The Filmic Cut and "Switchback" in the Plays of Sam Shepard

The Filmic Cut and "Switchback" in the Plays of Sam Shepard DENNIS CARROLL In Shepard criticism to date, attention has been given both to the film references within the plays and to the playwright's attitude to film as an American institution. As regards the former, there has been elucidation of the many allusions to films in both the plays and prose pieces: George Stambolian, for example, has pointed out Shepard's debt to John Huston in Mad Dog Blues (1971), and Florence Falk his debt to John Ford in The Tooth ofCrime (1972).1 As regards the latter, Carol Rosen has drawn attention to Shepard's paradoxical attitude to film; she suggests that he seems strongly drawn to the "dreammachine identities" which people appear to derive from movie myths, but at the same time seems to realize the "self-destructive power" inherent in a merely passive absorption of them.2 In her article on Angel City (1976), she is mainly concerned with thematic analysis, but she tantalizingly suggests that: "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.,,3 In this essay, I wish to investigate Shepard's thematic and structural use of possibly his most characteristic stylistic device: a sudden transition from one strand of action or frame of reference to another. This can be regarded as the use, in the theatre, of a device more properly organic to film: the "cut." Such transitions, of various degrees of visibility on stage, arguably occur in four ways which are not mutually exclusive, on a spectrum from incursion into the soliloquy or monologue much like that of traditional drama, to an elaborate cutting on stage between two or more parallel actions going on at different places and times - what D.W. Griffith called the "switchback."4 The latter devices form a major structural principle of two of Shepard's most neglected and formally adventurous plays: Mad Dog Blues (1971) and Suicide in B Flat (1976). In the first place, there are cuts to the inner perception of a character, 126 DENNIS CARROLL expressed in a stream ofconsciousness which mayor may not manifest itselfin overt action or communication with another. Shepard has explained these cuts to the traditionally trained actor by saying that they are "full-blown manifestations ofa passing thought or fantasy, having as much significance or 'meaning' as they do in our ordinary lives." The only difference is that "the actor makes note of it and brings it to life in three dimensions."5 But such cuts may have a purely formal or purely thematic significance in addition to this one, or even apart from it; and this significance constitutes a second type of usage more difficult for actors to justify, for the cut-in material originates not from anyone character's fantasy or perception, but rather from the playwright's. Shepard seems to realize this difficulty, for earlier in the same note he describes "character" as a "fractured whole with bits and pieces ofcharacterflying offthe central theme.,,6 Director Jacques Levy describes this theme-centered use of the cut as the playwright's "wish to follow to the limits the specific intention of a moment in the play, to highlight it, as bursting into colour in the midst of a black-and-white film would do.,,7 Both types of cuts, separately or together, are challenging for actors, and perhaps even more so for critics and audiences. One challenge is recognizing precisely when some ofthem occur, for the stage provides no easy equivalent of a filmic cue - such as a close-up on one character - to indicate whose perception is being cut into. And sometimes the transition appears less like a cut than a slow dissolve, as a character may slide slowly into an interior reality, or into the exuberance ofa game or put-on which may build into a formal thematic exegesis by the playwright. The character-centered cuts are the easiest to illustrate and take several forms. At their least emphatic, they introduce material that...