Shepard, Sam

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Shepard, Sam

Personal

Born Samuel Shepard Rogers VII; November 5, 1943, in Fort Sheridan, IL; son of Samuel Shepard (a teacher and farmer) and Elaine (a teacher; maiden name, Schook) Rogers; married O-Lan Johnson Dark (an actress), November 9, 1969 (divorced); partner of Jessica Lange (an actress and film producer); children: (first marriage) Jesse Mojo; (with Lange) Hannah Jane, Samuel Walker. Education: Attended Mount Antonio Junior College, 1960-61. Hobbies and other interests: Polo, rodeo.

Addresses

Office—International Creative Management, 8942 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, CA 90211-1934. Agent—Toby Cole, 234 West 44th St., New York, NY 10036.

Career

Actor and playwright. Conley Arabian Horse Ranch, Chino, CA, stable hand, 1958-60; Bishop's Company Repertory Players (touring theatre group), actor, 1962-63; Village Gate, New York, NY, busboy, 1963-64; Writer, 1964—; drummer and guitarist with Holy Modal Rounders, 1968-71; Magic Theatre, San Francisco, CA, playwright-in-residence, 1974-84. Actor in feature films, including Days of Heaven, 1978, Resurrection, 1980, Raggedy Man, 1981, Frances, 1982, The Right Stuff, 1983, Country, 1984, Fool for Love, 1985, Crimes of the Heart, 1986, Baby Boom, 1987, Steel Magnolias, 1989, The Hot Spot, 1990, Defenseless, 1991, Voyager, 1991, Thunderheart, 1992, The Pelican Brief, 1993, Silent Tongue, 1994, Safe Passage, 1994, The Only Thrill, 1997, Curtain Call, 1999, Snow Falling on Cedars, 1999, Hamlet, 2000, All the Pretty Horse, 2000, The Pledge, 2001, Swordfish, 2001, Black Hawk Down, 2002, Leo, 2002, The Notebook, 2004, and Blind Horizon 2004. Actor in television movies, including Lily Dale, 1996, Purgatory, 1999, Dash and Lilly, 1999, One Kill, 2000, After the Harvest, 2001, and Shot in the Heart, 2001. Director of feature films Far North, 1988, and Silent Tongue 1994. Director of plays, including A Lie of the Mind, 1985.

Member

American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Awards, Honors

Off-Broadway ("Obie") Award for distinguished plays, Village Voice, 1966, for Chicago, Icarus's Mother, and Red Cross, 1967, for La Turista, 1968, for Forensicand the Navigators and Melodrama Play, 1973, for The Tooth of Crime; Off-Broadway ("Obie") Award for playwriting, 1975, for Action, 1979, for Buried Child; Off-Broadway ("Obie") Award for best new American play, 1977, for Curse of the Starving Class, and 1984, for Fool for Love; grant from University of Minnesota, 1966; Rockefeller Foundation grant, and Yale University fellowship, both 1967; Guggenheim Foundation memorial fellowships, 1968 and 1971; National Institute and American Academy award for literature, 1974; Brandeis University creative arts award, 1975-76; Pulitzer Prize for drama, 1979, for Buried Child; Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 1984, for The Right Stuff; Golden Palm Award, Cannes Film Festival, 1984, for Paris, Texas; New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, 1986, for A Lie of the Mind; American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Drama, 1992; Theater Hall of Fame, 1994; Antoinette Perry ("Tony") Award nomination for best play, 1996, for Buried Child, and 2000, for revised version of True West.

Writings

PLAYS

Cowboys (one-act), first produced Off-Off-Broadway, 1964.

The Rock Garden (one-act; also see below), first produced Off-Off-Broadway, 1964.

4-H Club (one act; also see below), first produced Off-Broadway, 1965.

Up to Thursday (one-act), first produced Off-Broadway, 1965.

Dog (one-act), first produced Off-Broadway, 1965.

Chicago (one-act; also see below), first produced Off-Off-Broadway, 1965.

Icarus's Mother (one-act; also see below), first produced Off-Off-Broadway, 1965.

Fourteen Hundred Thousand (one-act; also see below), first produced in Minneapolis, MN, 1966.

Red Cross (one-act; also see below), first produced Off-Broadway, 1966.

La turista (two-act; first produced Off-Broadway, 1967; also see below), Bobbs-Merrill (Indianapolis, IN), 1968.

Cowboys #2 (one-act; also see below), first produced Off-Broadway, 1967.

