Understanding Sam Shepard's Realism

Understanding Sam Shepard's Realism William W. Demastes Sam Shepard is a playwright who developed in the 1960's and in many ways is still a product of the 1960's. His early work clearly reflects the experimentation and innovation of that turbulent era in American theater. But his more recent work has adopted a traditional bent that has often led critics to wonder if Shepard has lost the vitality of his early period. This turn to the traditional, however, is not the result of a loss of faith in the ideas and ideals of the Sixties but is the result of a maturing process that has allowed Shepard to drop the more sensational trappings of experimental theater and blend the distilled thought of the period into more traditional forms. The clearest reflection of that revitalizing fusion is a surfacing in his works of realism, the dominant form in American theater for at least the last eighty years. Shepard's realism has given new life to and demonstrated the flexibility of the realist form while at the same time making his own work more accessible to a wider audience and aligning it with a long tradition in American theater. Robert Brustein, in his essay "The Crack in the Chimney: Reflections on Contemporary American Playwriting" (1979), applauds the earlier efforts of Shepard, noting that his work is a breakthrough that essentially brings American theater up-todate with the current thought and expression of its European contemporaries. Former dramatic efforts in America have been mired in outdated perceptions of reality; Brustein notes that in Arthur Miller's works, for example, "the premises underlying Miller's themes and actions . . . belong to the eighteenth century, which is to say the age of Newton, rather than to the twentieth century, the age of Einstein."l Brustein is specifically attacking America's obsession with realism and naturalism. According to WILLIAM W. DEMASTES currently teaches in the English Department at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. He is the author of a forthcoming book entitled American "New Realism" in the Theatre of the 80s. 229 230Comparative Drama Brustein, naturalism's strict causal connections—actions causing equal and opposite reactions—involve a system that modern thought has finally shown to be too reductive and simplistic to illustrate human action with credible accuracy. Miller is not the only one to follow this pattern, though. It is pervasive in much of American drama, even in O'Neill and even in his masterpiece, Long Day's Journey Into Night.2 The historical cataclysms of the mid-twentieth century have brought that certainty of understanding into serious doubt. But despite such events, eighteenth-century rationalism and nineteenth -century naturalism have remained the dominant modes of understanding and explanation, in America at least. With the arrival of the 1960's, however, American drama began to reflect more accurately the changing thought already reflected in European drama—in absurdist theater, for example. Using the non-realistic Suicide in B Flat (1976) as illustration, Brustein notes that, like European absurdism, Shepard has here succeeded in "disintegrating the causal conventions of realistic theatre"3 so prevalent in American theater. In fact, this process of disintegration has caused Rodney Simard to see Shepard less as an American dramatist in particular than a postmodernist in general. Simard goes as far as to align Shepard with European artists rather than Americans, arguing that Shepard's plays "deny cause and effect like Stoppard's works" and noting that an insistence on viewing Shepard as an American "obscures his contribution to postmodern drama."4 But while at one time Shepard's early works expose the inadequacies of traditional American realism and naturalism, more recently he himself has turned to realism. It is a conversion which has resulted in some concern that Shepard has given up his postmodern aspirations. The shift, however, was not to return to old causal patterns, but to turn to a form that had worked so well for other American playwrights in their efforts to deal with another dominant American obsession: the disintegration of the American family. That obsession certainly identifies O'Neill—and Miller and Williams also, among others. And the realistic form seems particularly well suited to...