Sam Shepard (1943–2017)

I wish Miguel Mota had decided to assign us this instead of True West. Not only because it's better (which, no disrespect to True West, it is), but because it's deeper and richer and puts out more of a sense of existing in a real world. Vince and Shelly walk into this house that joy forgot and sure, everything's going to go insane and Theatre-of-the-Absurd later on, but for the moment, they are emisaries of a real world of grass and light and era-specific cultural references. You can read show more her as Lydia Lunch or as Patti LaBelle or as Stevie Nicks.


The second thing is that we already read Pinter's The Homecoming, and as far as I can see this is just a lusher, creepier, more interesting take on the same themes: familial hatred; psychosis; sexual betrayal; the betrayal of one's self by one's emotions; basically what the Scientologists would sum up as "bloodsexcrime." But where the Pinter is like a horrible day in a horrible life, this one floats--creepy, ugly, but oneiric. Ludic? Because of the greater feminine presence, with Shelly and Halie? How awful is that?


And hey, the Bradley character is a bracing reminder that we haven't gotten over all our quiet fears about the twisted and damaged, haven't completely separated and sanitized them into the (laudable) recognition of the true bravery and humanity of the disabled. God, sometimes all this play wants is a lobotomy dude in the corner. Tilden?


I read people talking about the breakdown of the American Dream in connection with this story and I think fuck off. The decay of the traditional family? The mortgaging of the future to pay for the present? These are universal human processes and I am so sick of fucking America. Anyway, my students would have gotten a lot out of it. Maybe I'll bring in a passage for to discuss. Also, on stage, this could be devastating. I smell Pulitzer! show less

This is like a rich scrapbook or journal unearthed from the glove box of an old pickup in Shepard's yard. Few of the entries are longer than a couple of pages, but they each pack a punch. Then, there is the head-scratching effort to figure how much each one is auto-biographical - like was the starlet in the story from 1981, whom the narrator got drunk and toned with while they were making a movie, is that Jessica Lange?? Regardless of the quotient of autobiography, the stories and poems, show more however short or long, are gilded with an air of absolute authenticity - Shepard's super-power. Sure his plays are great and they won awards, but I wish there was so much more of this.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended! show less

On pg 38, Tonto meets Snoop-Dogg (please mentally add as many [sic]s as grammatically necessary): "You-- You a love. You-- You are only that. Only. You don' know. Only love. Good. You. Mother. You. Always love. Always. But he lies to me. Like I'm gone. Not here. Lies and tellz me iz for love. Iz not for love! Iz pride!"

It is dialogue like this which contributed to me taking a full month to read something which, if seen in the theatre, would have played out in two hours. I must conclude that show more attending a performance of this play would have felt like spending a full month in an uncomfortable seat.

You know those times in a movie where something is supposed to be sooper-serious and you can tell they wanted you to be really moved by something an actor says, but instead it makes you burst out laughing in disbelief of its corny melodrama? This is that line, copied exactly as it appears on pg 21: "HEEZ MY HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAART!!!" Yep, 2 capital E's, a capital Z, and no less than 16 capital A's (I counted-- twice). I wonder how long the author agonised over the potential dramatic differences between 15, 16, or 17 capital A's (or, hey, can we get some consistency here? Shouldn't "always" and "lies" in the passage above be spelled with Z's too?).

And finally, during what is no doubt expected to be a significant symbolic gesture/event (I can tell, since it was lifted right out of Chekhov's The Seagull), the author counts heavily on his audience being as dain bramaged as his sexy-sexy, oh-but-she's-a-slut-too-so-let's-have-her-beaten-nearly-to-death-by-her-suffering-husband character Beth, when her brother Mike comes in and dumps a full back half of a buck on the living room floor-- an animal he shot just minutes before-- and says he doesn't need to chop it up into dinner any time soon because, "It's frozen solid. Won't thaw out for hours yet" (pg 61). Well dang, if it's cold enough outside to freeze a large living animal solid within minutes after its death, ya gotta wonder how any part of Mike himself made it back to the house intact enough to tell us about it. (And good luck to the props people who take work on this play. I imagine the full back half of a solidly frozen buck is mighty heavy and papier-mâché isn't going to cut it any more than Mike wants to.)

Awful, stupid, and insulting to any degree of intelligence. Sam Shepard's two-time Oscar-winning wife, Jessica Lange, must have been giving Oscar-worthy performances the rest of us could not see every time she told him, "It's good, honey!" (or should that be, "IZ GOOD. HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUNEE!!!"?) show less

This was another sad reading experience, as this was the last Shepard published, and it was published posthumously by his children. Shepard is a favorite author with his stripped-down style and keen ear for Western thought and dialog. As per usual, there is an otherworldly elemental to the narrative, as a man spies on his elderly neighbor from across the street, wondering about the man's life while the man himself is lost in thought about that life - it's unclear who either of them are, show more whether they are the same person, whether they are two elements of Shepard himself. Though Shepard seems to answer that question in the affirmative in the last short chapter. There are few living authors writing about the West like Shepard, and only a few deceased who could match him. The world lost a unique and vibrant mind.

5 bones!!!!! show less