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542 Book Reviews plishment for the reader and helps to illuminate the significance of this collaboration in American theatre history. SUSAN SPECTOR, BARUCH COLLEGE/CUNY DAVID DEROSE. Sam Shepard. New York: Twayne Publishers 1992. Pp. 17I. David DeRose's Sam Shepard is the most comprehensive survey of Shepard's plays to date - and one of the most insightful analyses of the individual plays as well as the contour of Shepard's oeuvre. The study is informed by a sound grasp of theatrical modernism , discussing the influence of Brecht, Albee, Artaud, Beckett, and Pirandello. DeRose is also superb on the influence of the postabsurdists like Pinter, as well as the New York avant-garde theatre scene in which Shepard developed. What particularly distinguishes this study however is its close and systematic attention to performance and staging. As a director as well as a critic, DeRose argues that there has been a lopsided approach to Shepard which has stressed his innovative language and ignored his theatrical innovations. For DeRose, Shepard's interest in performance springs from the American concern with self invention and the "performing self." This interest was intensified by the sixties preoccupation with "consciousness" (and its altered, "heightened" states) as a means of self-transformation. Shepard's characters exist in states of critical hyperconsciousness and agitation, and the theatrical implications of these states provide the basis for Shepard's disturbing vision. DeRose discusses Shepard's innovative theatrical images, his use of stage space, his "Artaudian" representation of action which avoids reducing action to psychologically motivated terms, his "transformational" techniques - all of which, DeRose forcefully argues, function to defy conventional theatrical representation, to "unfix" the reality of the plays and their characters." DeRose's discussion focuses particularly on what he calls the "suprareal," a crucial innovation by which Shepard materially manifests states of anxiety and heightened consciousness on stage through dramatic nonsequiturs and strikingly incongruous imagery. DeRose maintains that these sensory-specific images take on an overwhelmingly vivid and material quality, injecting a kind of Jamesonian postmodem "schizophrenic " quality into the plays as well as a sense of menace and agitation. DeRose's provocatively argues that the relative success of Shepard's plays depends on the degree to which they creatively draw upon the startling and disjunctive "suprarealism " the playwright developed in his early period. He contends that as Shepard's career develops, the "fit" between this heightened theatrical reality and the emerging realism of the family plays is sometimes uneven and strained, vitiating, in some cases, Shepard's dramatic vision. DeRose goes on to argue (convincingly, I think) that the plays which most creatively mix avant-garde "suprarealism" and a developing "realistic" strain are Buried Child, True West and Fool/or Love. In Buried Child suprareal images - Dodge's grotesque haircut, the corn husks, and the infant corpse - "intensify the sense of forebod- Book Reviews 543 ing that has been realistically introduced through the action." Fool for Love most successfully combines the real and suprareal with its ambiguous dreamlike setting and fierce expressionist staging, and its suspension between fantasy and reality. However in the earlier Curse ofthe Starving Class, according to DeRose, suprarealism clumsily cohabits with realism, coming off as "vestiges of an older aesthetic" without context in the action of the play, while in the more recent A Lie ofthe Mind Shepard almost completely loses touch with his avant-garde roots, producing a play in which suprarealism has been replaced by cliched symbolism. DeRose sees hope for a resurgence of Shepard 's dramatic inventiveness in States ofShock, "a fluid, dreamlike event of hypnotic, archetypal images, as full of visual poetry as it is of current politics." While DeRose's overall argument is well sustained, I suspect it doesn't fit so well in the case of Curse of the Starving Class. Here I'd argue that the "strain" between the heightened theatrical reality and the developing realism produces a "conflict" (if it is such) which is "creative." The disjunctive moments of suprarealism, rather than being "discontinuous images without context" (as DeRose contends) seem to me to constitute a productive convergence of naturalistic form and fragmented image (the latter often conceptually at odds with the naturalistic form) which is utterly...

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