An American Cowboy on the English Fringe: Sam Shepard's London Audience

An American Cowboy on the English Fringe: Sam Shepard's London Audience STEVEN PUTZEL "Rile 'em Cowboy," "Metaphors, Mad Dogs and Old Time Cowboys," "Renaissance Man Rides Out of the West" - these are just a few titles of British articles on the plays of Sam Shepard.' The image of Shepard as cowboy has been part of U.S. popular culture for so long now that more people know the Stetson-topped, Lucchese-shod aging coverboy than know the work of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. Twenty years ago when this image was still new, Shepard packed up wife, child, and stereotype and moved to London , entering the ranks of literati expatriates. Like all expatriates, he took his homeland with him. As he told the editors of Theatre Quarterly after he had been living in London for a few years, "it wasn't until I came to England that I found out what it means to be an American. Nothing really makes sense when you're there, but the more distant you are from it, the more the implications of what you grew up with start to emerge.'" This new-found national identity is reflected in the plays he wrote while in London, but what is equally important is that he also found a new audience. By 197' Sam Shepard had established himself as one of the rising stars of the non-establishment New York theater. Self-consciously avant-garde audiences of the American Place Theatre, Theater Genesis, Old Reliable Theatre, Cherry Lane Theatre, Caf. Cino, Judson's Poet's Theatre, and La Mama Experimental Theatre Club had welcomed Shepard's plays since he moved east from California in 1965. He arrived in New York, as he later told an interviewer, at the time when "the whole off-off Broadway theatre was just starting,"3 and when like-minded artists from all over the United States were converging in the East Village. He attributes his early success, in part, to tIle nature of his audience: On the Lower East side there was a special sort of culture developing. You were so Modem Drama, 36 (1993) 131 132 STEVEN PUTZEL close to the people who were going to the plays, .there was really no difference between you and them - your own experience was their experience .. ,4 In 1971 this onanistic relationship between playwright and audience ceased to satisfy. Shepard and his wife, O-Lan, moved three thousand miles further east to become American expatriates in London. Although Shepard claimed to be fleeing the unprofitable New York playwriting business to "get into music" in London, the "rock '0' roll centre of the world,"5 the move proved to be shrewd persona building. In London the cowboy rock 'n' roll image of both the playwright and his work played well and played right to the British audiences' stereotype of American rugged individualism. Of course, living in London and writing for a new audience also affected Shepard's art. Seeing his early plays performed by British actors for London audiences would reveal to him just how universal or parochial the plays were. More important, his experience as an expatriate, including his experience as a writer and director for and a member of London audiences, would alter the thematic content and theoretical approach to his drama. By focusing on the reception of Shepard's plays while he lived and wrote in London from late 1971 through most of 1974, we can add to our understanding of what Patrice Pavis calls the "theatrical relationship" and the role this relationship plays in forging Shepard's artistic self-identity.6 We can rely on the written text for clues about the intended relationship between play and audience, but only first-hand knowledge of the entire production sequence could come close to reconstructing the actual performance texts. Although this essay makes no attempt at such a reconstruction, reference to the immediate response of theater critics adds some first-hand evidence about specific performances. Twelve Shepard plays were produced in London·between 1972 and 1974, five of which were new plays. written during his three years in Shepherds Bush and Hampstead: The Tooth of Crime (1972), Blue Bitch (I973), Geography of...