Sam Shepard’s Metaphorical Stages by Lynda Hart (review)

146 Western American Literature twenty-seven years, since Leonard McDonald of A Shooting Star, has Stegner created anyone who lives quite as successfully and contentedly as does Morgan. To balance his experiments with narration, Stegner has again chosen gardens as his setting. In overly-tended gardens, he carries forward a theme that he’s much concerned with, the abuse of land. As have other characters before her, Charity Lang vainly sets out to secure her happiness by dominating land. She always tries, “in defiance of the genius of the country” (228), to “bulldoze” land to her purposes (265). But, as reward for her work, she only discovers “the miserable failure of the law of nature to conform to the dream of man” (267). Stegner’s success with this latest work lies in the ability to use contempor­ ary art to express ageless truths about the human heart and about the earth. This novel is at once a fresh beginning and a comforting benediction. It’s Stegner at his best. RUSSELL BURROWS Utah State University Sam Shepard’s Metaphorical Stages. By Lynda Hart. (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. 157 pages, $29.95.) Lynda Hart’s Sam Shepard’s Metaphorical Stages is one of the series Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies being brought out by the Green­ wood Press under the general editorship of Joseph Donohue. In this volume Hart sets herself the task of offering a “unified vision” of Shepard’s drama. On the face of it, this does not seem to be an easy task, as Shepard, in his career spread over more than two decades, has experimented with every known style and has eluded categorization. But by focusing on the metaphorical dimensions of the plays, Hart successfully traces the continuity between Shepard’s early, fragmentary plays and the later full-length family dramas. Recent studies of Shepard’s work, including Ellen Oumana’s Sam Shep­ ard: The Life and Work of an American Dreamer (1986) and Ron Mottram’s Inner Landscapes: The Theatre of Sam Shepard (1984) highlight his Americanness and his ability to articulate the “collective unconscious.” Shepard is seen as an American phenomenon. Hart, while supporting this, goes beyond this to examine the European roots of his experimentation. Shepard’s work is not sui generis; and it is not born out of nothing. Towards this end, she views the early plays as necessarily self-reflexive, as an answer to the question “what is drama?” This also involves an exploration of the meaning of character. Shepard has behind him the anti-illusionistic and anti-realistic tradition pro­ vided by writers like Pirandello, Artaud, Beckett, Brecht and Ionesco. His concept of character, though drawing immediately on the transformation exercises of the Open Theatre, has its roots in the fluidity of Pirandello’s characters, and the multiple selves which inhabit the world of European Reviews 147 drama. It is this fluidity of character which helps him to revitalize the realistic form when he turns to it in his later plays. Hart devotes a complete section to the study of five full-length plays— Buried Child, Curse of the Starving Class, True West, Fool for Love and A Lie of the Mind. They are plays about family relationships, relationships between generations, between parents and children, and between lovers. But they are not projected in conventional terms; they are psychological (and metaphori­ cal) explorations of the human mind. The realism of these plays is laced with experimentation and Shepard moves freely between different forms. Shepard, in Hart’s words, uses a “myriad of theatrical techniques and forms that he borrows from nearly every major movement in contemporary theatre.” This slim volume is a welcome addition to the body of criticism on Shepard’swork for several reasons. Not cluttered with an examination of every play, it provides a clear focus. It also has two appendices, one providing a career chronology, and the other listing his published works and premiere pro­ ductions. And finally it helps set the perspective right by drawing attention to a dramatic tradition outside the bounds of geography. JASBIR JAIN University of Rajasthan, Jaipur, India Howard Hawks: A Jungian Study. By Clark Branson. (Santa Barbara: Garland-Clark Editions/Capra...