Forensic and the Navigators (one-act; also see below), first produced Off-Off-Broadway, 1967.

The Unseen Hand (one-act; also see below), first produced Off-Broadway, 1969.

Holy Ghostly (one-act; also see below), first produced in New York, NY, 1970.

Operation Sidewinder (two-act; first produced Off-Broadway, 1970; also see below), Bobbs-Merrill (Indianapolis, IN), 1970.

Shaved Splits (also see below), first produced Off-Broadway, 1970.

Mad Dog Blues (one-act; also see below), first produced Off-Off-Broadway, 1971.

(With Patti Smith) Cowboy Mouth (also see below), first produced in Edinburgh, Scotland, 1971, produced Off-Broadway, 1971.

Back Bog Beast Bait (one-act; also see below), first produced Off-Broadway, 1971.

The Tooth of Crime (two-act; also see below), first produced in Princeton, NJ, 1972, produced Off-Off-Broadway, 1973.

Blue Bitch (also see below), first produced Off-Off-Broadway, 1973.

(With Megan Terry and Jean-Claude van Itallie) Nightwalk (also see below), first produced Off-Off-Broadway, 1973.

Geography of a Horse Dreamer (two-act; also see below), first produced in London, England, 1974.

Little Ocean, first produced in London, England, 1974.

Action (one-act; also see below), first produced Off-Broadway, 1975.

Killer's Head (one-act; also see below), first produced Off-Broadway, 1975.

Angel City (also see below), first produced in San Francisco, CA, 1976.

Curse of the Starving Class (two-act; also see below; first produced Off-Broadway, 1978), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1997.

Buried Child (two-act; also see below), first produced Off-Broadway, 1978.

Seduced (also see below), first produced Off-Broadway, 1979.

Suicide in B-Flat (also see below), first produced Off-Off-Broadway, 1979.

Tongues, first produced at Eureka Theatre Festival, CA, 1979, produced Off-Off-Broadway, 1979.

Savage/Love, first produced at Eureka Theater Festival, CA, 1979, produced Off-Off-Broadway, 1979.

True West (two-act; first produced Off-Broadway, 1980), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1981.

(Also director of original production) Fool for Love (one-act; also see below), first produced in San Francisco, CA, 1983, produced Off-Broadway, 1983.

The Sad Lament of Pecos Bill on the Eve of Killing His Wife (one-act; also see below), first produced Off-Broadway, 1983.

Superstitions (one-act), first produced Off-Broadway, 1983.

(Also director of original production) A Lie of the Mind (three-act; first produced Off-Broadway, 1985), published with The War in Heaven (also see below), New American Library (New York, NY), 1987.

Hawk Moon, produced in London, England, 1989.

States of Shock, produced in New York, NY, 1991.

Simpatico, Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1995.

Eyes for Consuela (based on the story "The Blue Bouquet" by Octavio Paz), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1999.

The Late Henry Moss, produced in New York, NY, 2001.

PLAY COLLECTIONS

Five Plays (contains Icarus's Mother, Chicago, Melodrama Play, Red Cross, and Fourteen Hundred Thousand), Bobbs-Merrill (Indianapolis, IN), 1967.

The Unseen Hand and Other Plays (contains 4-H Club, Shaved Splits, Forensic and the Navigators, Holy Ghostly, and Back Bog Beast Bait), Bobbs-Merrill (Indianapolis, IN), 1971.

Mad Dog Blues and Other Plays (includes The Rock Garden, Cowboys #2, Cowboy Mouth, Blue Bitch, and Nightwalk), Winter House (New York, NY), 1972.

The Tooth of Crime [and] Geography of a Horse Dreamer, Grove (New York, NY), 1974.

Angel City, Curse of the Starving Class, and Other Plays (includes Killer's Head and Action), Urizen Books (New York, NY), 1976.

Buried Child, Seduced, Suicide in B-Flat, Urizen Books (New York, NY), 1979.

Four Two-Act Plays (contains La turista, The Tooth of Crime, Geography of a Horse Dreamer, and Operation Sidewinder), Urizen Books (New York, NY), 1980.

Chicago and Other Plays, Urizen Books (New York, NY), 1981.

The Unseen Hand and Other Plays, Urizen Books (New York, NY), 1981.

Seven Plays by Sam Shepard, Bantam (New York, NY), 1981.

