Experimental Theatre Then and Now

The death of Sam Shepard, on July 27, generated an outpouring of genuine sadness at the loss of an incomparable voice in the American theatre. Some will say he punctured the myth of masculinity, and others that he represented a certain kind of lost manliness. He was a playwright, actor, and musician who organized his life around a fierce individuality, and who reflected on his strengths and vulnerabilities with an unflinching gaze. Most of all, he was a man who loved writing and gave to the theatre a new dramatic language that could be a rock-and-roll sentence or a lyrical riff or a staccato punch or a trainload of desire. He was a taciturn man who imagined garrulous characters, a cowboy with Neruda in his back pocket. Over the decades, Shepard’s own writings were published as well as often discussed in the pages of PAJ. In 1985, a play he wrote with Joseph Chaikin, entitled The War in Heaven (Angel’s Monologue), appeared in the journal’s tenth anniversary issue. We also published Shepard’s work in two books, in 1981: American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard, which I had edited, and Hawk Moon: Poems, Stories, Monologues, a volume that remains in print.

Included here is Shepard’s first contribution to PAJ, published in our fifth issue, Fall 1977. It was a response to a solicitation among members of the theatre community on the subject of experimental theatre since the sixties.

Bonnie Marranca

It feels awkward to make definitive statements concerning a subject like experimental theatre. If experimentation truly has to do with taking steps into the unknown with the hope of knowing, then it seems that each time those steps are taken they are brand new from the last time. There are certain things that you always drag with you but when the time comes to step off the edge you leave those things behind. If you hang onto them you find yourself in the same place you started. So you start over again.

To me the influence of the sixties and the off-off Broadway theatre and the Lower East Side was a combination of hallucinogenic drugs, the effect of those drugs on the perceptions of those I came in contact with, the effects of those drugs on my own perceptions, the Viet Nam War, and all the rest of it which is now all long gone. The only thing which still remains and still persists as the single most important idea is the idea of consciousness. How does this idea become applicable to the theatre? For some time now it’s become generally accepted that the other art forms are dealing with this idea to one degree or another. That the subject of painting is seeing. That the subject of music is hearing. That the subject of sculpture is space. But what is the subject of theatre which includes all of these and more? It may be that the territory available to a theatrical event is so vast that it has to be narrowed down to ingredients like plot, character, set, costume, lights, etc., in order to fit it into our idea of what we know. Consequently, anything outside these domains is called “experimental.”

I don’t really feel that the American theatre underwent any enormous changes as a result of what went down in the sixties. It was only added onto. Generally speaking, the attitudes of the press are still the same as they always were toward new work. Bemused condescension or outright indignance. The main theme of the press in reaction to my own work has been “It’s fine if you like that kind of thing and he certainly has a way with words but when is he going to stop playing around and give us a really MAJOR NEW AMERICAN PLAY.”

By now, it’s obvious that there is an audience for new theatre. For a theatre that takes chances and risks going into dimensions other than the ones we’ve already seen and heard of. That audience creates the need for theatre as an art form and that...