest and doubling, which are related in Freudian analysis. For the son to overcome Oedipal desires and achieve a healthy maturity, he must find a suitable substitute, or double, for his mother. Doubling often appears in Shepard's plays. In La Turista (1967), Shepard's first full-length play, the two acts of the play mirror each other. Act 1 takes place in a Mexican hotel room where the two main characters are suffering from dysentery. Act 2 occurs in an American hotel, and the disease is sleeping sickness. In True West the two brothers, Austin and Lee, represent two sides of the American present, one sophisticated, cultivated, ambitious, and successful; the other alienated and outcast, raw, wild, and violent. As the play unfolds, the two characters exchange places and reveal that each is the double of the other. In The Tooth of Crime Crow is a younger double of Hoss. Doubling in Buried Child occurs in both plot and character, the most obvious of which is his use of the return. Dodge and Halie's son, Tilden, a former All-American fullback, has returned home after several years of wandering and then living in New Mexico. He seems bewildered and out of touch with reality but in touch with some supernatural power. It allows him to go out behind the house and find armloads of gigantic corn growing in fields that had seemingly lain fallow for years, the fields where Dodge had buried the child that was the product of Tilden's incestuous relationship with his mother. This supernatural power in a fertile wilderness provides the frontier imagery. Soon Tilden's son, Vince, also returns to the house, his first trip to his grandparents' home in years. Thus, the doubled scene suggests the doubled characters. Vince is his father's double. As he and his girlfriend, Shelly, walk up to the house, she kids Vince about his image of his grandparents as the typical American family and about the house being "out of Norman Rockwell or something." Actually, Dodge and Halie's old house takes on an eerie feeling from the beginning as Dodge sits on an "old, dark green sofa with the stuffing coming out in spots," staring at a television with a "flickering blue light . . . but no image, no sound." Rain falls in the background, and beyond the porch "are the shapes of dark elm trees" that recall Eugene O'Neill's Desire under the Elms (1924), another gothic play with incestuous overtones. Shepard therefore uses these doubled characters and events to point to the problematic nature of American life. On the one hand, the fertile aspect of the American myth of open territory and the new Eden is represented by the lush corn growing behind the house. On the other is the destructive nature of the myth that feeds incestuously on itself. Vince's second return after leaving to get Dodge a bottle and then deciding to leave for good suggests a significant change. Rather than supplanting his lineage, Vince understands that he incorporates his past. In one of Shepard's most compelling monologues, Vince explains the conclusion he reached as he drove west into an American night: "I was gonna run and keep right on running. . . . I could see myself in the windshield. My face. My eyes. I studied my face. Studied everything about it. As though I was looking at another man. As though I could see his whole race behind him. Like a mummy's face. I saw him dead and alive at the same time. In the same breath. In the windshield, I watched him breathe as though he was frozen in time. And every breath marked him. Marked him forever without him knowing. And then his face changed. His face became his father's face. Same bones. Same eyes. Same nose. Same breath. And his father's face changed to his grandfather's face. And it went on like that." As the play ends Halie looks out from upstairs, sees all the vegetables growing in the fields, and proclaims, "It's like a paradise out there." With Vince's return to accept his inheritance, the family can once again see the power of the landscape, suggesting one of Shepard's repeated themes: for myth to retain power it must be incorporated into the flow of time. Mere nostalgic attempts to hold onto a lost past are destructive. When Vince accepts time, he apparently moves into the present, but Shepard tempers the seeming optimism of this conclusion when Dodge dies, Shelly leaves, and Tilden unearths the buried child and brings it into the house. The American Eden provides a rich harvest, but too often part of the harvest is violent and destructive. Vince's metamorphosis of consciousness has grown from seeds of violence. In 1991 Shepard returned to the stage after a five-year hiatus with States of Shock, a work that reflects some of his continuing themes and marks a return to his earlier, less realistic style and contemporary concerns. Presented during the Gulf War, States of Shock is set in a diner where a character called the Colonel brings Stubbs, a young disabled veteran of an unnamed war, for an outing from the hospital. The Colonel attempts to get Stubbs to recall the details of his wounding and the death of the Colonel's son, who supposedly was killed by the same artillery shell that wounded Stubbs. Before the play ends, Stubbs indicates that he was wounded by friendly fire and that perhaps the Colonel was involved in his wounding and is actually his father who has betrayed him. States of Shock again emphasizes a fragmentation and falling away from early values, paradoxically caused by the violence engendered by older American myths. At one point the Colonel breaks into a typical Shepard monologue, merging the old and new: "Even in the midst of the most horrible devastation. Under the most terrible kind of duress. Torture. Barbarism of all sorts. Starvation. Chemical warfare. Public hangings. . . . Amputation of private organs. Decapitation. Disembowelment. Dismemberment. Disinturnment [ sic]. Eradication of wildlife. You name it. We can't forget that we were generated from the bravest stock. The Pioneer. The Mountain Man. The Plainsman. The Texas Ranger. The Lone Ranger. My son. . . . We have a legacy to continue, Stubbs." While States of Shock recalls Shepard's earlier elliptical and absurdist style, his next play, Simpatico , reflects the themes and style of the more realistic Shepard of True West. Simpatico, which opened off-Broadway in November 1994 with Shepard directing, concerns two old friends, Carter and Vinnie, who fifteen years before used Vinnie's then-wife, Rosie, to blackmail a horse-racing official named Ames. Rosie and Carter then ran off together and became wealthy and successful. In the intervening time Vinnie used photographs of Rosie and Ames (now Simms) to extort money from Carter. As the play begins, Carter has returned to their hometown of Cucamonga, California, because Vinnie has once again asked for support and Carter wants