Defusion of Menace in the Plays of Sam Shepard

Defusion of Menace in the Plays of Sam Shepard CHARLES R. BACHMAN • FOR SEVERAL YEARS Sam Shepard has been acknowledged as the most talented and promising playwright to emerge from the Off-off Broadway movement. Now, more than a decade after his work was first performed, he is increasingly recognized as one of the more significant dramatists in the English-speaking world. Praised by Edward Albee and Elizabeth Hardwick,I he has been called "One of the three or four most gifted playwrights alive"2 and "the most talented of his generation."3 Catherine Hughes rightfully acknowledges that "there is no young American playwright who can match Shepard in his ability to employ language."4 Ren Frutkin in an article in Yale Theatre asserts that "he has brought the word back into the theatre,"S and London director Kenneth Chubb believes that Shepard's "perspective on his material has a relevance and universality that earmarks great writers."6 Granted the tendency of some reviewers to exaggerate in the enthusiasm of the moment, the body of positive opinion regarding Shepard's work is impressive. At least twenty -seven of his plays have been performed, not only in the United States and the United Kingdom,7 but in Canada8 and Australia9 as well. At least twelve plays have been performed in London alone, where he has been living for the past four years.IO Nineteen of his plays, as well as a book of poetry and prose, are in published form, and he has several screenplays to his credit.11 Shepard draws much of his material from popular culture sources such as B-grade westerns, sci-fi and horror films, popular folklore, country and rock music and murder-mysteries. In his best work he transforms 405 406 CHARLES R. BACHMAN the original stereotyped characters and situations into an imaginative, linguistically brilliant, quasi-surrealistic chemistry of text and stage presentation which is original and authentically his own. One source of the unique quality and tension of his dramas is his ambivalent attitude toward violence. The structure of his work reflects both an abhorrence for and fascination with it, and with the menace which may lead to it. This fascination is partly apparent in the "force of competitive virtuosity" noted by Frutkin in various pairs of Shepard characters, which in 1969 led that critic to observe that in Shepard's plays "the main dynamism ... is not that of union - the dynamism of love - but of displacement - the dynamism of power."12 At least until his last three published plays, however, such competition produces very little real menace or terrifying physical violence. What Shepard's ambivalent attitude toward violence, menace and power does result in throughout his dramas is the following pattern of action: Menacing, potentially violent characters or forces are introduced, only to have the terror they create defused either by an avoidance of the threatened violence, or vitiation of its effect through audience alienation devices. In the dramas preceding The Tooth of Crime (1972),13 this structure frequently involves characters who are self-indulgent, who often find their whims almost instantly gratified . Such a pattern is in contrast, for example, to that employed in Pinter's dramas, in which menace is almost never defused, but continues to build throughout the action, at times exploding into terrifying conflict. Shepard's dramatic pattern, while never resulting in anything as sentimental as love or even union, bears some resemblance to the fictional patterns of Thomas Hardy, who, like Shepard, created in various novels all the ingredients for violent confrontation, then scrupulously avoided the potential conflict. Like Hardy's characters, those of Shepard ultimately turn out to be potential communers rather than potential conflicters.14 Examples of this pattern throughout Shepard's work are the defusion of the threat posed by Bill, Howard and the offstage plane in Icarus's Mother (1965), Jim in Red Cross (1966), Doc and Boy in La Turista (1966), the Exterminators in Forensic and the Navigators (1967), Peter in Melodrama Play (1967), Geez in Shaved Splits (1969), the Young Man, Blood, and the Desert Tactical Troops in Operation Sidewinder (1970), Sycamore and The Kid in The Unseen Hand (1970), the Chindi and...