Inverted Chronology in Sam Shepard's La Turista

Inverted Chronology in Sam Shepard's La Turista CHARLES G. WHITING Shortly after the first performances of Sam Shepard's La Turista in New York City in March 1967, Elizabeth Hardwick wrote an article praising the "superlative interest," the "aggressive brilliance," "violent energy," and "imaginative strength" of this "dazzling production." She described it as "a storm of feeling and experience" and "his most ambitious play so far." 1 It was in fact Shepard's first two-act play and also the first of his plays that was substantially re-written. Persuaded by the director, Jacques Levy, Shepard produced an entirely new second act while La Turista was already in rehearsal. It is a landmark in Shepard's early career, and he chose to include it in a recently published collection of seven of his works, along with The Tooth of Crime, his favorite, and the three recent "family plays," Curse ofthe Starving Class, Buried Child, and True West. 2 La Turista has its place in this group because it announces so many of the great Shepard themes, ali linked to the integrity ofthe self: the family as roots and the family as prison; the value ofreal experience versus the sterility of order and neatness (the cleanliness-obsessed Kent learnedly lecturing Salem on sunburn and skin color already anticipates Austin, the orderly intellectual of True West); victimization by others; and above all the failed escape, failed because man is finally limited by what he is already or what he has become, Slim in Cowboy Mouth, Hoss in The Tooth of Crime, Jeep in Action, Niles in Suicide in B-flat, Henry Hackamore in Seduced, Wesley in Curse ofthe Starving Class, Vince in BuriedChild, Austin in True West. Hardwick, in her sensitive review, noted that the second act of La Turista chronologically precedes the first, and Ruby Cohn in her recent book, New American Dramatists, also makes this observation.3 No one, however, has explained why Shepard wanted his play to go backward. A thematic strategy that has nothing to do with a linear series of cause and effect required this unusual structure. Furthermore, in this play the main characters are not really Inverted" Chronology in La Turista 417 characters, but expressions of powerful energies or devastating weaknesses, and dialogue is often not dialogue but "arias," "performances," and speeches to the audience. Shepard is shooting energized images at the spectators, stirring emotions and provoking resonances in the imagination to encourage metaphysical realizations in the consciousness: "The r~al quest of a writer is to penetrate into another world.,,4 In Act I, Kent and Salem are a young American couple, tourists in a hotel room in Mexico, afflicted with sunburn but especially with diarrhea. A small Mexican boy walks in uninvited. Despite his poverty, he is in perfect health, and he is also aggressively independent, finally so shocking the American couple that Kent falls into a coma. A witchdoctor and his son arrive, but despite elaborate rituals fail to effect a cure. The act ends with the Mexican boy announcing his departure, not only from the hotel room, but from his entire hopeless existence. In a wonderfully evocative speech he describes a magical liberation by a pick-up truck which will float him across the Gulf of Mexico. Act II begins again in a hotel room, but now in the United States. Again Kent lies in a coma, but this one has been caused by sleeping sickness, so diagnosed by a country doctor and his son, both costumed in the style of the Civil War period. Doc succeeds in bringing Kent out ,of his coma but then turns into a sinister successor to Dr. Frankenstein who intends to re-fashion Kent into a monster. Kent unmasks Doc and makes a spectacular escape by swinging on a rope and running through ~he back of the set, ending the play. Hardwick's claim thatAct II in the United States precedes Act I in Mexico is substantiated by eleven references made by Salem in Act II to a trip she and Kent are about to make to Mexico. How to explain this inverted chronology? The fIrst answer is that the play was written in Mexico...