Sam Shepard

SAM SHEPARD BETWEEN THE MARGIN AND THE CENTRE (2)

In memory of my father (1924–1996)

Contents

Curse of the Starving Class and the Logic of Destruction William E.Kleb

1

American Clocks: Sam Shepard’s Time Plays Enoch Brater

17

Sam Shepard, Feminist Playwright: The Destination of A Lie of the Mind Carol Rosen

27

Shamanism Vilified and Redeemed: Sam Shepard’s States of Shock Alfred Nordmann and Hartmut Wickert

39

Indian Country: Sam Shepard and the Cultural Other David J.DeRose

53

Hidden in Plain Sight: 25 Notes on Shepard’s Stage Silence and Screen Presence, 1984–1993 Don Shewey

71

Notes on Contributors

85

Index

95

For the Contents of Sam Shepard: Between the Margin and the Centre (1), Volume 8 Part 3, please see back of this issue.

iv

Curse of the Starving Class and the Logic of Destruction William E.Kleb

This paper looks closely at the formal structure and linguistic texture of Curse of the Starving Class, attempting to demonstrate that the text itself is engaged in the same (self-destructive) struggle expressed at the end by the figure of the eagle and the cat. The analysis, focusing on Shepard’s stage directions (“the performance text”), suggests a “psychoanalytic” reading based on key concepts from Lacan and Kristeva: The hunger (desire) for wholeness, stability, “phallic” identity which drives the work forward (at the level of “realism”) is continually challenged, and finally defeated by structural tropes of destruction, division, deferral, and abjection (at the level of action and metaphor). However, this internal logic of destruction releases again and again an eruption of poetic language (verbal and non-verbal) which finally threatens to reconstitute Curse as a play of “semiotic” forces, situated outside the symbolic order, on the edge of the real. KEY WORDS: Abjection (Kristeva), Father (failed), Performance art, Real Performance text (Lacan), Stage directions (as countertext), Symbolic Order (Lacan).

When Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class was originally produced, first in London (1977) and then in New York (1978), it was received by some reviewers as an anomaly—America’s foremost experimental playwright had written a realistic play about a dysfunctional family living on the edge of poverty in Southern California. At the time, realism was having a major revival in the arts in America, and a number of playwrights (David Mamet and Lanford Wilson chief among them) were engaged in revitalizing the form which had been central to the development of serious American drama since the 1920s. Also, it was obvious that Shepard was not totally abandoning his non-realist roots: reviewers noted that Curse was filled with startling visual images and abrupt transformations (in tone and character)—features of the Shepard style from the

2 WILLIAM E.KLEB

beginning. Nevertheless, despite its predictable idiosyncracies, Shepard’s new play struck some at least as a reversion—a turn (however tenuous) to the dramatic traditions (and values) of the past—as much as a reinvention of those traditions. In the 1960s and 1970s, the predominant influences on Shepard’s plays were generally located in popular culture—music (rock and roll, then jazz), beat poetry, pop art, comics, movies; now critics began to point to O’Neill, Miller, Odets, Caldwell, Steinbeck, and, of course, to what seemed to be the major (albeit non-American) source, Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.1 Perhaps this evocation of a realist patrimony was simply a reflection of the “neoconservative” spirit of the time—post-bicentennial, and on the verge of a sharp ideological swing to the right. In any case, the validity of this lineage seemed to be confirmed by Shepard’s subsequent work. Today, Curse of the Starving Class is generally written about as the first of a major sequence of five “realistic” plays, addressing, as Robert Coe puts it, “the traditional theme of American drama, the theme of O’Neill and Miller’s greatest work: the disintegration of the American family” (1980:58).2 To consider Shepard’s play from this perspective is not invalid. Surely it looks forward to Buried Child and True West, and just as surely it displays the symptoms (some might say poison) of its dramatic inheritance. There is, however, another way to view it—one which recognizes the realistic elements in Shepard’s text (both in style and theme) and at the same time calls them into question. I propose to make a move in this direction: to offer an alternative reading of what I consider to be one of Shepard’s most interesting plays; to reconnect this play to the moment in Shepard’s career when it was written, and to a dominant concern in Shepard’s work up to that moment—the struggle to create, control, and sustain an image of the (masculine) self.

1

The London and New York productions were conceptually very different and this influenced the critical response. Meckler’s staging at the Royal Court tended towards a kind of lyric realism, and as a result many of the London reviews responded to the play in terms of the American realist tradition. Woodruffs staging at the New York Shakespeare Festival went to the opposite extreme (partly in response to the failure of the London production), developing an absurdist or surreal style. Here, then, the play was seen less as a failed attempt at realism than as an example of stylistic grafting: “John Steinbeck’s Oakies seen by Donald Barthelme” (Kauffmann), “The Cherry Orchard returning as farce” (Fox). In any case, Shepard’s use of the trappings of realism was recognized and noted with some surprise on both sides of the Atlantic. For a summary of this response and selected references, see my critical bibliography (1989:396–397). 2 See for example Bigsby (1985:239–240), Cohn (1982:183–184) and Hart (1987:68–75). Demastes’s argument that Shepard’s use of a “controlling metaphor” (starvation) turns the play into an example of “new realism” requires further amplification (1988:104–105). The success in 1986 in New York of a strongly naturalistic production of Curse demonstrates the currency of this critical point of view (Rehm, 1986:218–219).

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Curse of the Starving Class was apparently written some time in the winter of 1975–76.3 Between that time and its London premiere (April 21, 1977), Shepard produced four plays—Angel City, Suicide in B-Flat, The Sad Lament of Pecos Bill, and Inacoma—none noted for its realism. In an unusual move, Curse was published prior to production in a volume of Shepard’s plays which included Angel City and six earlier works. This was the context in which I first encountered it, and I was much less conscious of radical differences in the text than of similarities. It seemed less connected to a realistic play like Cowboy Mouth than to Rock Garden or Action (all three plays followed Curse in this volume). As far as outside influences were concerned, I was struck by one, to me at least, obvious connection. In January 1976, a series of four performances took place at 80 Langton Street, San Francisco’s most important venue for performance art. Created collaboratively by sculptor Jock Reynolds and Motion, at that time a well-known Bay-Area women’s theatre “collective” (comprised of Suzanne Hellmuth, Joya Cory and Nina Wise), each performance was different but each evolved from the same structural premise. Reynolds provided objects and environments, unknown to the performers before they entered the performance space; they then improvised with these materials (using both words and movement) for an indeterminate length of time. Reynolds altered the environment as they interacted with it. I can still remember the extraordinary images and inventions that evolved and dissolved during these strange, dreamlike events. One piece, Hospital, began with a table surrounded by and piled high with sawdust and freshly cut pieces of wood; at the opposite end of the darkened space, there was a small square chamber defined by four Venetian blinds that contained another table and two chairs; on the table was a steaming tea kettle on a lighted gas stove. Or Whitebread: this piece returned again and again to the theme of suicide and featured an old, empty, white refrigerator and a huge pile of packages of Wonder Bread. At one point, Wise stuffed the empty refrigerator with empty white cardboard cartons; at another, Hellmuth locked herself inside while Wise tore open the packages of bread and ate it ravenously, until her mouth was stuffed to overflowing and she was surrounded by scraps and crusts (Kleb, 1976:4–5). There were also many long, slow passages, punctuated by looks and stares, as the three performers explored their materials and each other’s bodies. I remember the radical disjunctions of time, space, pace, as short scenes developed, only to be quickly broken off; the continual movement towards impasse; the overlapping stories, memories, fantasies; the silences; the gradual accumulation of beautiful debris. The work seemed always to be

