"Acting it out": Sam Shepard's Action

"Acting it out": Sam Shepard's Action GERRY McCARTHY Sam Shepard has made it clear that he writes in terms of images. He does not conceive plays as narratives, still less as statements or expressions of ideas. In writing he follows the progress of a visualisation. He speaks of"taking notes ... on an event that's happening somewhere inside me.'" He disclaims any sort of hallucinatory effect but speaks instead of a relationship between imagination and craft. He follows the image and controls it. In his play Action (1974) we have a piece which allows Shepard's method to be examined closely, since the play is thought lhIough in greater detail than possibly some of his other works. He has explained that in the composition of this play he adopted the unusual practice for him of speaking out loud all the lines he wrote: "To me that play still comes the closest to sounding on stage exactly like it was written. This method doesn't work for every play, though, since it necessarily sets up a slower tempo. It just happened to be the right approach for that particular piece.", The result has a particular integrity of effect, and must be counted as a revealing example of the playwright's work. Action, like any other Shepard play, lives in a rhythm of image and action, and it is this poetic method which must be judged, not the articulateness of the playwright's thought. In the play strange and unexpected events are ordered within an evolving scheme, which allows them to make their meanings within Shepard's individual type of theatre. The smashing of chairs received with impassivity by the onlookers; the ritllalistic searching for a lost place in a book; a "soft-shoe" danced by seated actors; the discovery ofa dead fish in a bucket of water; this seeming arbitrariness creates a complex but coherent metaphor, and at the heart of the metaphor is the experience of the actor. It is familiar enough to discover dramatists using the image of the stage itself within their works. Whether it is the Elizabethan play-within-a-play or the Chekovian actress-character for whom self-dramatisation is a mode of existence , there is a self-consciousness at work which draws attention to the theatrical event itself and bears upon the audience's view of what passes upon 2 GERRY McCARTHY the stage. For the actors involved there is no problem beyond the imagined complexities of character and situation. Even in the complicated Pirandellian game of mirrors, it is the audience whose reactions are sharpened by the celebrated interplay of reality and illusion, whereas the actor retains his own given circumstances. There is a perfect consistency to his part whatever the ambiguities which the dramatist may creatively exploit. In Six Characters in Search of all Author, characters and actors produce alternative versions of events, but it is only the audience who is disoriented by virtue of being moved as much by the actors' "fiction" as by what the characters claim to be "fact." In Action Shepard's method is both more rigorous and less ostentatious. He examines the experience he represents through the actual problems encountered by the actor as he confronts his audience. Without the security of a ~onsistent character, all the actor can experience is the enduring presence of himself and the other actors on the stage, and the ever-present necessity of action to relieve the burden of existence. It may well be that Beckett is the inspiration in this,' but there is an important difference. Beckett's method is deeply rationalist, and shows minds, however desperate, insistently ordering the games and rituals which piece out their time within the play. Shepard is more impressionistic and allusive in the way he works, and in Action he emphasises the arbitrariness of actions, for this is the way in which they can be experienced by the actor under stress. Both audience and actor feel the strain of trying to interrelate the events of the play, and for the actor this means revealing gaps in the performance: the moments where, as he moves from action to action, there is a stasis. Nonnally this...