Fool for Love [and] The Sad Lament of Pecos Bill on the Eve of Killing His Wife, City Lights Books (San Francisco, CA), 1983.

Fool for Love and Other Plays, Bantam (New York, NY), 1984.

The Unseen Hand and Other Plays, Bantam (New York, NY), 1986.

States of Shock, Far North, [and] Silent Tongue, Vintage (New York, NY), 1993.

The Late Henry Moss, Eyes for Consuela, [and] When the World Was Green, Vintage (New York, NY), 2002.

SCREENPLAYS

(With others) Zabriskie Point (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1970), Cappelli (Bologna, Italy), 1970, published with Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1972.

(With L. M. Kit Carson) Paris, Texas, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1984.

Fool for Love (based on Shepard's play of the same title), Golan Globus, 1985.

Far North, Alive, 1988.

Silent Tongue, Trimark, 1992.

See You in My Dreams (for television), 2000.

True West (for television), Public Broadcasting Service, 2002.

Don't Come Knockin, 2004.

OTHER

(Contributor) Oh! Calcutta!, first produced on Broadway, 1969.

Hawk Moon: A Book of Short Stories, Poems, and Monologues, Black Sparrow Press (Santa Barbara, CA), 1973.

Rolling Thunder Logbook, Viking (New York, NY), 1977.

Motel Chronicles, City Lights Books (San Francisco, CA), 1982.

(With Joseph Chaikin) The War in Heaven (radio drama; produced by WBAI, 1985), published with A Lie of the Mind, New American Library (New York, NY), 1987.

Joseph Chaikin and Sam Shepard: Letters and Texts, 1972-1984, edited by Barry V. Daniels, New American Library (New York, NY), 1989.

Cruising Paradise: Tales, Knopf (New York, NY), 1996.

Great Dream of Heaven: Stories, Knopf (New York, NY), 2002.

Also author, with Robert Frank, of Me and My Brother, and, with Murray Mednick, of Ringaleerio.

Adaptations

Fourteen Hundred Thousand was filmed for NET Playhouse, 1969; Blue Bitch was filmed by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 1973; True West was filmed for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) series American Playhouse, 1998, and for Showtime, 2002.

Sidelights

"Sam Shepard's perennial theme isn't nostalgia for the Old West or depicting the tortured artist in society," wrote Michael Green of Backstage West, "not even dysfunctional families (though they're part of it). It's displaying emotional primitives—characters bristling with raw energy, chaos, and contradictions, whose only defenses are fearful hiding, flight, or violence, who want to jump out of their skins and end up bolting their circumstances as best as they can do." For Green, "a good production of Shepard gives zero insight but makes you feel the lives of its characters in your gut." Hal Gelb, writing in the Nation, found Shepard's early plays to be "like no others—fresh, hip, antiheroic, free from the tired old psychology of Tennessee Williams and the Actor's Studio. By no means political, they nevertheless made us aware of the myths that shaped our behavior as Americans." Gelb dubbed Shepard "the best playwright of his generation."

The author of over four dozen plays, the winner of ten Obie awards, a Pulitzer Prize for Buried Child, a New York Drama Critics Circle award for A Lie of the Mind, a Golden Palm award for his screenplay Paris, Texas, and an Academy Award nomination for best actor in The Right Stuff, Shepard has cut a wide swath in American arts and letters since the 1960s, creating a highly eclectic—and critically acclaimed—body of work. The Shepard oeuvre ranges from the experimental and surreal one-act plays of his Off-Off-Broadway days to the more realistic two-and three-act "dysfunctional-family" dramas of his middle period, and on into the new millennia with further contributions to the stage, such as The Late Henry Moss.

Shepard is considered the preeminent literary playwright of his generation, the most important American dramatist since Edward Albee. He has also directed plays of his authorship, played drums and guitar in rock bands and jazz ensembles, and acted in major feature films. His movie appearances include leading roles in The Right Stuff and Country, and he has contributed to the world of literature with the short story collections Cruising Paradise: Tales and Great Dream of Heaven: Stories. However, such pursuits are a sideline for the man Newsweek's Jack Kroll called "the poet laureate of America's emotional Badlands." Despite his success in Hollywood, Shepard is primarily a playwright whose dramas explore mythic images of modern America in the nation's own eccentric vernacular. As Shepard told Kevin Berger in Salon.com he pursues acting in particular merely as a means to finance his writing: "You can't make a living as a playwright. You can barely scrape by." Shepard has consistently stressed artistic integrity rather than marketability. As a result, Kroll contended, Shepard plays have "overturned theatrical conventions and created a new kind of drama filled with violence, lyricism and an intensely American compound of comic and tragic power." Yet it was not until the 1990s that revivals of his earlier plays finally landed the auspicious and more lucrative Broadway venue.