3

Joe Papp commissioned a “family play” from Shepard while Shepard was on the Rolling Thunder Tour with Bob Dylan in the fall of 1975. Shepard saw the New York opening of Geography of a Horse Dreamer (12 Dec. 1975) and returned immediately to Califomia (Shewey, 1985:109–118). On 22 February 1976, Shepard wrote to his agent that Curse was a “big” three act play and that he could not afford to have it photocopied (Shepard, Cole Archives).

4 WILLIAM E.KLEB

exploding and imploding. At the time, I recognized its sources in the principles of Gestalt psychology (techniques, in fact, which the performers used in rehearsal); today, I would probably call it “at play in the fields of the semiotic” (to borrow a term from Julia Kristeva), or exercises in “abjection” (to borrow another).4 My journal notes from this period indicate that Shepard attended at least one of these performances, and I know that several weeks later he invited Reynolds to design the set for the world premiere of Angel City at the Magic Theatre, an invitation Reynolds declined, preferring to do another collaboration with Motion (this appeared at the Magic Theatre in 1977).5 However, the “anxiety of influence” is not at issue here; stylistic and thematic contiguity is. Drawing an aesthetic connection between these performances and Curse of the Starving Class seemed, to me, inevitable at the time and, as a result, I entered the play less through character and plot than through image, metaphor, symbol, and movement. I read it less as a dramatic action than as a kind of performance, and I would like to propose such an entry (or re-entry) here. The place to begin, I suggest, is not with Shepard’s dialogue, but with his extraordinary stage directions. Stage directions are a playwright’s buried children—discounted, dismissed, denied, ignored, cut up, cut out, cut off without a moment’s hesitation by directors, designers, actors, even critics. These did not issue from the playwright, one argument goes; they were conceived in production; they are really the work of the director, the designer. Or, if they do reflect the playwright’s vision, they are an inessential part of that vision: if it is not in the dialogue, it is not legitimate. Playwrights are “craftsmen of words” (meaning the words that the characters speak), not “scenic activity”, Richard Schechner explained to Shepard during their famous debate over a production of The Tooth of Crime (1973: 236–238). Shepard clearly sees the matter differently. His process may begin with the voices of characters in his head, but it clearly includes the visualization of action and image within the three-dimensional stage as well. And this visualization is an essential part of the text, its meaning. Published before any production (its stage directions unaltered in any subsequent edition), Curse of the Starving Class provides an especially vivid example of this. What, then, do Shepard’s stage directions contribute to this text, and how do they work? At the simplest level, one common feature stands out: Shepard seems to be much more interested in movement, in action (or the lack of it), in pose and

4

I am indebted to Leonard Wilcox’s penetrating analysis of Red Cross for alerting me to Kristeva’s concept of “abjection”. This concept is just as applicable to Curse (in particular to the maternal, “semiotic” drives released by Weston’s failure and associated with Ella) as it seems, in retrospect, to the improvisational work by the women of Motion inside Reynolds’s “symbolic” environments. 5 The performance done at the Magic Theatre (in its new space at Fort Mason) was also called Hospital, but it was very different in style and tone from the pieces done at 80 Langton Street, and, to me, much less effective. It was not improvised, used other performers in addition to Motion, and employed a musical score.

CURSE OF THE STARVING CLASS 5

presence, than he is in telling the actor what a character thinks or feels. Ella enters “sleepily” in Act I (57), Wesley stares “blankly” at one point in Act III (109) and “coldly” at another (110). When Emma tells Weston that Taylor is the name of the lawyer Ella “went with”, he “stares at her drunkenly, trying to fathom it” (85). There are few other psychological pointers in this play, and while many of Shepard’s directions for movement gain meaning from their context, that meaning often seems to reflect back on itself, to turn inward, or to slip away towards ambiguity and impasse. Again and again the action stops (“pause” is a favourite word in this text) while characters look and stare and watch. At such moments, the gaze seems to become an open signifier, selfcancelling, uneasily lodged in the narrative, or at an angle to it. Often it seems to draw a blank. Communication stalls. At other times, a look or a stare will open up a kind of gap in the conscious movement of the plot through which a deeper “truth” may emerge: a fantasy, a monologue, or simply an irony, a joke or a pun. Characters seem to look at other characters as if they were objects, or at objects as if they were characters. Emma looks into the empty refrigerator and speaks to it, promising that soon it will “get some company” -“little eggs tucked into your sides and some yellow margarine tucked into your little drawers”—but then she is reminded of her lost chicken: “(pause) You haven’t seen my chicken have you? You mother fucker! She slams the door to refrigerator and turns away. She sees Taylor standing there. They stare at each other. Taylor smiles. TAYLOR: Your mother here?” (71). The joke, and its subtextual implications, should be obvious (Curse is littered with self-conscious plays on words, many of them sexual). Or consider the following from late in Act I (76–77): Taylor and Ella exit. Wesley stands there for a while. He turns and looks at the lamb. WESLEY: (staring at lamb) Eat American Lamb. Twenty million coyotes can’t be wrong. He crosses to refrigerator and opens it. He stares into it. WESLEY: You’re out of luck. Santa Claus hasn’t come yet. He slams refrigerator door and turns to lamb. He stares at lamb. Out of this stare comes Wesley’s remarkable meditation on the raw and the cooked—the difference between being a starving lamb in a “civilized household”, and being a starving lamb tied to a log in the mud in the rain outside a cardboard shack in Korea: “Someone’s hungry. And his hunger takes him outside with a knife and slits your throat and eats you raw. His hunger eats you and you’re starving. Loud crash of garbage cans being knocked over offstage right” (76–77). This is the cue for the entrance of Weston, Wesley’s father. He appears as it were through the space in the action opened up by this internal monologue and introduced by an extraordinary series of ambiguous looks and stares, a series he himself continues and amplifies.

