Images of Women in Shepard's Theatre

Images of Women in Shepard's Theatre CHARLES G. WHITING Sam Shepard, despite all the recognition he has received, has never been celebrated for his characterizations of women. The most sustained and eloquent attack on the playwright's attitudes was made by the director and critic Florence Falk in 1981. "In general, women [in Shepard's plays] are a straggling group of camp followers, and men treat these 'bitches,' 'broads,' and 'stupid fucking cuots' as recalcitrant and dangerous possessions." I More gently, the actress Joyce Aaron ended a brief article in the same year with the exclamation, "\ wish he'd write a play for women! '" Perhaps if Ms. Falk and Ms. Aaron were writing today, after the appearance of Foolfor Love and A Lie ofthe Mind, and the film Far North, they might make some change in their judgements, because it is evident now that Shepard's younger women have become distinctly more prominent in his recent work, and this realization leads us to a new and more favorable perspective on the women in all the earlier plays. It is certainly still true, however, that most of Shepard's theatre is centered on a male character, that five out of twenty-eight published works have no women at all, and that some of his plays offer extremely negative images of women. Miss Cherry, for example, in Shaved Splits, 1970, is an amazingly vulgar and empty-headed rich American woman, and in Operation Sidewinder , also from 1970, Honey is her silly middle-class counterpart. Both these plays, however, have to be seen as political and social satires of various aspects of American life. Action, 1974, is a much more troubling example. This is a play with two men and two women, and its concern is alienation from the self and the consequent isolation from others, but only the two men are interesting and·important. What the playwright appears to have done here is to sharpen the focus on his themes at the expense of the female characters. By giving the two women household roles - cooking, doing the laundry, sweeping - he increased their isolation from the men. He widened the Images of Women in Shepard's Theatre 495 separation even more by using the tradition.l image of women as intellectual inferiors. Lupe and Liza admit their complete ignorance when Jeep begins discussing Walt Whitman. Even worse, these women accept themselves as inferior, and so their ambitions are much more 'limited than those of the men. Almost at the beginning of the play, Jeep tries a soft shoe routine while seated at a table with the three others. For him, it represents an attempt at ftnding a satisfactory identity, but he is not happy with his clumsy effort: I mean we've got this picture in our head of Judy Garland or Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire. Those feet flying allover the place. That fluid motion. How can we do anything for the ftrst time. Even Nijinsky went nuts. Lupe also tries a soft shoe, but her thoughts are far more modest: "I know I'm not as good as Judy Garland. But so what? I wasn't trying to be as good as Judy Garland. " Signiftcantly, during this exchange, Jeep says: " It's hard to have a conversation. " 3 If we put aside for later discussion the older women in Shepard's theatre, the subordinate image of Lupe and Liza in Action is a major exception. Already in very early plays like Icarus's Mother, 1965, and Fourteen Hundred Thousand, 1966, there are young men and women who are equally important and equally interesting. This is also true in the later autobiographical Cowboy Mouth, 1971, in the recent and more psychologically probing Foolfor Love, 1982, and again in Shepard's most recent play, A Lie orthe Mind, 1985. Furthermore, already in the ten earliest plays, [964-67, all of the younger women are in some way remarkable. Every one of them is strong and independent, rarely hesitating to speak her mind, and many of them are willy and imaginative. In Melodrama Play, Dana may appear as a traditional ftgure when she busies herself with the welfare of her rock musician boyfriend...