Fool of Desire: The Spectator to the Plays of Sam Shepard

Fool of Desire: The Spectator to the Plays of Sam Shepard ANN WILSON Fool for love ... and not just at a distance but as one who had been summoned and embraced, one who had tasted with a piercing delight and had become an addict within an hour,l The extravagant theatricality which characterizes the plays of Sam Shepard intrigues and frequently perplexes critics. Some, like Walter Kerr, dismiss the work with the suggestion that the flamboyance masks its essentially trite content. He suggests that Shepard is deliberately and telentlessly obscure: "His tendency is to stick to his bailiwick and keep on doing what he's been doing even if this forces him into repeating doleful banalities.,,2 Others. like Gerald Weales. suggest that conventional critical strategies concerned with the discovery of meaning never adequately address the dynamic play of Shepard's work. "Traditionally. reviewers have found it congenial to handle plays by talking about what they are about and that is the least valuable way of approaching Shepard's work.,,3 In Shepard's work meaning (in the sense of action which refers to a "reality" ·beyond the play) often seems to be subverted by the theatricality of the plays because Shepard is concerned not with producing meaning but with the production of meaning in the theatre. Shepard's exploration of theatrical practice has been addressed by a number of critics who discuss the recurring theme of performance in his work. Necessarily, the theatrical exploration of performance cannot simply be thematic because performance is itself being performed. In this self-referential gesture the performance comments upon itself. Writers, commenting on the metatheatrical elements of Shepard's work, tend to focus on the characters, many of whom are performers who enact themselves. This focus overlooks the complexity ofperformance which is not simply the performer but the performer before an audience. Three of his plays - Cowboys #2, Buried Child and Fool The Spectator of Sam Shepard 47 for Love' - in their exploration of the audience, indicate the complexity of Shepard's interest in performance. At first, the action of Cowboys #2 seems simple: Chet and Stu improvise scenes from the Old West. At the end of the piece, this illusion of spontaneous improvisation is broken when Man Number One and Man Number Two come from opposite sides of the stage with scripts from which they read aloud "starting from the beginning ofthe play" (p. 240). Ren Frutkin argues that the two men (identified by number and not narne) represent an insidious form of danger, an unsuspected, unimagined danger: "the death of the imagination.'" Frutkin's allegorical reading of Cowboys #2 creates an oppositional pair of improvisation and scripted writing. In its suggestion that the two men are figures of death, the reading endows each element with a complex of values: in contrast to Man Number One and Man Number Two, Chet and Stu are figures of life, of spontaneity. Emerging from the wings, the two men do not establish, but rather reveal, the illusion of the oppositional pair on which Frutkin's argument is predicated. Chet and Stu only appear to be improvising; the emergence of the two men makes clear that all the roles are scripted. Frutkin's reading is possible only by ignoring the opening line of the play which is spoken from off-stage left by Man Number One, "It's going to rain" (p. 228). To this Stu responds and so initiates the apparent improvisation between himselfand Chet. It is not until the end ofthe piece - the emergence of the two men from the wings - that we can read this small opening moment; it is only then that we finally see the script which has controlled the action. Man Number One does not suddenly enter the action at the end, as Frutkin's reading implies, but figures throughout as he and Man Number Two whistle across the stage. Constituted only aurally, and frequently amidst a cacophony of electronically produced sound effects, the two men are not recognized by the audience until they walk onstage and are seen. Shepard does not allegorically represent a struggle between the spontaneity of improvisation and the control of writing. Rather he dramatizes the...