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In traditional realism, the meaning of the dramatic action is subtly encoded in the material world of the play—the behaviour of the characters, the architecture of the set, the furniture and the objects, the costumes. The real and the symbolic fuse, signifier and signified become “one whole thing” (118). Shepard’s repeated use of the pause and the gaze does the opposite: it divides, forcing the symbolic subtext (the dreamlife of realism) to the surface (to consciousness) while focusing attention on the object and the actor (on presence, being, the real). At one point, the signifier, overdetermined and blatantly inscribed, explodes with meaning; at another (or at the same time), isolated and dispossessed, it escapes meaning and frees itself from representation. In between, realism disappears. The lamb is an obvious example. At first it stands for the farm and agriculture (Taylor says, “It’s a shame to see agriculture being pushed into the background”, and seconds later Wesley places the lamb “up center stage” [74]). But soon it also stands for innocence, need, disease, starvation, salvation, castration, rebirth, sacrifice, the Lamb of God, afterbirth, loss, death, meat, the civilized (inside), the uncivilized (outside)—and throughout, of course, for Wesley and his relationship with his father. Probably more. It is also a live lamb on a stage in front of a live audience, and Shepard (the connection with his name need hardly be pointed out) even directs that the “lamb is heard ‘baaing’ in the dark” at the beginning of Act III (101). This may be real, but according to the aesthetics of realism it is suicide. The most infamous example is Wesley’s pissing scene (which should be performed, Shepard directs, “facing front”). Wesley’s penis, his claim to manhood, is a major issue in this scene (both his mother and his sister look at it, and Ella even compares the circumcision favourably to her father’s), and here he uses it to perform an especially anarchic gesture. Not only does he destroy Emma’s charts (her link to the social world outside the house), and turn the kitchen into a toilet, he shatters the illusion of character as well. Ella and Emma may be looking at Wesley’s “pecker”, we are looking at the actor’s (63). If the lamb and Wesley’s body (he also appears “completely naked” [107] in Act III) shatter the representational frame, moving outward into “the real” (Lacan), the world inside that frame seems similarly divided.6 Curse takes place in a farmhouse kitchen, but Shepard’s directions refer only to a stage. He locates outside on stage right and inside (the interior of the house) on stage left, but he makes it clear that the kitchen has no walls, nor any doors (57). Visually, the line between inside and outside does not exist. Down left is a working refrigerator and a small gas stove, “set right up next to each other”. Centre stage, a table

6 As an interpretive point of reference, my reading of Curse of the Starving Class makes use

(in a generalized and non-programmatic way) of Lacan’s revision of Freud’s topography of the mind into three interacting “orders”: the symbolic, the imaginary, the real. Benvenuto and Kennedy (1986:81) define these three orders briefly as follows: “The Imaginary Order includes the field of phantasies and images […] The prototype of the typical imaginary relationship is the infant before the mirror fascinated with his image. […] The Imaginary also seems to include pre-verbal structures, for example, the various

CURSE OF THE STARVING CLASS 7

with “four mismatched chairs”. The isolation of these mundane objects within an open field focuses attention on their reality, their being as objects disconnected from any environmental context. The separate actions which open Act I and Act II stress the point. The lights go up in Act I on Wesley (who as yet has no firm identity as a character) picking up pieces of wooden debris and throwing them into a wheelbarrow: “This”, Shepard directs, “goes on for a while” (57). Act II opens with Emma making a new set of charts and Wesley building a new door centre stage. “Hammers, nails, saw and wood lying around, sawdust on floor.” The stage direction concludes: “They each continue working at their separate tasks in silence, each of them totally concentrated. Wesley measures wood with a tape measure and then cuts it on one of the chairs with the saw. He nails pieces together. After a while they begin talking but concentrate on their work” (80–81). In short, Shepard isolates each action, lifts it out of context, insists that it be looked at simply as a task, its meaning for a moment erased. Once the dramatic action begins, however, Shepard’s set becomes charged with meaning. The four mismatched chairs clearly stand for the four mismatched Tates, while the “very plain breakfast table” gets transformed into a bed, and a stage. The most significant objects are the stove and the refrigerator. Along with a cluster of images connoting orderly, analytical (i.e. civilized) behaviour, each act begins with food actually being cooked on the stove (an action which also escapes into the real). Later in each act, the cooking stops (as destructive tropes take over the action and the stage), and the focus shifts to the refrigerator, symbolically the most loaded object in the play, after the lamb, despite the fact that its chief connotations are hunger (desire) and absence. Finally, kitchen and stage complete each act littered with debris—a “dungheap” Emerson calls the space at the end of Act III (116). Thus, like Shepard’s use of the pause and the gaze, the visual landscape he creates profoundly decentres our experience of the play. It reminds us of the real (inaccessible, lost, aretreat from signification), even as it assembles a dynamic dreamscape,highly condensed, overdetermined, its constantly shifting images caughtin a recurrent rhythm of disorder and destruction. What I am suggesting is that Shepard’s stage directions be considered a kind of performance text, non-realistic, irrational, unstable, within which the dramatic text is embedded and with which it contends for control and definition. At one

primitive phantasies uncovered by the psychoanalytic treatment of children, psychotics and perverse patients. […] The Symbolic Order is concerned with the functions of symbols and symbolic systems, including social and cultural symbolism. Language belongs to the Symbolic Order. […] it is through language that the subject can represent desires and feelings, so it is through the Symbolic Order that the subject can be represented or constituted. The Real Order […] is linked to the dimension of death and sexuality. […] it seems to be the domain outside the subject. The Real Order, is ‘out there’; it is what the subject keeps ‘bumping up against’, and it sometimes seems to refer to that domain outside symbolization”.

