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The Killer's Ancient Mask: Unity and Dualism III Shepard's The Tooth of Crime GREGORY W. LANIER The Killer awoke before dawn. He put his boots on. He took a face from the ancient gallery ... And he walked on down the hall ... And he came to a door. And he looked inside. Father ... Yes, Son? I want to kill you ... The End, by The Doors Those lines from The Doors's 1967 haunting rock classic, "The End," point directly toward the violence that defined the conflict between the generations during the Viet Nam era. A Killer, identified as both a Young Man and a Son, walks on down the hall to a confrontation with the Father he wants to kill, a confrontation that takes us to "my only friend, the end ... I The end of 'laughter and soft lies, I The end of nights we tried to die," an end that erupts in an orgasmic communion of music and violence.1 If even a cursory examination of rock-and-roll music reveals a structural teleology pointed toward violent rebellion, then we should suspect that a rock play like Sam Shepard's The Tooth of Crime will be structured around the same telos. The critics who have to date written on Shepard's The Tooth ofCrime have based their analyses of the play on the fortunes of Hoss, who is indeed the dominant character in terms of number of lines and number of minutes on stage. Doris Auerbach, for example, argues that "Crow and Hoss act out conflicting emotions within Shepard. The play, however, leaves little doubt in the viewer's mind that the writer's ultimate sympathy lies with Hoss."t Ruby Cohn puts the matter more bluntly: "Like classical tragedy, The Tooth Modem Droma, 36 (1993) 48 The Tooth of Crime 49 of Crime begins close to its climax: Hoss needs a kill."3 That identification of Hoss as the play's center corresponds to part of what Shepard himself has said about the play: It started with language - it started with hearing a certain sound which is coming from the voice of this character, Hoss. And also this sort of black figure appearing on stage with this throne, and the whole kind of world that he was involved in, came from this voice-I don'tmean it was any weird psychological voice in the air thing, but that it was a very real kind of sound that I heard, and I started to write the play from there.4 But it is, perhaps, better to trust the tale and not the teller, because Shepard has also reported that: The character of Crow in [The] Tooth of Crime came from a yearning toward violence . A totally lethal human with no way or reason for tracing how he got that way. He just appeared. He spit words that became his weapons. He doesn't "mean" anything . He's simply following his most savage instincts. He speaks in an unheard-of tongue. He needed a victim, so I gave him one. He devoured him just like he was supposed 10.5 This side of the play - obviously much darker in its conception - has not been to my mind adequately explored. That male "yearning toward violence" appears so often in Shepard's plays that it has become something of a Shepardian trademark. And if we accept Charles Lyons's precept that a playtext constitutes the "convoluted project of self-definition that expresses certain revelations and repressions in its sporadic course," then it might well be that Shepard's ultimate (or subliminal) sympathy lies with a character who spits words that become his weapons6 Moreover, a comparison of the predominant structures in The Tooth of Crime with the predominant structures of Shepard's other plays reveals important similarities that also emphasize Crow's dominance. Cohn is right to define the deep structure of The Tooth of Crime as classical tragedy; however, The Tooth of Crime is not the ritualistic portrayal of a great man beset and ultimately destroyed either by the gods or by some vague hubris or by some more vague hamartia. Rather, The Toolh of Crime dramatizes the primitive ritual...

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