Shepard's modern cowboys, drifters, farmers, and other offspring of the frontier era yearn for a purer past that may never have existed as they quarrel with family members. Journal of Popular Culture contributor George Stambolian maintained that, like many of his fellow playwrights, Shepard "knows that the old frontier myths of America's youth are no longer a valid expression of our modern anxieties, even though they continue to influence our thoughts." Stambolian said Shepard seeks "a new mythology that will encompass all the diverse figures of our cultural history together with the psychological and social conditions they represent.... Shepard's greatest contribution to a new American mythology may well be his elaboration of a new myth of the modern artist."

Army Brat

Shepard, born in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, was given the name his forebears had used for six generations—Samuel Shepard Rogers, but he eventually dropped the last name and became simply Sam Shepard. The oldest of three children, Shepard lived a peripatetic life as a youngster. His father was a career army officer, so the family moved from base to base in the United States and even spent some time in Guam. When Shepard's father retired from the service, the family settled first in South Pasadena, California, before finally creating a permanent home on a ranch in Duarte, California, where they grew avocados and raised sheep. Although the livelihood was precarious, Shepard enjoyed the atmosphere on the ranch and liked working with horses and other animals. Shepard's mother was a teacher; after his military career, his father also studied to become a teacher. As Shepard told biographer Don Shewey, his father "had a real short fuse. He had a really tough life—had to support his mother and brothers at a very young age when his dad's farm collapsed. You could see his suffering, his terrible suffering, living a life that was disappointing and looking for another one. It was past frustration; it was anger." As Berger pointed out, "More often than not, Shepard was the brunt of that anger." What became one of the paramount themes of his later plays, the dysfunctional family and a son's confrontation with the father figure, was thus hard-wired into Shepard at an early age.

Influenced by his father's interest in Dixieland jazz, Shepard gravitated to music; he began to play the drums and started what Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor David W. Engel called "his lifelong involvement with rock-and-roll music and its subculture." He graduated from Duarte High School in 1960 and spent one year studying agricultural science at the local junior college, but his family situation deteriorated as his father began drinking excessively. Shepard fled by joining a touring theatrical group called the Bishop's Company Repertory Players. At age nineteen, he found himself in New York, determined to seek his fortune with only a few months' acting experience. By chance he encountered a high school friend in New York, Charles Mingus, Jr., son of the renowned jazz musician. Mingus found Shepard a job at the Village Gate jazz club and the two young men became roommates.

Life in the Theater

While working at the Village Gate, Shepard met Ralph Cook, founder of the Off-Off-Broadway company Theatre Genesis. Cook encouraged Shepard to write plays, and Shepard responded with Cowboys and The Rock Garden, two one-acts that became part of the first Theatre Genesis show at St. Mark Church in-the-Bowery. Though most critics regard Shepard's debut works as "bad imitations of Beckett," a Village Voice columnist had a kind word. With this encouragement, Shepard began to rapidly turn out one-act pieces, many performed Off-Off-Broadway; they attracted a cult following within that theatrical circuit. Shepard also continued his association with jazz and rock music, incorporating the rhythms into his dialogue and including musical riffs in the scripts. As he recalled in New York magazine: "When I arrived in New York there was this environment of art going on. I mean, it was really tangible. And you were right in the thing, especially on the Lower East Side. La Mama, Theatre Genesis, . . . all those theaters were just starting. So that was a great coincidence. I had a place to go and put something on without having to go through a producer or go through the commercial network. All of that was in response to the tightness of Broadway and Off-Broadway, where you couldn't get a play done."

Shepard did his early work hastily. "There wasn't much rewriting done," he told New York. "I had this whole attitude toward that work that it was somehow violating it to go back and rework it. . . . Why spend the time rewriting when there was another one to do?" Kroll said: "The true artist starts with his obsessions, then makes them ours as well. The very young Sam Shepard exploded his obsessions like firecrackers; in his crazy, brilliant early plays he was escaping his demons, not speaking to ours." New York Times correspondent Mel Gussow called the playwright's early works "a series of mystical epics (on both a large and small scale) mixing figures from folklore with visitors from the outer space of fantasy fiction." The Shepard one-acts juxtapose visual and verbal images with dramatic collage. Stambolian said the technique "forces the spectator to view the surface, so to speak, from behind, from within the imagination that conceived it."