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level, the plot of Curse of the Starving Class concerns the sale of a house and the farm that surrounds it. This is the stuff of traditional, well-made melodrama. The father, an alcoholic, amusing but violent, has gone deeply into debt. Without telling his estranged wife, he decides to sell the place to the owner of his favourite bar and move to Mexico. His wife, meanwhile, has decided to have her husband declared incompetent and to sell their property with the help of a shady lawyer who specializes in land development; she wants to move to Europe and offers to take her adolescent son and daughter with her. The son opposes them both (this is the root conflict), telling his father about his mother’s plans, at the same time trying to convince him to stay on the land and to work the farm. The climax comes at the end of Act II when both deals collapse and the house and the money paid for it by the bar owner are lost. In Act III, the father runs off to Mexico, and the gangsters to whom he owes the money blow up his daughter my mistake. Mother and son are left alone, distracted and dispossessed. Wesley, the son, carries the moral weight in this plot and he analyses the situation from time to time in social realist terms (“So it means more than losing a house. It means losing a country” [83]). He also attempts to control the forward thrust of the action, bringing the other characters back to the subject of the sale whenever they lose interest and slip away into stories of their own. The major dramatic question is simply stated: will Wesley (the hero) succeed in saving first the farm and then the father? Whenever this question controls the action, the style of Shepard’s play moves in the direction of realism. The tone may be comic, behaviour bizarre (a word Shepard has used to describe his own family [Coe: 58]), but the action connects itself to the psychology of character, structure becomes causal, the dialogue approximates the way that such people might actually speak. Shepard’s stage directions propose, in effect, a challenge to this realistic text, subverting its authority and eventually dismantling it. Just as the realistic text is connected to Wesley, this countertext is connected to Weston, his father. Wesley’s story, the story of the sale of the house, is not the only story in Curse. The play is made up of many stories; it is, in fact, a web of competing fantasies, delusions, borrowed narratives, and submerged myths. Connected to the sale of the house, for instance, is the story of the return of the absent father. Like Orestes or Telemachus, Wesley at times longs for his father to come back, a god of vengeance, laying down the law, killing his mother’s suitor (and, perhaps, even his mother), restoring order to the hearth and health to the land. Weston undermines this myth in Act I (he plans to sell the house himself), and it collapses totally in Act II when Wesley reveals Ella’s duplicity: drunk and enraged, Weston erupts with threats of revenge and murder that sound like a scenario for a horror film; then, lying prone on the kitchen table, he passes out. Throughout the rest of the act, as the plot of the sale of the house rises to a noisy climax around him, he remains there, motionless, displayed, corpse-like, “unconscious” (there and not there), a powerful visual counterpoint to Wesley’s plot, a signifier pointing in another direction. Shepard uses one word only to describe Weston in this scene, and he uses it four separate times—“unconscious”

CURSE OF THE STARVING CLASS 9

(89, 91, 95). Thereby he points to another story, one which encompasses the others and provides a structural framework for the play. According to this story, Weston is not simply the absent father, distracted by his encounter with life, but the failed father. His alcoholism, his irresponsibility, his sale of the house (behaviour which connects him to Wesley’s story and with which Wesley attempts to cope in a realistic way) are symptomatic of a deeper failure—the failure, in psychoanalytic terms, of the ego to enter fully into the symbolic order.7 Ensnared by the unconscious, on the edge of psychosis, Weston turns (the word Shepard uses again and again to describe his movements) from one delusion to another.8 His entrance at the end of Act I is emblematic. His appearance is startling; his behaviour disoriented and violent. He destabilizes the space. He talks to himself. He yells at the house. He empties a bag of desert artichokes into the refrigerator and shouts that he is “MR. SLAVE LABOR HIMSELF COME HOME TO REPLENISH THE EMPTY LARDER!” (77–78). In Lacan’s revision, the Freudian unconscious is structured like a language, one in which the signified evades the signifier, where meaning multiplies, fades, and evaporates. The voice of the unconscious is thus “interrogative”—an unending asking of questions without answers (Lacan, 1977:295):

He takes a few steps and stops cold when he sees the lamb. He just stares at the lamb for a minute, then crosses to the table and sets the bag of groceries and the laundry on the table. He crosses to the center and looks at the lamb inside the fence.

WESTON: (to lamb) What in the hell are you doin’ in here? (He looks around the space, to himself) Is this the inside or the outside? This is the inside, right? This is the inside of the house. Even with the door out it’s still the inside. (to lamb) Right? (to himself) Right. (to lamb) So what the hell are you doing in here, if this is the inside? (he chuckles to himself) That’s not funny. (77) The nature of Weston’s failure rewrites Wesley’s story, translating the son’s attempt to save the house and the family (to replace the father) into the ego’s 7

Lee (1990:65) summarizes Lacan’s position on the failed father as follows: “It is the failure of the real father fully to live up to ‘the symbolic value crystalized in his function’ that is ‘the source of the effects of the Oedipus Complex which are not at all moralizing, but most often pathogenic’. Thus it is the béance between the symbolic and the real that is at the root of the neuroses (and even psychoses) with which the psychoanalist is confronted”. 8 In his definition of the Freudian unconscious, Eagleton (1983:157) stresses its “radical otherness”: “[It] is a place and a non-place, which is completely indifferent to reality, which knows no logic or negation or causality or contradiction, wholly given over as it is to the instinctual play of the drives and the search for pleasure”.

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attempt to escape from the power of the unconscious, to achieve selfidentification (or subjectification). At the level of the realistic text, at the level of consciousness, Weston seems pathetic, a joke, his violent threats simply a refraction of his incompetence. Shepard’s stage directions, what I am calling the performance text, reveal his true power: They enact the drives he represents as a figure of the unconscious, and they allow those drives to redirect the movement of the play, even when he is not on stage; they function as structural markers, signaling radical shif ts in tone and subject, where cohesion collapses and meaning misfires; they interrupt the surface of the ego/text exposing the dreamlife of the action—Wesley’s incestuous relationship with his mother, his murderous rivalry with Emma, and, in particular, Emma’s profound identification with her father. (From this perspective, Emma’s mythic ride through the Alibi Club becomes a symbolic act, a displacement of her hostility towards Wesley and his plans; in this she is simply her father’s emissary, a projection of his power.) Finally, they permit what Kristeva calls “the abject” to gain control of the space and to ensnare its inhabitants, releasing the power of the maternal (Ella), and disturbing “identity, system and order” (Kristeva, 1982:4).9 In short, the true West(on) speaks through this text (this is his language in the play—surreal, irrational, fragmented, explosive, entropic, abjected, and radically other), and again and again, at its most articulated moments, his name is invoked. An obvious irony: the Name of the Father expressed as the Law of Desire.10 This is the power that Wesley faces in Curse, and in the final act it takes control of the stage. Throughout the second half of Act II, Weston lies on the kitchen table speechless, then at the beginning of Act III he explodes with words. In a transformation scene worthy of a Christmas pantomime, surrounded by a vision of wholeness and harmony (all the key images of the play are brought

9

In Powers of Horror, Kristeva suggests that subjectivity within a patriarchal society requires the “abjection” of the mother-her identification at a pre-symbolic, “semiotic” level with figures of profound ambiguity, the confusion of self and not-self, inside and outside, excrement, blood (especially menstrual blood), corpses, incest, ultimately death. Entry into the symbolic order requires the repression of these abjected images (a process, ironically, initiated by the mother and bound up with her body), either within the (culturally reinforced) site of the family or, “where patrilinear power is poorly secured” (1982:77), through the use of pollution rituals. The power of the abject controls the world of the play in Act I of Curse, released by Weston’s failure. (Ella, the mother, turns Emma’s menstruation from a sign of regeneration into a sign for death and disease; she allows her son to urinate on stage without protest; she attempts to link her son’s penis to her lineage, implying at the same time an incestuous subtext, and, finally, she destroys the unity of the family by trying to sell the house and move to Europe without the father.) This same power controls the stage at the end of the play as well. 10 “It is in the name of the father that we must recognize the support of the symbolic function which, from the dawn of history, has identified his person with the figure of the law” (Lacan, 1977:67).

