Food and Drink in Shepard's Theater

Food and Drink in Shepard's Theater CHARLES G. WHITING Half of Sam Shepard's published plays have food or drink onstage at or very near the beginning, and in at least half of his plays food and drink play an important role. Except perhaps for lobster in Cowboy Mouth and tequila in the same play and in Foolfor Love, these are always very ordinary comestibles, but never are they used by Shepard merely to achieve an effect of realism or naturalism, nor are they ever presented to the spectator in an unremarkable or banal manner. In one way or another, Shepard always makes them noticeable and significant. From the beginning he has been aware of theater as spectacle and has known how to exploit all the visual possibilities of food and drink on the stage. The first scene of The Rock Garden (1964) is played in total silence, thus accentuating what is seen. The setting is simple, uncomplicated, focusing the audience's attention on a father and two children seated at a table. The father is totally absorbed in a magazine, and Shepard specifies that" The only action is that ofthe BOY and GIRL drinking milk.'" The scene ends with the girl dropping her glass and spilling the milk. Again in 4H Club (1964), food and drink have strong visual accents; typically, however, Shepard does not repeat himself. The stage is empty, except for a small kitchen extreme upstage left where there are two young men. A third young man is downstage facing the audience, kneeling beside a hot plate and stirring something in a pot. He hits the spoon on the pot and serves coffee to all three, who slurp it down and smash the cups on the floor. Then, while one young man sweeps up the pieces, the two others enter, one at a time, loudly crunching an apple. Two of the trio throw an apple back and forth, amusing themselves by imagining an apple war against the pedestrians below. Food in Shepard plays is not just offered, eaten, or rejected, but is made visually apparent in a variety of striking and unexpected actions. Biscuits are . thrown by someone offstage at a young man in a bathtub in Chicago. In Forensic and the Navigators, a young woman wearing a white hospital gown CHARLES G. WHITING enters flipping a pancake and catching it in a frying pan. Later, she fills a bowl with Rice Krispies and holds them down with her hands, inviting a young man to pour milk over her hands onto the cereal. In Cowboy Mouth, the Lobster Man arrives in a motel rOom with a large order of food and is told to drop it all in the middle of the room. Tilden, in Buried Child, enters with an armful of com and dumps it in the lap of his father, who then pushes it onto the floor. Tilden strips the corn and covers his sleeping father with the husks. Miss Scoons, in Angel City , slowly brings a glass of water onstage, balancing it on the back of her hand. In True West, Austin prepares a huge stack of toast which his brother Lee sends flying. Jake in ALie ofthe Mind, throws a bowl ofcream ofbroccoli soup onto his mattress, and then begins stomping on it, jumping all over the bed. It is in Curse ofthe Starving Class, however, that actions involving food are most evident: in the first act all four major characters continually open and close a refrigerator and even talk to it; in the second act, the mother of the family throws artichokes out of the refrigerator to make room for a large bag of groceries; in the third act, the father cooks breakfasts and Wesley, his son, pulls food out ofthe refrigerator, eats it ravenously, and throws half-eaten bits to one side while digging in for more. Alcohol, which appears first in The Unseen Hand, also becomes visually powerful in Curse ofthe Starving Class with its spectacle of the loud, reeling, drunken Weston, father of the family. It then reappears in a variety of new images in Buried Child where old Dodge drinks from a bottle and hides it in...