to get the photographs. Like True West, Simpatico uses two dissimilar characters to highlight the connections between them by dramatizing how each character becomes transformed into the other as the play develops. As both plays unfold, the two characters exchange places and reveal that each is the double of the other. Despite the American belief in starting anew, Shepard's plays emphasize that the past is never over but continues to intrude into the present. The mythic American icon of this play is the horse, debased by the materialistic sport of horse racing, and Shepard uses the interconnected blood of thoroughbreds to suggest the interrelationships that tie things together in paradoxically powerful and debilitating ways. Shepard's next play, When the World Was Green, is a one-act piece created with Joseph Chaikin for the 1996 Olympic Arts Festival in Atlanta. It concerns an old man, once an excellent chef and now jailed for accidentally poisoning a young man. A young woman, a local journalist interested in his case, visits him, and their ensuing discussion reveals their lives. As Ben Brantley observed in his review in The New York Times (8 November 1966), the play "glimmers with Shepardesque themes: the falseness of memory, the gulf between men and women and, above all, the uncertainty of identity." Early in 1998 Eyes for Consuela opened at the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York. The play, based on Octavio Paz's short story "The Blue Bouquet," concerns an American traveler who encounters a bandit in the Mexican jungle. The American, Henry, has grown apart from his wife ("We'd grown hard against each other") and attempts a regenerative escape to Mexico, where he ends up in a decaying Mexican boardinghouse confronted by the bandit Amado, who is seeking blue eyes as offerings to his wife, Consuelo. This play, like Fool for Love, examines the problematical nature of love and, like other Shepard works, is built around doubled characters, in this case the pairs of lovers. Shepard's three nondramatic collections, while spare and elliptical, often examine some of the same themes as the plays through stories of strained families in search of stability, sexual betrayal and violence, and wandering and fame, often presented with a backdrop of the haunted, sometimes corrupted American Western myth. The first two collections, Hawk Moon and Motel Chronicles, convey the concerns of the younger Shepard through many rock-and-roll references. Some of the stories relate directly to some of his better-known plays: the vignette "Illinois," with its description of "green lush wet dripping corn" and a dying grandfather, has connections to Buried Child. In "Montana" a superhuman cowboy with gold spurs pastes money to his dead girlfriend's corpse, burns her body in the tub, and then leaves for Montana. The third collection, Cruising Paradise: Tales, reveals an older, more sophisticated and worldly-wise writer in yet another return to familiar Shepard themes. For example, in "The Real Gabby Hayes," a seven-year-old boy and his father journey to a desolate plot of land that the father purchased in the Mojave Desert, where the father tells the son a corrupted version of the story of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, making the Spanish explorer who washed up on Texas shores in 1528 into a California treasure hunter:
Cabeza de Vaca musta come right through here. Ever heard a him? "Head of a Cow"--that's what his name means. Had a big, ugly head, apparently. From all the accounts. I'll bet he came right through here, searching for Cibola. . . .
. . . old de Vaca had a Negro man--a Moor I guess they called them back then. Big, giant Negro man that de Vaca used as his scout. He'd send him out in search of the golden cities, and one day this Negro came back to camp and told de Vaca he'd finally found it. So they rushed to this place with the Moor leading the way and when they got there it turned out to be a Pueblo Indian village carved into the side of a cliff. When the sun hit the pueblo at a certain time of day, it appeared to be golden. So de Vaca had the Moor beheaded. On the way back home the boy sees someone he thinks is the "real Gabby Hayes," the bewhiskered, toothless sidekick of Western stars, but the man smiles a white-toothed smile and confuses the boy. This is Shepard's world, where children are drawn into appealing but apocryphal versions of a West that never was true. Other stories examine similar ideas: two boys go to a forlorn motel where one boy 's drunken father burned to death; two other boys order a wolf pup from a mail-order catalogue, then set it free along the railroad; in another desolate motel a couple argue and part for unclear reasons. In another series of related stories an actor much like Shepard gets hired by a German director for a movie filmed in Mexico. In "Falling Without End" the Shepardesque narrator confesses:
I'm an actor now; I confess. I don't fly. I've been having some trouble landing jobs lately because of this not wanting to fly business; plus, I refuse to live in L.A. I live as far away from L.A. as possible. . . .
Still, I would gladly go through all these dumb acts ten times over than get on an airplane of any kind. I admit to an overwhelming vertigo that I don't quite understand and I'm unwilling to psychoanalyze. Suffice it to say, it's a severe problem of the imagination. The inability to control mental picturings of stupefying height; and the ensuing sensations associated with these picturings. The absolutely realistic sensation of falling without end, for instance. That's one I have no power over. This is part of the ambivalent, modern world Shepard's characters inhabit, a world where the imagination is strangely loud and silent, oxymoronically frightening and soothing. Although he has slowed the prolific output that characterized his earlier period as a writer, and although his newest plays lack the sweep of his best work, Shepard continues to track the heart of true Western American experience, mapping a metaphysical world that reveals in glimpses the hopes, dreams, and betrayals of American mythology. Papers: The Sam Shepard Archive is a part of the Southwestern Writers Collection at Southwest Texas State University, San Marcos. FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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About this Essay: Mark Busby, Southwest Texas State University, San Marcos Source: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 212: Twentieth-Century American Western Writers, Second Series. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Richard H. Cracroft, Brigham Young University. The Gale Group, 1999. pp. 259-268. Source Database: Dictionary of Literary Biography |
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