Sam Shepard: Theatrical Power and American Dreams

Sam Shepard: Theatrical Power and American Dreams SHEILA RABILLARD The plays of Sam Shepard present some peculiar difficulties. There appears to be a wide split between the early and the later works, one that Shepard himself acknowledges. In an interview published in 1974, he announced that he was now trying for less flash and fewer mythic figures;l in 1980 he told Robert Coe that, although he had thought charactera "corny idea," he was now becoming interested in it "on a big scale";' True West (1980), he told one interviewer, was the frrst of his plays he could watch, night after night, withoutembarrassment3 This division is reflected in the response to Shepard which is in itself problematic: the plays before Curse of the Starving Class (1977), especially when they first appeared, were generally received with a good deal of bafflement even from the directors who presented them; the later plays have enjoyed much wider acceptance, but some of the popular response seems to be directed not so much to the plays themselves as to a cliched patina enveloping Shepard and the dissolution of the American Dream. The second, and related, difficulty lies in the power Shepard exercises over an audience, a power that may well make the spectator uneasy . For the early plays can strike one as somehow meretricious, mere show-biz, a collection of coups de theatre floating untethered by character, plot, or theme; while the later plays, with thcir apparently more conventional and realistic anchoring, hold the spectator with a force that one can scarcely attribute to themes so readily reducible to cliche. How does Shepard take his audience so violently? Is one merely being "taken"? In a sense the plays, both early and later, are undeniably sequences of spectacular theatrical effects: violent confrontations between characters; sudden and bizzare transformations in the roles characters play; striking gestures and images that compel attention without yielding to interpretation. The audience is drawn and held - but not meretriciously. I propose that Sam Shepard's dramas can be regarded as, in some essential respects, explorations of theatricality. With the help of analytical categories outlined in Anne Theatrical Power and American Dreams 59 Ubersfeld's Lire Ie Thea.tre, it is possible to examine how Shepard uses or disqualifies certain semiotic practices. Such an analysis, I suggest, provides a way of describing the sources ofShepard's power over his audience and reveals some vital connections between the earlier plays and the later, at first glance more realistic and illusionistic, works. A collection of earlier plays, Five Plays by Sam Shepard (1967), includes introductory notes by directors who, for the most pan, failed to create successful Shepard productions. Theircomplaints are instructive: "When I read [Icarus's Mother (1965)], I couldn't tell the characters apan - and Sam said he doesn't think about characters." "It's always hard to tell what, if anything, Sam's plays are 'about'." One director records that he made the staging of Fourteen Hundred Thousand (1966) more dynamic, made its opening scenes more realistic, and, as the characters approached stasis in the later scenes, used the actors expressionistically. Shepard, who was observing, declared his efforts "unacceptable.,,4 What these directors found unproducable in Shepard is precisely what I argue is most theatrical. Here it is that he strips away elements traditional to realistic drama - psychologically detailed character, developed themes, shapely and consistently-moving plots - in order to concentrate upon the bare bones that remain and to explore the nature of the theatrical event. Shepard's plays defy easy categorization, but the attempt to apply a familiar taxonomy may help to clarify their character. The early plays are, in some sense, abstract, yet they seem neither expressionist nor symbolist. They have nOne of the symbolist aura of mystery - there is too much of the comic in them, and most symbolic readings so far offered seem too restrictive for the disorderly life of dramas such as Chicago (1965), or Red Cross (1966). Nor do these plays focus, expressionistically, on a mind's experience - although one does encounter in The Mad Dog Blues (1971), and perhaps in True West, the consciousnesses of two characters alternately shaping the world of the play. Shepard...