Some critics have dismissed Shepard's early work as undisciplined and obscure. Massachusetts Review essayist David Madden found the plays "mired in swampy attitudes toward Mom and Dad. Their main line of reasoning seems to be that if Mom and Dad's middle class values are false, that if they and the institutions they uphold are complacent and indifferent, the only alternative is some form of outlaw behavior or ideology." Other national drama critics have evaluated the one-act plays quite differently. In the New York Review of Books, Robert Mazzocco wrote: "If one is content to follow this hard-nosed, drug-induced, pop-flavored style, this perpetual retuning of old genres and old myths, one encounters, finally, a profuse and unique panorama of where we are now and where we have been." Stambolian said that Shepard "is in fact showing to what extent the mind, and particularly the modern American mind, can become and has become entrapped by its own verbal and imaginative creations." In his own assessment of his first plays, Shepard told New York: "They were explosions that were coming out of some kind of inner turmoil in me that I didn't understand at all. There are areas in some of them that are still mysterious to me."

Shepard's first major production, La turista, appeared in 1966. A two-act drama, it is informed by Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. His Operation Sidewinder, produced in 1970, was described by Engel as "an excellent example of how [Shepard] combines the roles of poet, musician, and playwright." Set in the Hopi Indian country of the American Southwest, Operation Sidewinder follows the attempts to control a huge, mechanical rattlesnake originally designed to trace unidentified flying objects. Air force commandos, Hopi snake-worshippers, black power activists, and even a beautiful but foolish blonde named Honey try to use the computerized sidewinder for their own ends. While some critics found the work overly moralistic and stylistically confusing, Martin Gottfried praised the work in Women's Wear Daily. "More than any recent major production, it is built upon exactly the style and the mentality energizing the youth movement in America today," he wrote in a contemporary review.

Beyond the Surreal

In 1971 Shepard took his wife and infant son and moved to England. Having long experimented with drugs, the playwright sought escape from the abusive patterns he saw destroying fellow artists in New York. In London he wrote what some critics consider his finest plays. Dramas such as Angel City, Geography of a Horse Dreamer, and The Tooth of Crime explore various aspects of the artist/visionary's dilemma when faced with public tastes or corporate profit-taking. Mazzocco argued that at this phase of his career Shepard examines "not so much in political or economic parallels as in those of domination and submission, the nature of power in America. Or, more precisely, the duplicitous nature of 'success' and 'failure,' where it's implied that a failure of nerve and not that of a 'life' is at the basis of both."

Marking the playwright's move to more traditional drama, The Tooth of Crime, according to a critic for Contemporary Dramatists, further strengthened Shepard's literary reputation. A two-act study of rock-and-roll stars who fight to gain status and "turf," the play "depicts a society which worships raw power," in Engel's words. London Times reviewer Irving Wardle wrote that the play's "central battle to the death between an aging superstar and a young pretender to his throne is as timeless as a myth . . . and . . . has proved a durably amazing reflection of the West Coast scene." "Moving freely from gangster movies of the 40's to punk rock of the 70's, Mr. Shepard speaks in a language that is vividly idiomatic," Gussow added. Mazzocco called The Tooth of Crime "undoubtedly the quintessential Shepard play" and "a dazzlingly corrosive work . . . one of the most original achievements in contemporary theater."

The Family Dramas

Following The Tooth of Crime Shepard produced a series of plays that focused on "the erosion and the conflagration of the ill-American family," according to Gussow. Buried Child, Curse of the Starving Class, True West, Fool for Love, and A Lie of the Mind document, in scenes of black humor, the peculiar savagery of modern American family life. New York Times contributor Benedict Nightingale noted that these plays are peopled by a "legion of the lost" whose "essential tragedy . . . seems . . . to be that they are simultaneously searching for things that are incompatible and possibly not attainable anyway: excitement and security, the exhilaration of self-fulfillment and a sense of belonging, freedom and roots."

