The Late Work of Sam Shepard by Shannon Blake Skelton (review)

In The Late Work of Sam Shepard, Shannon Blake Skelton makes the case for a critical reconsideration of Shepard’s work since the late eighties, arguing that these later pieces contain less uncertainty than his earlier work and exhibit major changes in Shepard’s outlook. Shepard has always been prone to disrupting audience expectation, so it comes as little surprise that his “Late Style” upends much of what has gone before, though Skelton wisely shows the through lines of these concerns and how they connect to earlier work. Skelton claims this later work to have been given short shrift by critics thus far, even while he admits these works “leave much to desire” and vary in quality (16). After reading his book, I am inspired to take a closer look at these late pieces, but remain unconvinced of Skelton’s last two claims—the latter because he has provided sufficient evidence of the potential complexity of these later pieces to make them worthy of greater consideration, and the first because it is not exactly true.

The state of Shepard scholarship was looking pretty healthy back in 2002 when I wrote a bibliographic essay for Matthew Roudané’s Critical Companion to Sam Shepard, with excellent volumes on Shepard by such scholars as David DeRose, Stephen Bottoms, Leslie Wade, and Michael Taav having been recently published. Despite Skelton’s claim that there has been a slackening of interest in Shepard’s work during the twenty-first century, I counted eleven new monographs in English alone (including Rameśa Prasada Panigrahi’s The Splintered Self: Character and Vision in Sam Shepard’s Plays, 2004; Carol Rosen’s Sam Shepard: A Poetic Rodeo, 2004; Johan Callens’s Dis/Figuring Sam Shepard, 2007; Jyotirmoy Prodhani’s Creativity and Conflict in the Plays of Sam Shepard, 2012; and Emma Creedon’s Sam Shepard and the Aesthetics of Performance, 2015) and sections in several other critical texts, as well as a numerous theses and journal essays. Many of these address the later works, though they are not, like this volume, centered on them. However, of recent Shepard scholarship outside of reviews of productions, Skelton references only Rosen’s book and Attilio Favorini’s Memory in Play: From Aeschylus to Sam Shepard (2008). More thorough research would have better grounded this book in current scholarship, as several of the aspects Skelton asserts as being new—Shepard challenging the patriarchy, more positive presentations of women and general outcomes, even his relationship to Samuel Beckett—have been considered by others, and their voices should have been included.

In terms of style, The Late Work of Sam Shepard is not always the most lucid volume, but it covers a lot of new material and is not without insight. Skelton offers us a conglomeration of all the expected ingredients—summaries of these later works, early reviews, a framework by which to connect these later plays to the earlier as well as to show how far Shepard’s work has changed—but the final product feels poorly mixed. At times the writing becomes pedestrian and annoyingly repetitive. Assertions with slightly altered vocabulary get repeated on numerous occasions, and almost as much space is spent telling the reader what will be proven as is spent proving it. Begun as a doctoral dissertation, this volume could have been better edited to streamline its arguments. Such stylistic gripes aside, this remains a useful book and a welcome attempt to make sense of these later Shepard pieces.

Shepard’s biographers and other critics have explored the connections between Shepard’s acting and his written work, and addressed how they feed off one another, so Skelton’s “transmedial approach” (10) may not be as original as he claims. But where this volume differs is that while scholars in the past have identified deep tensions between Shepard’s performances and his writing as well as ambivalent divisions within the plays themselves, Skelton asserts that in recent years these divisions have been...