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together and stabilized—a new door is in place, coffee heats on the stove, the refrigerator is filled with groceries, even the lamb, now cured, can be required to “baa” on cue), Weston delivers two verbal arias, reinventing himself twice, as the hero of the two great myths of consciousness—castration and resurrection. In Act II, Weston becomes a threatening object (the living dead); now, in Act III, he seizes the subject position—upright, centred, in control of language, narrative, myth, the world of the play. In short, he is the Lacanian “Phallus”, the symbolic order enshrined and in place.11 Shepard’s stage directions reflect this shift. Throughout this opening scene, up to the point when he goes offstage (outside) to look for Wesley, Weston is simply directed to fold laundry and to cook breakfast, and these actions are never isolated or destabilized in any way: there are no discordant, divided moments for Weston here, no dissonances, no pauses, no ambiguous looks or stares. He has, it seems, shed the language of the unconscious (the performance text) as easily as he has shed his clothes. In Act III, Weston speaks more than all of the other characters combined; here, then, he stands for the Word. When Wesley enters, however, at the end of the first of Weston’s arias, he seems to have lost the will and the power to speak. Face and hands bloody, his language reduced to monosyllabic words and simple sentences, Wesley demands that Weston complete the story of the eagle and the lamb testes (102). Weston refuses. Wesley then completes his own story: “He [Ellis] ran off with your money. And he’s got the house too” (103). Weston dismisses the news as irrelevant. At this point, Wesley’s abstracted behaviour might be read realistically—shock and despair at the failure of his “superobjective”; the psychology of shame, grief, and repressed rage. Shepard clearly has something more in mind, and once again his stage directions provide a clue to the underlying “truth” of the action. While Weston, in his new role as the domesticated male, unafraid to cook and clean (at the same time!) begins to preach the gospel of rebirth and family connectedness, “Wesley crosses slowly to the stove and looks at the coffee” (103). This move inaugurates a sequence of looks and stares by Wesley alone (first at the coffee, then into the refrigerator) which intervene silently in Weston’s talk, contradict his cooking, and reestablish the rhythm of text and countertext. Here the countertext, the language of the unconscious, belongs entirely to Wesley. In short, Shepard completes a radical reversal of roles: now Wesley stands for loss of control, disorder, disconnection, appetite, and the unconscious. Before he puts on his father’s clothes, Wesley puts on his language. This reversal, it turns out, is an illusion; the play has become, in fact, a hall of mirrors. When Wesley attempts to repeat Weston’s ritual of rebirth, the “remedy” (113) fails; the transformation is a mirage, a masquerade, the latest and

11

“The Phallus is the privileged signifier of that mark in which the role of the logos is joined with the advent of desire” (Lacan, 1977:287).

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the grandest of Weston’s delusionary dreams—a dream which has now taken over the stage.12 At this point, Wesley begins a series of ritual actions of his own. Instead of an illusion of wholeness, however, these actions rewrite the space in terms (again) of the radically decentred countertext; and finally they deconstruct his father. The decisive moment, the seismic shift, occurs as a naked Wesley picks up the live lamb and, ominously, removes it—and the real—from the stage (107–108). Shepard’s stage directions make it clear that these actions are not meant to be seen as part of a conscious process: Wesley “wanders” through these performances “dazed” and distracted (107). Rather, he has been forced to move outside the realistic narrative that he has attempted (and failed) to construct, to shed his precarious ego-identity (by this point it has virtually collapsed) and to enter, shaman-like, the very landscape of the un-real. As if to stress that Wesley’s actions from here on, and Weston’s reactions, should also be read symbolically, as a kind of dreamtext, Ella (the threat of abjection) is present throughout, lying on the kitchen table, asleep (108). (Shepard only uses the word “asleep”, or a variant, to describe her condition here, never “unconscious”.) When Wesley reappears on stage, he has slaughtered the lamb (“we need some food”) and put on his father’s discarded clothes (“they fit me”) (109). Weston cannot “fathom” either action, but both, of course, are stuffed with meaning (in contrast to Weston’s “empty” words).13 The slaughtered lamb recalls immediately Wesley’s earlier definition of the uncivilized (the raw), while the blood on his arms (a displacement of the earlier menstrual blood) (113) and his costume (“some old bum’s clothes that’ve been thrown-up in, pissed in, and God knows what all in“[109]) suggest a kind of pollution ritual, and a sacrifice— Wesley’s final attempt to sever his connection to the (failed) father, and thus to release (perhaps to destroy) the self. At this moment in the text, Wesley begins “pulling all kinds of food” out of the refrigerator and “eating it ravenously”. According to Kristeva, when food appears in pollution rituals, it does so only in relation to its “orality”, to the mouth as a “boundary of the self’s clean and proper body […], a border between […] nature and culture, between the human and the non-human” (1977: 75). Here, Wesley stands at that border.14

12

“[T]he art of the analyst must be to suspend the subject’s certainties until their last mirages have been consumed” (Lacan: 43). 13 See Benvenuto and Kennedy (1986:84–85) for a lucid summary of Lacan’s distinction between empty speech (“the imaginary empty speech which takes its orders from the ego”) and full speech (“concealed unconscious, purposive ideas”). 14 This moment might also be read as a none-too-subtle re-enactment of Freud’s oral stage of infant development, and a further demonstration (if one were needed) of Wesley’s retreat from self-hood. 15 Kristeva (1982:4) extends the figure of abjection to include moral and political hypocrisy: “the traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a savior […]”.