In Shepard's Pulizer Prize-winning Curse of the Savage Class, Shepard mines Eugene O'Neil country in "dramatizing a tragic American mire in sin," as the contributor to Contemporary Dramatists explained. Buried Child and A Lie of the Mind, separated by seven years, examine disturbed families. In Buried Child, Vince arrives at his Midwestern farm home after a long absence. A dangerous cast of relatives confronts him, harboring secrets of incest and murder. Richard Christiansen, writing in the Chicago Tribune, dubbed the play "a Norman Rockwell portrait created for Mad Magazine, a scene from America's heartland that reeks with 'the stench of sin.'" Buried Child put Shepard's name solidly on the theatrical map, and it earned the Pulitzer Prize without a Broadway production.

True West, the third of Shepard's family plays, focuses on the relationship between two brothers, Austin who is a screenwriter, and Lee who is a drifter and small-time crook. Appearances do not reflect reality in this drama, which "wreak[s] havoc with stereotypes," as William Tynan noted in Time magazine. True West ran for over six hundred Off-Broadway performances when first produced; a revised production in 2000 made it to Broadway and earned a Tony Award nomination. With these three dramas, "Shepard ripped the door off the hinges, smashed the toasters and exposed an incredible torment at the core of postwar American families," as Berger noted.

1983's Fool for Love is another investigation of a love/hate relationship. Produced on the stage and also adapted for a film starring its author, this one-act is one of Shepard's best-known works. Fool for Love alternates submission and rejection between two lovers who may also be half-brother and half-sister. New York Daily News critic Douglas Watt said the ninety-minute, non-stop drama "is Sam Shepard's purest and most beautiful play. An aching love story of classical symmetry, it is . . . like watching the division of an amoeba in reverse, ending with a perfect whole." New York Times reviewer Frank Rich called the play "a western for our time. We watch a pair of figurative gunslingers fight to the finish—not with bullets, but with piercing words that give ballast to the weight of a nation's buried dreams. . . . As Shepard's people race verbally through the debris of the West, they search for the identities and familial roots that have disappeared with the landscape of legend." A similar dichotomy is at the heart of A Lie of the Mind, which presents a tale of "interior domestic violence, the damage that one does to filial, fraternal and marital bonds—and the love that lingers in the air after the havoc has run its natural course," Gussow wrote. In that work, two families are galvanized into violence when a jealous husband beats his wife, almost fatally. A Lie of the Mind won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best new Off-Broadway play of 1985, and Shepard himself directed the original production.

Hollywood Fame

Beginning in 1978, Shepard took on one major movie role each year, and he was nominated for an Academy Award in 1984 for his performance in the film The Right Stuff. Despite his discomfort with the image, he also assumed a certain matinee idol status during the 1980s and 1990s. "Shepard did not become famous by writing plays," Stephen Fay wrote in Vogue. "Like it or not, acting made him a celebrity." Shepard did not relish his role as a screen celebrity, and public scrutiny made him somewhat of a recluse. He told a contributor for New York: "There's a definite fear about being diminished through film. It's very easy to do too much of it, to a point where you're lost. Image-making is really what film acting is about. It's image-making, as opposed to character-making, and in some cases it's not true."

In addition to acting in films, Shepard has also been involved in motion pictures as a scriptwriter. In 1983, German director Wim Wenders commissioned Shepard to write a screenplay based loosely on the playwright's book Motel Chronicles. The resulting work, Paris, Texas, recasts many of Shepard's central concerns—broken families, the myth of the loner, and the elegy for the old West—in a story of reunion between a father and a son. In People magazine, Peter Travers called the award-winning movie the "most disturbing film ever about the roots of family relationships. Shepard's words and Wenders' images blend in a magical poetry." While New York reviewer David Denby found Paris, Texas to be "a lifeless art-world hallucination—a movie composed entirely of self-conscious flourishes," many other critics praised the work, and the film earned top honors at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival.

For all his work in other media, Shepard is still most highly regarded for his playwriting. "He is indeed an original," wrote Edith Oliver in the New Yorker, "but it might be pointed out that the qualities that make him so valuable are the enduring ones—good writing, wit, dramatic invention, and the ability to create characters." Stambolian added, "It is certain that in a society drifting rapidly into the escapism of a permanent, and often instant, nostalgia, Shepard's plays are a sign of artistic health and awareness, and are, therefore, worthy of our attention." Shepard himself sees room for growth in his writing. "I guess I'm always hoping for one play that will end my need to write plays," he told Vogue. "Sort of the definitive piece, but it never happens. There's always disappointment, something missing, some level that hasn't been touched, and the more you write the more you struggle, even if you are riding a wave of inspiration. And if the piece does touch something, you always know you haven't got to the depths of certain emotional territory. So you go out and try another one."

