Shepard Revisited

“A true hero of our times would be a rock-and-roll Jesus with a cowboy mouth,” announces Cavale in Sam Shepard’s Cowboy Mouth. Cavale describes a hero who could as well be Shepard himself—a semisacred icon of rebellion, individualism, and self-indulgence. These two recent books consider the irony of that image as it relates to the playwright’s life and work. Wade concentrates on Shepard’s transformation from 1960s rebel rock and roller to a celebrated Marlboro Man of the 1980s.

Grounded in cultural studies, Wade tries to show how “the fluctuations in Shepard’s career and the consolidation of his public image have been closely linked to the ebb and flow of American culture at large.” He attempts to map out Shepard’s work in “dialogic terms”—that is, to rethink “how the playwright has addressed the nation” as well as “how the nation has deployed the playwright.” Devoting most of his attention to this second question, Wade makes a thorough analysis of the plays’ reception over the last three decades. He defines Shepard’s success as a result of the reactionary political culture of the 1980s, suggesting that the same people who elected Reagan flocked to see Shepard’s work. The playwright’s acclaim coincided with one of the most conservative moments in American postwar history. Wade suggests that just as Reagan’s fiscal policies rewarded capitalist initiative, inhibited governmental control, and celebrated the individual entrepreneur, Shepard’s plays “give expression to core Republican values since they convey a suspicion of government, a desire for deregulation, and an emphasis on the individual, entrepreneurial spirit.”

The public responded to the playwright’s image as an item of cultural nostalgia. The plays draw on rock music, detective fiction, B movies, and Wild West adventure shows; around this time, the playwright took on Hollywood roles in films such as Raggedy Man, Frances, Country, Steel Magnolias, and Thunder Heart, giving him an additional public visibility. After his Oscar nomination for The Right Stuff, Shepard’s image also became associated with patriotism. Wade speculates that “at no time in the history of the American theater has a playwright’s physique been so valued.” Might and muscle satisfied Americans longing for assurance and confidence; Shepard’s nonconformist loner image matched the era’s reactionary need for symbols of an untamed nature with a “frontier appeal” prompting hope for “the recovery of American will and spirit” and “the restoration of American pride.”

Wade’s overview of Shepard’s journey takes us through the fervor and creative activity of lower Manhattan in the 1960s and San Francisco in the 1970s, revealing Shepard’s role in the larger history of an emerging institutional American theater, the National Endowment for the Arts, and educational and resident theater movements. Wade sees Shepard as a figure somewhat adrift in the 1990s, with its orientation toward identity politics. Since “his plays function as a storehouse of images, icons and idioms that denote American culture and an American sensibility,” they rely upon an idea of the nation as a unified whole. As Wade points out, the very notion of a single national identity in postwar American culture has proven an ambiguous and often exclusionary concept. With so much contemporary critical interest in exploring a decentralized American culture, Wade wonders if Shepard’s work, so concerned with myths of the West and narratives from America’s past, deserves the same critical attention today it once attracted.

As for the plays themselves, Wade discounts their value as expressions of the individual writer’s vision and focuses on “the systems that generate texts and the institutions that control them.” This is murky territory, but it does lead to some intriguing questions: Is it possible to undo the myth of American individualism in a book that has, as its central subject, the life of a famous man? By his choice of subject Wade may be in danger of recapitulating, ratifying the cult of the exceptional figure he hopes to counter. (Ironically, the cover features a large picture of Shepard.)

Wade ends by questioning whether the playwright will again summon the creative energy of his off-off-Broadway work. Bottoms does not share Wade’s doubts on this question. Bottoms sees Shepard as a writer who continues to experiment, “redeploying previous techniques and branching out in different directions in a visible attempt to challenge both himself and his audiences.”

Tracing the development of Shepard’s playwriting in a more traditional approach, Bottoms charts Shepard’s various shifts of directions, pointing out that “instability” is a distinguishing feature of the work. He insists that Shepard’s work is dominated by patterns of internal tension and contradiction, which “operate to generate a plethora of possible meanings” and can often be seen as an unresolved conflict between modernist and postmodernist perspectives on such issues as “the nature of self-identity, the search for coherence and meaning in late capitalist culture, and the creative process itself.” In The Tooth of Crime, for example, Hoss reflects on the reality of an America in which competing media fictions have colonized the imagination: “While you’re ridin’ in your radio or walkin’ through the late late show, ain’t it a drag to know you just don’t know.” Paulette has a different take on the nation’s stagnation in Suicide in Bb, however: “You can’t get to anything new. You’re repeating yourself.”

Bottoms associates Shepard’s concern for an authentic self-expression and a more spontaneous free-flowing creativity with the modernist tradition. Like the modernists, Shepard seeks to create a truly personal language, in a work full of subconscious desires and recurring motifs and myths, suggesting its universal resonance. But according to Bottoms, since postmodern artists subsequently challenged the very idea of an “authentic” inner depth, as Shepard matured, he adopted a more conscious control of his fragmented subconscious and thus moved closer to a postmodernist aesthetic. Here he cites Shepard’s use of abrupt juxtapositions of apparently unrelated material to highlight the gaps between them and to suggest the discontinuity of experience. “In Back Bog Beast Bait,” he writes, “two refugees from a Western arrive in a gothicized Southern swamp-shack. . . . In Shaved Splits the revolution invades the boudoir of a porn queen. In The Holy Ghostly a would-be New York rock star meets Indian demons in the middle of the desert while his father totes a bazooka.” For Bottoms, the writing moves from the self-absorbed, primarily modernist sensibility of the early plays to a broader postmodernist exploration of the superficiality of contemporary life. He shows how the playwright complicates gender roles and deconstructs the male gaze in Fool for Love, how his treatment of the female is ambivalent in the film Paris, Texas, and how the masculine and feminine categories collapse in A Lie of the Mind.

Bottoms is most engaging when he traces cross-disciplinary currents in Shepard’s work, discovering parallels in Jack Kerouac and the Beat writers; Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein, and many pop artists; Kenny Clarke, Ornette Coleman, and Charles Mingus; Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, and the fiction writers of “dirty realism”; Wim Wenders and superrealist photography. Though Shepard’s monologues are frequently compared to operatic arias and his writing is commonly described as “jazzy,” Bottoms’s readings of the plays’ musical patterns are still original, particularly his analysis of the musical influence in Chicago, Cowboys #2, Red Cross, Angel City, and Suicide in Bb.

Bottoms opens these texts up, proposing that the plays are alive by contradiction and through complicated layering. He generally weaves back and forth between several plays, always pointing toward the multiple interpretations possible (feminist, psychoanalytical, etc.), requiring the reader’s critical engagement. Whereas Wade casts a dark shadow over Shepard’s future, Bottoms provides valuable evidence of the playwright’s role in creating new theater.