CURSE OF THE STARVING CLASS 13

Finally, Wesley’s physical appearance holds up a mirror to Weston, exposing his father’s new, “Phallic” identity for the abject delusion it is,15 forcing him to recognize his own “lack”, and then driving him from the stage.16 Thus, a second sacrifice occurs: Wesley’s insistence that “they’re going to kill you”, projects his own intention (110). As Weston delivers a series of confessional speeches (which sound suspiciously like ideological evasions), Wesley watches him “coldly”, and repeatedly urges him to go (110–113). There is no equivocation on Wesley’s part, no hope. The scene is an exorcism: As B.Traven, Emma’s favourite author, knew so well, Mexico equals death (70). The unconscious is that discourse of the Other by which the Subject receives, in an inverted form, his own forgotten message. (Lacan qtd. in Felman, 1987:124)

The mirroring relationship set up in Act III works two ways. As Weston, looking at Wesley, sees himself, so Wesley, looking at Weston, is faced with an image of himself fused with his father. This is the climax of the countertext, when all the looking, staring, and watching in Curse reaches at last a point of insight-the “forgotten message” of the unconscious: the possibility (indeed the profound anxiety which animates this play) that there may be no escape. That wholeness, subjectivity, the unitary self, Phallic identity, may be ultimately all an illusion. Emma’s death delivers this message, as does the return to the stage of the lamb, now a skinned carcass, by Emerson and Slater (115). In her final scene, Emma tries to transform herself into a criminal, an icon of escape, a law unto herself, outside society, family, even gender. And then she gets blown up by her father’s enemies while trying to steal her mother’s car.17 This “little reminder”, as Emerson puts it (115), is followed immediately by Slater’s ironic reference to the lamb (“Looks like somebody’s afterbirth to me”). Throughout these two scenes, Wesley continues to regress (“How come I’m going backwards?” [147]), while his mother, awake but still dreaming, confuses him with his father (“Get them out of here, Weston!” [116]). In Act I, when Weston first enters, Shepard’s stage directions say that Wesley “bolts off stage left” (into the interior of the house); then, a few minutes later, he returns from “stage right” (the outside) (77–78). Perhaps this is just a 16

“We have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification […] the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image” (Lacan, 1977:2). This moment clearly suggests what Lacan calls the mirror stage of infant development, when the child moves away from a narcissistic identification with the mother’s image (the imaginary) into an understanding of his own difference in the world. It is the first stage in ego formation and instills in the subject a deep sense of loss and alienation; the mirror image is that ideal of wholeness and unity which must always be desired and never achieved. For a summary, see Benvenuto and Kennedy (1986:55). This is what might be called Wesley’s “objective” in this reading of Curse, but in Act III, his movement is “backwards” (114) into the “imaginary”, or perhaps into what Kristeva calls “abjection”.

14 WILLIAM E.KLEB

stage-directorial slip of the tongue. Or perhaps it is meant to mirror the confusion between inside and outside experienced at the same moment by Weston as he looks for the first time at the lamb. In any case, it is an early example, at the level of the performance text, of the deeper bond that exists between the two. This bond is not simply a matter of genetics, some poison in the blood or “tiny little swimming things […] Plotting in the womb” (93). These, Shepard suggests, are part of the fiction of realism (the plot of the house and the family): an “alibi”. (In fact, the Alibi Club, where Weston goes to escape his family, is named for the first time at the end of Weston’s heredity lesson to Wesley [88], while Ellis, whom Shepard identifies in the stage direction as “the owner of the ‘Alibi Club’”, enters immediately after Ella’s “curse” speech [93].) This is a bond that goes deeper and has little to do with familial eccentricity. It concerns the syntax of our separate lives. The final tableau reiterates this point. All movement has stopped. Mother and son are left alone together on the littered stage, and Ella now calls Wesley by his own name; but the image they create together is divided, split apart: Ella faces downstage, “staring at the lamb carcass in the pen”, Wesley, his back to her, faces “upstage” and “looks out”. Then Ella remembers “that story your father used to tell about that eagle”. As the play ends, they tell the end of Weston’s story: WESLEY: And the eagle’s being torn apart in midair. The eagle’s trying to free himself from the cat, and the cat won’t let go. ELLA: And they come crashing down to earth. Both of them come crashing down. Like one whole thing.(116–118) Visually, this moment repeats the basic structural unit of what I have been calling the performance text in Shepard’s play (or, to stress its opposition to the realistic plot, the countertext)—the divided signifier, split between the real (lost,

17

Emma begins the play working within the system (making charts for a 4-H demonstration); she ends it “going into crime”—“No credentials. No diplomas. No overhead. No upkeep” (114). In between, she tells stories and dreams of her escape, and each of these narratives involves destruction in some way. Her desire to be a mechanic/ magician ends in the mud (“I was just a hunk of meat tied to a big animal. Being pulled” [70]). Her talk with the refrigerator finally reminds her of her “boiled” chicken (71). She attempts to frighten Taylor off with the story of nitroglycerine in the blood, a story which prefigures the nitrogelignite explosion which finally kills her, as does the story about the peacock which her father “blasted to smithereens” (83). Even her dream of cheating Taylor and Ella when their car breaks down in Mexico is essentialy a destructive fantasy involving the loss of her identity as Emma (“They don’t recognize me […] I’ve lost the knack of English by now” [82]), and it foreshadows her final dream of escape into an identity-less life of crime. Emma does not understand it, but she is almost totally out of touch with reality, and her final speech urging her brother to “look ahead”, to see the “writing on the wall”, to “read” what is “behind” the eyes makes this clear. When Wesley asks her, “What are you?”, she replies, “I’m gone! I’m gone! Never to return” (114). And, of course, she is right.

CURSE OF THE STARVING CLASS 15

dead) and the symbolic (exploded, “gone” [114]). Through this gap, the spirit of Weston enters once again (evoked, Ella says, “just from looking at this lamb” [117]), an urge, a memory, his ironic story of wholeness as appetite and selfdestruction reconnecting mother and son. Thus, at the end of Curse, the countertext controls the stage.18 The relationship of Shepard’s stage directions to non-realist performance (especially the type I have described with roots in dada and surrealism), which provoked this reading (this psychoanalytic story), suggests a further act of subversion (perhaps unconscious) on the author’s part—a move against the theatre itself, that (abject) space where traditionally in the West the writer of plays has attempted to construct (in public) an identity for the ego, the family, the culture. From this perspective, the text is engaged in the same (selfdestructive) struggle expressed metaphorically at the end by the figure of the eagle and the cat. The hunger for wholeness, identity, stability, the Phallus, (a place in the canon) which drives the work forward (at the level of realism), is recurrently challenged and frustrated by structural tropes of destruction, division, deferral, and abjection (at the level of action and metaphor).19These interruptions threaten to reconstitute Curse as a play of “semiotic” forces (Kristeva) situated outside the symbolic order, on the edge of the real.20 This internal logic of destruction, activated by Weston, is what ultimately accounts for the astounding energy and vitality of Shepard’s play (its claim to the poetic), even as it stands, like Wesley, “looking out” at nothing.21

18

This movement, then, represents a return to the (abject) relationship that begins Shepard’s play: the son bound to the mother (the imaginary) by the self-destructive narrative of the failed father. According to Lacan (and Freud for that matter), Wesley’s quest was futile to begin with, a Cartesian illusion. That, it might be said, is the “curse” of being. “In any case, man cannot aim at being whole (the ‘total personality’ is another of the deviant premises of modern psychotherapy), while even the play of displacement and condensation to which he is doomed in the exercise of his functions marks his relation as a subject to the signifier” (Lacan, 1977:287). 19 Lyons (1990:32) recognizes the juxtaposition in this play between techniques of realism and non-realism, but finally he suggests a psychoanalytic reading in terms of the author’s relationship to his own father and family—“as an act that attempts to articulate the processes of exorcising the presence of the father and assimilating the energy of the patriarch by appropriating both dramatic and archetypic paradigms self-consciously”. My reading positions this struggle existentially and uses the Oedipus narrative as a metaphor. 20 Kristeva argues in Revolution in Poetic Language that in addition to the music of poetry, avant-garde writing uses innovative grammars that loosen the linguistic constraints on the repressed semiotic. Revolutionary language speaks the “Unconscious” (Oliver, 1993:99). 21 My thinking about the “destructive” elements in Shepard’s writing and their relationship to “its claim to the poetic” have also been influenced by Bataille’s “notion of expenditure” (Bataille, 1985:118–120).

16 WILLIAM E.KLEB

Works Cited Bataille, George. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Ed. Allan Stoekl. Trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R.Lovitt and Donald M.Leslie, Jr. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1985. Benvenuto, Bice and Roger Kennedy. The Works of Jacques Lacan: An Introduction. London: Free Association Books, 1986. Coe, Robert. “Saga of Sam Shepard”. New York Times Magazine 23 Nov. 1980:56–9, 118–24 . Demastes, William W. Beyond Naturalism: A New Realism in American Theatre. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1983. Felman, Shoshana. Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contempo rary Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987. Fox, Terry Curtis. “Family Plot”. Village Voice 13 March 1978:77 . Kauffmann, Stanley. “What Price Freedom?” American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard. Ed. Bonnie Marranca. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1981. 104–107 . Kleb, William E. “‘Motion’ in San Francisco”. Alternative Theatre 1.5 (1976): 4–5 . —“Sam Shepard”. American Playwrights Since 1945: A Guide to Scholarship, Criticism and Performance. Ed. Philip C.Kolin. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989. 387–419 . Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S.Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W.Norton and Company, 1977. Lee, Jonathan Scott. Jacques Lacan. Amherst: Massachusetts UP, 1990. Lyons, Charles R. “Text as Agent in Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class” Comparative Drama 24.1 (1990): 24–33 . Oliver, Kelly. Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-bind. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. Rehm, Rush. “Curse of the Starving Class”. Theatre Journal 38 (1986): 217–218 . Schechner, Richard. Environmental Theatre. New York: Hawthorn Books, Inc., 1973. Shepard, Sam. Angel City and Other Plays. New York: Urizen Books, 1976. — Letter to Minna: 6.8. 22 Feb. 1976. Toby Cole Archives. Department of Special Collections. University Library. University of California, Davis, California. Shewey, Don. Sam Shepard. New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1985. Wilcox, Leonard. “Language and Desire: The Abject in Shepard’s Red Cross”. Sam Shepard: A Casebook. Ed. Kimball King. New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1988. 107–120 .

American Clocks: Sam Shepard’s Time Plays Enoch Brater

Sam Shepard’s plays make unusual and unconventional use of stage time. In so doing, he follows in the tradition of innovative time signatures as they have been known to function in the work of American playwrights who preceded him, notably Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams. In Fool for Love and A Lie of the Mind, however, time past is no longer fetishized as some sort of historical or psychological explanation for time present. These plays develop new structures of simultaneous and parallel time through a scenography dependent on a new arrangement of stage space. Shepard’s stage space is full of new temporal possibilities that expand our notion of both the unity and disunity of time. KEY WORDS: Play with time, Simultaneity, Theatre morphology, Theatrical space (aesthetics of), Time (presence of).

Time moves in strange ways on the contemporary American stage. In this prefabricated world the dramatic moment constantly re-sets itself: here a unity of time is more frequently experienced as a tantalizing disunity. The minute destablizes, the hour deconstructs, the beating of a clock takes its own odd-even measure for measure. This is a haunting rhythm, as Sam Shepard describes his adventurous mise-en-scène for A Lie of the Mind, “of infinite space, going off to nowhere”—in particular. At the end of this ambitious three-act play, Meg moves slowly down stage right toward the porch, still unaware of two other characters stuck in the same tableau, her maimed daughter Beth and Jake’s “other”, brother Frankie. Her eye crosses the proscenium to the fire still burning in the bucket from a different staged time in another scenic place. And as she moves out onto the porch landing, it is the empty site of this previously staged “space” that she now cauterizes for us with the finality of an ambiguous stare:

18 ENOCH BRATER

[…] she stops. Pause. MEG: (Still with hand to her cheek) Looks like a fire in the snow. How could that be? (Lights fade slowly to black except for fire.) The specular invites speculation: this attempt at a composite dénouement has been designed for a dual set on which two bold time signatures are registered in terms of the explicit use of a suddenly simultaneous stage space. Shepard’s scenic vocabulary in A Lie of the Mind is, of course, only a more graphic display for the artificial structuring of time as it has long been known to function on the twentieth century American stage. “The past is the present, isn’t it?” intones Mary Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. “It’s the future too. We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us”. The scenography for her dramatic revelation has been far more naturalistically arranged than anything we are likely to see in Sam Shepard’s performance space. Even in True West, for example, a recognizably suburban kitchen is invaded by a phalanx of toasters from hell. And yet Mary Tyrone’s stage time may be similarly transformed by the steady intrusion of fog, mist, and her morphineinduced state. Appearing at a doorway wearing a sky-blue house coat over her nightdress, her eyes enormous, an old-fashioned white satin wedding gown trailing on the floor, her face now appears “so youthful”: “Experience seems ironed out of it. It is a marble mask of girlish innocence, the mouth caught in a shy smile”. A dramatic moment is all at once liberated from the constraints of picayune illusionism as Mary, like Shepard’s Meg, seems unaware of the presence of other characters sharing the same stage time and the same stage space: She pauses and a look of growing uneasiness comes over her face. She passes a hand over her forehead as if brushing cobwebs from her brain […] That was the winter of senior year. Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time. She stares before her in a sad dream. Tyrone stirs in his chair. Edmund and Jamie motionless.

