Shepard, Sam (Samuel Shepard Rogers, Jr.)

Shepard, Sam (Samuel Shepard Rogers, Jr.) (1943– ),Illinois‐born playwright, reared and resident in California. His first works were short plays, beginning with Cowboys and The Rock Garden (1964), presented off‐Broadway. La Turista (1967) was his first long play. Other productions followed rapidly from Shepard's prolific writing, which, with substantial selectivity, includes The Tooth of Crime (1972), a fantasy about rock‐and‐roll pop singers that is a commentary on contemporary American social values, and Curse of the Starving Class (1978), depicting a lower‐middle‐class family symbolic of social chaos in the U.S. Buried Child (1978, Pulitzer Prize) deals with an even more macabre disintegrating family in Illinois. In general the dramas of Shepherd are marked by an improvisational feeling because of their great variety in moving from the surreal to the realistic in treating people and situations ranging from the mythic to the abstract. Many of these early plays and more of the 1960s and 1970s were put into print in Seven Plays (1981), Fool for Love (1984), and The Unseen Hand (1986). More recent significant plays include the frequently staged, extremely popular True West (1980), depicting family feuding begun by a Los Angeles mother and her estranged husband, the father from the not‐too‐distant desert, that involves two sons, one, a film writer, who is close to their mother, and the other as empty as the desert itself; Fool for Love (1983), depicting the psychological unravelling of a man who, believing his wife sexually unfair to him, indulges in a vicious assault on her; A Lie of the Mind (1985) about the adventures and fragmentation leading to the fury of a deserted woman against the men with whom she has been involved; Simpatico (1994), Shepard's homage to the film‐noir genre, set in a world of professional horseracing (the complicated plot involves blackmail and false identities); and Eyes for Consuela (1998), based on The Blue Bouquet by Octavio Paz. Among screenplays Shepard has written is that of Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (1965). He has written short stories, poems, and monologues, including the recent collections Cruising Paradise: Tales (1996) and Great Dream of Heaven: Stories (2002). Letters with Joseph Chaikin, a major actor in his plays, were published in 1989. In 1994 Shepard was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame.