Sam Shepard: A Casebook ed. by Kimball King (review)

Book Reviews 447 KIMBALL KING. ed.Sam Shepard:A Casebook. New York', Garland 1989. pp. xxiii. 176. $36.00. lnSam Shepard: A Casebook, editor Kimball King has assembled a dozenoriginaJ essays on the playwright-cum-cowboy-cum-movie star, preferring range ofsubject to depth. As such. King's methodology emulates previous scholarship that has studied anyone of Shepard's forty plays in isolation, contributing to an obfuscated or disjointed view of the corpus. Given the advanced stage ofcriticism on the "masked man" and his oeuvre, King's approach - which further endorses fragmentation - seems unnecessary. in fact, counterproductive . Recent independent research by Ron Mottram, Doris Auerbach and Lynda Han seeks to offer a unified picture of the man and his work. In book-length texts. these authors coordinate a biography of Shepard with insights into his subject matter and thematic obsessions. Examining his familial and dramatic roots, they establish a coherent framework that becomes all-inclusive as it unravels the riddles that Shepard may deliberately perpetuate. Consequently, it would seem advisable for today's students of the maverick playwright to begin connecting all the disparate images and issues that a host of critics has already identified. After twenty-five years ofproductivity, Shepard has indeed staked out a sizable terrain for analysis. The man who glorifies the myths of a bygone era has now - perhaps inadvertently - created his own cult status and shored up his own past. Time and a decelerated output ought to enable us to pin him down or, at least, bring him into clearer focus. Thus, in soliciting these articles, King's quest for "a sense of fun" and " exhilaration " seems misdirected. Had the editor had a more rigorous agenda or a single vision of Shepard that he wished to see developed, he might have generated a volume significant for pioneering the frontiers of Shepard scholarship. As it is, this Casebook skips from topic to topic, following the plays in a vague semblance of chronology, without providing much information that is new or useful. Even Patrick Fennell's reference guide to Shepard's early and as yet unpublished plays offers little more than brief summaries of their content. Elizabeth Proctor's criticism of •'offbeat humor and comic mystery" inLa Turista,The Unseen Hand, and other plays also dissolves into plot recapitulation instead of cultivating ideas that sustain an argument. Many of the essays in this col1ection, like the afore-mentioned, can be faulted for excessive regurgitation of storyline. and the parroting of stale remarks about the decline of the American family or the degeneration of the American Dream according to Shepard. It would be very difficult to top Bonnie Marranca's anthology American Dreams.' The Imagination o/Sam Shepard, which excels because it was culled from the best criticism already published by 1981. Unfortunately, there is not enough freshness of voice or novelty of thought in King's assemblage of essays. Where there is originality, as in Albert Wilheim's treatment of Icarus's Mother, the subject matter becomes an excuse for displaying erudition. Conceding the unlikelihood that the nineteen-year-old college drop-out would have been acquainted with Naucrate, "one of the least known figures in Book Reviews classical mythology," Wilheim suggests that Shepard is attempting' 'a refocusing ofthe Icarus myth" by naming the play after the daredevil's mother. However, Wilheim fails to convince that the title signals arevisionary perspective. Instead, herelies on inferences and convoluted logic to defend his hypothesis. He argues more successfully when he retreats into a discussion of the son as artist battling the father for creative p~wer. a variation on a theme that recurs in Shepard's corpus. The unadulterated pleasures in this collection begin with "Story Itself: Curse ofthe Starving Class through Foolfor Love." Composed by ChristopherBrookhouse, aretired English professor and fiction-writer, it centers on the device ofstory-telling in Shepard'5 family dramas. Brookhouse investigates subjectivity as it locks characters, audience, and author into disparate and conflicting perceptions of reality. Allowing - with great chann - that his "comments betray (his) own prejudices and in tum (his) own story," Brookhouse describes True West as a search for oneness achieved through a merging of stories, while Foolfor Love is "about...