American Clocks: Sam Shepard's Time Plays

American Clocks: Sam Shepard's Time Plays ENOCH BRATER Time moves in strange ways on the contemporary American stage. In this prefabricated world the dramatic moment constantly re-sets itself: here a unity of time is more frequently experienced as a tantalizing disunity. The minute destablizes, the hour deconstructs, the beating of a clock takes its own oddeven measure for measure. This is a haunting rhythm, as Sam Shepard describes his adventurous mise-en-scene for A Lie of the Mind, "of infinite space, going off to nowhere" (xix) - in particular.' At the end of this ambitious three-act play, Meg moves slowly down stage right toward porch, still unaware of two other characters stuck in the same tableau, her maimed daughtcr 'Beth and lake's "other," brother Frankie. Her eye crosses the proscenium to the fire still burning in the bucket from a different staged time in another scenic place. And as she moves out onto the porch landing, it is the empty site of this previously staged "space" that she now cauterizes for us with the finality of an ambiguous stare; ... Sire stops. Pause. MEG (Still with hand to her cheek) Looks like a Hre in the snow. How could that be? (Lights Jade slowly to hlack exceptJor fire.) (131) The specular invites speculation: this attempt at a composite denouement has been designed for a dual set on which two bold time signatures are registered in terms of the explicit use of a suddenly simultaneous stage space. Shepard's scenic vocabulary in A Lie oftlte Mi/ld is, of course, only a more graphic display for the artificial structuring of time as it has long been known to function on the twentieth-century American stage. "The past is the present, isn't it?" intones Mary Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill's LO/lg Day's Journey illlo Night (87). "It's the future too. We all try ·to lie out of that but life won't let Modem Drama, 37 (1994) 603 604 ENOCH BRATER us" (170).' The scenography for her dramatic revelation has been far more naturalistically arranged than anything we are likely to see in Sam Shepard's performance space. Even in True West, for example, a recognizably suburban kitchen is invaded by a phalanx of shiny toasters from hell. And yet Mary Tyrone's stage time may be similarly transformed by the steady intrusion of fog, mist, and her morphine-induced state. Appearing at a doorway wearing a sky-blue house coat over her nightdress, her eyes enormous, an old-fashioned white satin wedding gown trailing on the floor, her face now appears "so youthful": "Experience.seems ironed out of il. It is a marble mask of girlish iunocence, lite mouth caught in a shy smile." A dramatic moment is all at once liberated from the constraints of picayune illusionism as Mary, like Shepard's Meg, seems unaware of the presence of other characters sharing the same stage time and the same stage space: She pauses and a look ofgrowin,,! uneasiness comes over herface. She passes a hand over her forehead as ifbrushing cobwebs from her brain. ... ThaIwas the winterof senior year. Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes. I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone andwas so happy for a time. She stares before her ill a sad dream. Tyrone stirs in his choir. Edmundalldlamie motionless. CURTAIN (176) O'Neill's often acknowledged indebtedness to Strindberg notwithstanding, this playing with time relies perhaps too heavily on the realistic effects of two popular American pastimes, drugs and heavy liquor. Postmodernists prefer more romantic forms of addiction and poststructuralists insist on more ironic modes of psychological dependency: ropes repeatedly lassoed to a seedy motel bedpost or an Old Man who says he's married to Barbara Mandrell: "That's realism.") In Long Day's Journey into Night, however, the chemistry of narcotics of one sort or another is a great lubricator of the imagination as well as the tongue; such fourth-wall devices aim to do nothing less than unburden what we used to call the dark night of the soul. O'Neill's exploration of monologue (a lie detector if there...