Mixed Media

Shepard continues to confound his fans and critics alike, acting in movies from the sublime to the silly, then resurfacing on stage with another tightly plotted drama featuring a dysfunctional family. In 1996 his first work of fiction appeared, the forty-story collection Cruising Paradise. Described as a "terse and wistful . . . debut" by a Publishers Weekly commentator, the collection blends tales of "boyhood, lonely reminiscences, alienated accounts of showbiz absurdity and unsentimental looks at death" with themes of "solitude and loss," and showcases Shepard's affinity for "gentleness and lyricism." Booklist's Donna Seaman commented on the "intense fictional universe" Shepard presents in these "brusque but searing stories," while Margot Mifflin of Entertainment Weekly noted that the author "mines his signature themes" in the collection: "drunken dads, picaresque Western road trips, and romantic dramas between men and women whose signals are permanently crossed."

With his 2002 collection Great Dream of Heaven, Shepard delves more deeply into the short-fiction format. Here he presents eighteen "highly concentrated stories," according to Booklist's Seaman, who noted also that his "mastery as a short story writer reflects his gifts as both playwright and actor." However, for Seaman, what "lassoes the reader is the tension between Shepard's acuity and tenderness, his high regard for the recklessness of life." While noting that this collection is much shorter than his first, a contributor for Publishers Weekly went on to observe that the "sketches are simple but deeply intuitive and true." Similarly, Book's James Schiff, commented that Shepard's "terse tales" in Great Dream of Heaven "feel more like vignettes or sketches." Schiff concluded that while some of the stories are "contrived or slight," Shepard, "at his best is a compelling, beautiful writer." And writing in American Theatre, Frank J. Baldaro called the collection a "series of lean, fraught tableaux" that "shimmers with humor, absurdity, pathos and a stubborn taciturnity."

Never far from the theatre, Shepard has produced more family plays, among them 1995's Simpatico and 2000's The Late Henry Moss. In its San Francisco premier, the latter play boasted a stellar cast including Sean Penn, Woody Harrelson, and Nick Nolte in its tale about two sons who reflect upon their father's life in a search for structure and reconciliation. Killed by a car after a night of drinking, patriarch Henry Moss still presents something of a puzzle to his offspring. For Berger the play is Shepard's "most moving, certainly most tender attempt to resolve a son's agony over his abusive, alcoholic father's death." The Late Henry Moss also represents, according to Berger, "a beautiful, elegiac summary of the themes that have tortured Shepard to create one of the most prolific and original careers in the American theater." For Gelb, this play indicates a "new direction" in Shepard's work: "If Buried Child was Shepard's Ibsen play (and Ibsen parody) and Fool for Love his Strindberg, The Late Henry Moss may be a kind of Long Day's Journey into Night, an attempt at closure with his father and his death." However, Gelb felt that in the final analysis, "the play never deals with the grief and pity that must be dealt with if reconciliation is to come from an encounter with the dead."

If you enjoy the works of Sam Shepard

If you enjoy the works of Sam Shepard, you might want to check out the following books:

Edward Albee, The Collected Plays, 2004.

David Mamet, Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama, 2000.

Arthur Miller, All My Sons, 1947.

Of course, Shepard has never promised reconciliation. "I feel there are territories within us that are totally unknown," he once explained. "Huge, mysterious and dangerous territories. We think we know ourselves, when we really know only this little bitty part. We have this social person that we present to each other. We have all these galaxies inside of us. And if we don't enter those in art of one kind or another, whether it's playwriting, or painting, or music, or whatever, then I don't understand the point in doing anything." For Shepard, the destination is not the point; it's the trip that matters. "In order to do something worthwhile, you have to suffer. What comes easy isn't worth doing, There has to be an edge to it. That's what I've been trying to do in my life—put myself right up against the edge of what's . . . I wouldn't say hopeless, but bleak and stark."

Biographical and Critical Sources

BOOKS

Auerbach, Doris, Sam Shepard, Arthur Kopit, and the Off Broadway Theater, Twayne (Boston, MA), 1982.

Bottoms, Stephen J., The Theatre of Sam Shepard: States of Crises, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1998.

Contemporary Dramatists, 6th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 4, 1975, Volume 6, 1976, Volume 17, 1981, Volume 34, 1985, Volume 41, 1987, Volume 44, 1987.

