Sam Shepard's Master Class in Playwriting

Figure 1.

Photo by Quinn Chandler

Cherry Lane Theater, in Manhattan's West Village, is not located on Cherry Lane at all, but on Commerce Lane (nowhere near the Financial District of Lower Manhattan). It's a venerable theater company that has been around for years, not very big, nowhere near Broadway, tucked in a corner on one of the most beautiful neighborhoods in New York: an urban paradise. It would seem wrong if anything other than a theater company were in this location. After everything is gone, this place feels like it will still be here, waiting for an audience.

Monday, November 6, 2006, 7:46 p.m. Excitement hovers. The crowd is your standard theater audience: median age, late forties, and I am, as always, one of the youngest people in the room. Women dominate the group: sweet, good-natured ladies who all seem to know one another.

People meander inside Cherry Lane's second-stage space, which seats about fifty or sixty; every seat is taken. Some people are dressed like characters in one of Sam Shepard's plays. The event is being videotaped: a surprise, given Shepard's record of determined privacy. He doesn't do press junkets or interviews for the films he acts in. This is written into his contracts. Nor does he really like flying all that much. He has, however, in recent years, opened up somewhat, offering glimpses into his artistic and personal life such as he's generally shied away from. Perhaps that is why the Master Class you are about to read is a one-night-only window of opportunity; the experience is another taste of what continues to simmer on the stove before the lid goes back on and we keep cooking.

The stage is set. Orange stage lights illuminate the foreground, with a simple black chair and a small table nearby, holding a bottle of water. A backdrop of white fabric outlines leafless branches. From a distance, the white fabric looks like embroidered music notes—fitting for a musician turned member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Moments later Shepard is introduced, taking a purposeful stride toward the stage. This is the man responsible for Chicago, Tooth of Crime, Geography of a Horse Dreamer, True West, Curse of the Starving Class, Simpatico, A Lie of the Mind, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Buried Child, The Late Henry Moss, The God of Hell and Kicking a Dead Horse. He drafted a book while traveling with Bob Dylan's 1975 Rolling Thunder tour, as well as cowriting "Brownsville Girl," one of Dylan's most treasured songs. His fiction includes Motel Chronicles, Hawk Moon, Cruising Paradise and The Great Dream of Heaven, as well as a new collection to be published in 2008. When he's not writing, he finds opportunities to act onstage and in feature films.

When he sits down on Cherry Lane's minimally decorated stage, his first goal as director of this one-night production is lighting. "Can we find a way to get these lights down here?" he says, his hand over his eyes as he squints into the crowd. "I could be getting a sunburn up here and not notice it until it's too late."

The Master Class will consist of a question-and-answer session, and the action gets going, as in any of Shepard's forty-five plays. A man in his midforties with endless notes is the first one called upon, and we dive into substance:

CROWD MEMBER: You're an alum of the Cherry Lane, and you were here in . . . ? Way back in 1968?

SHEPARD: Oh, way before then. I did a one-act here in 1964 or '65 that was called Up till Thursday, and then, of course, later came True West.

CROWD MEMBER: As an actor, what do you expect from your writers, and as a writer what do you expect from your actors?

SHEPARD: I don't compartmentalize things like that. I'm not interested in borders so much...