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Sam Shepard's Angel City: A Movie for the Stage CAROL ROSEN SAM SHEPARD IS a playwright of zap-pop-pow action, and he is a playwright of comic-book verbs: his plays flash, zoom, and screech across the stage. Primary colors ooze through neon tubing, jazz and rock music shoot through a sound system, and characters hurl words like weapons, wounding each other with Shepard's heightened version of American English, a language of riffs, culled from slang, jargon, punk talk, dime novels, and B-movies. Shepard floods his stage with such language, a codified language of energy sounding through space; and he peoples his stage with the lone heroes of American myths. Gangsters, rock stars, cowboys, and science-fiction images cohabit on his stage; rub-outs, hits, showdowns, and take-offs collide in his plots. Shepard's plays are often about power, its sources, its manifestations , its styles. His characters fight for power, they usurp others' territory, steal their turf, stake their claims, and they fight, usurp, steal, and stake in his own hybrid language of picture shows and secret codes. The language itself often becomes a signal of danger, of mysterious energies, of power. [n a trance at the end of Act One of Angel City, for example, Miss Scoons speaks in a kind of voice-over, linking her own situation to the one she shares with her bosses, the detached movie-mogul, Lanx, and the enthralled Wheeler, a creative wheelerdealer of the industry who literally has movies- a green pus of deforming power- in his blood. "The urge to create works of art is essentially one of ambition," Miss Scoons says in that voice not wholly 39 40 CAROL ROSEN her own. "The ambition behind the urge to create is no different from any other ambition. To kill. To win. To get on top.'" This link between an artist's drive and an ambition for power is at the heart of many of Shepard's plays. More profoundly than any of his earlier plays, however, Angel City faces Shepard's demon, his idea of live movies. And in a relentless rhythm to match that of The Tooth of Crime, Shepard's rock music showdown of epithets, Angel City explores the playwright's own cinematic imagination, his impulse towards a filmic vocabulary, rooted in myths about power. Audiences at the 1977 McCarter Theatre world premiere production of Shepard's Angel City seemed most puzzled by Shepard's kinetic language with its sudden leaps from jargon to incantation, from lyricism to pop lyrics. Like Hoss in The Tooth of Crime, one of Shepard's best known plays, which premiered in 1972 at the McCarter Theatre, we are dazzled by the quickening rhythm of the language. "Can't you back the language up, man?" Hoss asks his opponent in a manic verbal pas de deux between rock stars battling it out for the number one spot on the American charts. "I'm too old to follow the flash.'" Similarly, the flashes- optical as well as verbal- of Angel City are tough to follow at first. The play does, in fact, have a structural logic, but it is a logic of film transplanted to the stage; the play jump-cuts from one image, one metaphor to the next, as if two films were being spliced together. Sometimes the effect is even more electronically disjunctive, as if a T.V. tuner or a juke-box knob were suddenly, fiercely being switched. Audiences at the McCarter production wondered , too, about the situation of the play, its plot, its structure (especially the shift from Act One to Act Two), and they wondered about the green slime that eats away at Wheeler and finally oozes like blood out of Rabbit's medicine bundle depicting the west, the "LooksWithin " place. In short, Shepard's play seems strangely, distinctly, perhaps dangerously young; its vocabulary- both verbal and theatrical - seems unfamiliar, an apocalyptic slang; and its characters seem aggressive, stylized hipsters, unreal yet strongly physicalized challengers . Actually, Shepard's vision of a plastic Los Angeles is an accurate image born of American dreams, nurtured by drive-ins, gang-wars, carhops, and sci-fi flicks, all of which...

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