DeRose, David J. Sam Shepard, Twayne (New York, NY), 1992.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 8: Twentieth-Century American Dramatists, 1981, Volume 212: Twentieth-Century American Western Writers, Second Series, 1999, Gale (Detroit, MI).

Drama Criticism, Volume 5, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1995.

Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd edition, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.

Encyclopedia of World Literature in the Twentieth Century, Volume 4, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Graham, Laura, Sam Shepard: Theme, Image, and the Director, Lang (New York, NY), 1995.

Greasley, Philip, editor, Dictionary of Midwestern Literature, Volume 1: The Authors, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 2001.

Hart, James D., editor, The Oxford Companion to American Literature, 6th edition, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1995.

Hart, Lynda, Sam Shepard's Metaphorical Stages, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1987.

International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, Volume 3: Actors and Actresses, St. James (Detroit, MI), 1996.

International Dictionary of Theatre, Volume 2: Playwrights, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1993.

King, Kimball, Ten Modern American Playwrights, Garland (New York, NY), 1982.

King, Kimball, Sam Shepard: A Case Book, Garland (New York, NY), 1988.

Magill, Frank N., editor, Critical Survey of Drama, revised edition, Volume 6, Salem Press (Pasadena, CA), 1994.

Marranca, Bonnie, editor, American Dramas: The Imagination of Sam Shepard, Performing Arts Journal Publications (New York, NY), 1981.

Mottram, Ron, Inner Landscapes: The Theater of Sam Shepard, University of Missouri Press (Columbia, MO), 1984.

Newsmakers 1996, Issue 4, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Oumano, Ellen, Sam Shepard: The Life and Work of an American Dreamer, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1986.

Parker, Peter, editor, A Reader's Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1996.

Patraka, Vivian M., and Mark Siegel, Sam Shepard, Boise State University (Boise, ID), 1985.

Peck, David, editor, Identities and Issues in Literature, Volume 3, Salem Press (Pasadena, CA), 1997.

Riggs, Thomas, editor, Reference Guide to American Literature, 4th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2000.

St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, St. James (Detroit, MI), 2000.

Serafin, Steven R., editor, Encyclopedia of American Literature, Continuum (New York, NY), 1999.

Shepard, Sam, Five Plays by Sam Shepard, Bobbs-Merrill (Indianapolis, IN), 1967.

Shepard, Sam, Mad Dog Blues and Other Plays, Winter House, 1972.

Shepard, Sam, Seven Plays by Sam Shepard, Bantam (New York, NY), 1981.

Shewey, Don, Sam Shepard, Dell (New York, NY), 1985.

Trussler, Simon, File on Shepard, Methuen (London, England), 1989.

Wade, Leslie, Sam Shepard and the American Theatre, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1997.

Wallflower Critical Guide to Contemporary North American Directors, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 2001.

Weales, Gerald, The Jumping-off Place: American Drama in the 1960s, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1969.

PERIODICALS

After Dark, June, 1975.

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American Theatre, October, 2000, "Alma Pater," p. 40; November, 2002, Frank J. Baldaro, review of Great Dream of Heaven, pp. 81-82.

Back Stage, May 3, 1996, Daniel Sheward, review of Buried Child, p. 48; May 16, 1997, Peter Shaughnessy, review of Curse of the Starving Class, p. 64; March 24, 2000, Eric Grode, review of True West, p. 64; October 26, 2001, David Sheward, review of The Late Henry Moss, p. 56; March 1, 2002, Hogan, review of Fool for Love, p. 64; September 26, 2003, Elias Stimac, review of A Lie of the Mind, p. 56.

Back Stage West, September 28, 2000, Kristina Mannion, review of Simpatico, p. 18; January 18, 2001, Michael Green, review of Fool for Love, p. 14; May 3, 2001, Jesse Dienstag, review of Seduced, p. 14; January 24, 2002, Dany Margolies, review of Suicide in B Flat, pp. 8-9; February 6, 2003, Leigh Kennicott, review of Curse of the Starving Class, pp.16-17; August 7, 2003, Anne Kelly-Saxenmeyer, review of The Unseen Hand, p. 20.

Book, November-December, 2002, James Schiff, review of Great Dream of Heaven, p. 85.

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Drama, winter, 1965; spring, 1969; autumn, 1973; summer, 1976.

Educational Theatre Journal, October, 1977.

Entertainment Weekly, May 31, 1996, Margot Mifflin, review of Cruising Paradise, p. 54.

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Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), December 21, 1985.

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