CURTAIN O’Neill’s often acknowledged indebtedness to Strindberg notwithstanding, this playing with time relies perhaps too heavily on the realistic effects of two popular American pastimes, drugs and heavy liquor. Postmodernists prefer more romantic forms of addiction and more ironic modes of psychological dependency: ropes repeatedly lassoed to a seedy motel bedpost or an Old Man who says he is married to Barbara Mandrell: “That’s realism” (Shepard, 1984: 27). In Long Day’s Journey Into Night, however, the chemistry of narcotics of

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one sort or another is a great lubricator of the imagination as well as the tongue; such fourth-wall devices aim to do nothing less than unburden the dark night of the soul. O’Neill’s exploration of monologue (a lie detector if there ever was one) unlocks offstage demons and makes them “be” again in a reblocked, gothic present. (For a useful discussion of how monologue works in the American theatre, see, for example, Cohn, 1971.) Mary Tyrone’s lines of closure are nonetheless meant to point to something much larger than herself: her prophesy conflating past, present, and future initiates a line of descent for a theatre in which there will be no angels in America. Arthur Miller’s theatre will reconfigure stage time in similarly transformative ways. His multiple set for Death of a Salesman literally “means” that we can be both inside and outside a protagonist’s head. For this famous play is always a “dream” rising out of a highly commodified “reality” (Miller, 1958:11). Time plays: and in this aesthetics of stage space it will be music, as I have argued elsewhere (1982:124–26), that opens up the platform to new equations between duration and memory, stage time and temporality. Once it has been established, for example, that Willy Loman’s father not only sold flutes, but made them, the sound of this instrument evokes the lost lyricism of a past that this playing with time is not going to recapture. Opening the curtain, and closing it, the flute becomes the principal instrument for orchestrating the sequence of short scenes that play themselves out on Miller’s evocative set: its main role is to inform the audience that the present is about to merge with some other time, now rendered as foreign as some other place. When Willy moves from the kitchen, to Linda and the boys, to the Woman, back to Linda, and then to Happy and Charley in the kitchen, he actually takes a double journey into the past before returning to the present, the time-slot where “everything”, unlike memory, figuratively and literally “rusts” (Rasky, 1979). Later, when Biff and Happy return home after having cruelly abandoned their father in a restaurant, we hear the flute but do not see Willy. As the following scene shows, he is digging in the garden and writing the end of his own history as he talks with his brother Ben about his own suicide—a plan involving a character from his past with a future event. Finally, it will be Linda Loman who has the flute behind her voice as she talks to her dead husband as though he were still a live presence in the play: Forgive me, dear. I can’t cry. I don’t know what it is, but I can’t cry. I don’t understand it. Why did you ever do that? Help me, Willy, I can’t cry. It seems to me that you’re just on another trip. I keep expecting you, Willy, dear, I can’t cry. Why did you do it? I search and I search, and I can’t understand it, Willy. I made the last payment on the house today. Today, dear. And there’ll be nobody home. A sob rises in her throat. We’re free and clear. Sobbing more fully, released: We’re free. Biff comes slowly toward her. We’re free… We’re free…

Although her moving speech in the Requiem combines past, present, and future, it is only the music of the flute that will be left on this darkening stage

20 ENOCH BRATER

“as over the house the hard towers of the apartment building rise into sharp focus” and the curtain slowly falls. In After the Fall Miller will stage three separate time zones always framed by the signature of a fourth, the ominous “fall” from the Christian Bible suggested in the play’s very title. “Flashbacks”, a term the playwright dislikes, seems hardly adequate to describe either the tempo or the mood of what happens in this play. “The Fall”, said Miller (referring to Camus), “ended too soon, before the worst of the pain began. […]” (1965; 1987:484; 1990). In After the Fall Quentin, the Miller figure, speaks to the audience in a luminous but self-indulgent present; for the action on this stage takes place, as the scripted directions indicate, in his “mind, thought, and memory” (1981:127). This is a highly subjective universe where time bends: the towers of Auschwitz and the spectre of Maggie, the Marilyn Monroe prototype (completely reinvented by Josette Simon in Michael Blakemore’s 1990 National Theatre production in London), are always going to be as “true” as Quentin is “real”. Playing with the fractures wrought by time, there can.be no chronology other than the continuity Miller imagines for his multi-level set. And as we remember the movement of this strangely haunting though imperfect play, all of its collected “time” remains simultaneous: “The mind has no color but its memories are brilliant against the grayness of its landscape”. No one who thinks long and seriously about reinventions of time in the American theatre would be likely to pass Tennessee Williams by, especially since his repertory, like Shepard’s, is full of some remarkable fantasists. His most memorable female figure, Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, not only depends “on the kindness of strangers”, but equally so on the restagings of time that take place within the lies of her own mind (as she blithely sings to Mitch,”—But it wouldn’t be make believe/If you believed in me!”). Who needs objective time when a master régisseur can refashion both herself and the stark reality of death under the light of a paper moon? I don’t want realism. I want magic! Mitch laughs. Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be true. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it!—Don’t turn the light on!

Her frail “Garden-of-Eden world” will be undone, however, by those lethal “flores para los muertos”. Real time is catching up with her, and Williams stages the progression of her fate through the intrusive melody of an insistent “Varsouviana”. Belle Reve has been just that, a “beautiful dream”. That scene at Moon Lake Casino can never be restaged, only replayed: a shot rings out as her homosexual husband Allan places a revolver to his mouth. An unlocked door had been opened far, far too quickly: “‘I saw! I know! You disgust me…’” The head of the Grey boy, tender, nervous, soft, and “effeminate looking”, “had been— blown away!”

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Williams’s staging of synchronic time can be deceptive in its very simplicity. For when time plays in Streetcar, it plays itself out as a function of discontinuous memory shaped into the discontinuity of monologue. Only in the presence of such heightened speech can the pressure of time be felt so intimately. The play demands an audience, as Marc Robinson has recently observed, “prepared to go where an unpredictable character might wander, and able to enjoy cascades of language” that rarely advance the plot but always deepen “our understanding of the character”. In this mode of dramatic speech “nothing is ever settled”; we travel with the character to the time and place her speech brings us to (Robinson, 1993:31–32). (For a decisive study of the movement of speech in dramatic time, see Clemen, 1987.) Blanche recites her story in the presence of Mitch, though it soon becomes clear that she is speaking only to herself. Literalizing as well as internalizing the movement of her own words, she moves both back in time and stays in the same place as the polka resumes in a major key. A character is suddenly in two “spaces” at one and the same time. Looks like a fire in the snow. How could that be?

Sam Shepard’s “time plays”, however, are something else again than a mere sum of those imaginative parts we have seen represented on the American stage before. Highly susceptible to the sort of historical-survey-cum-genre-study I have been following so far, his work in the theatre strives to establish its own integrity and its own vitality as it struggles to make a pact with the unities and disunities of his own playing with the presence of time in drama. Fool for Love, like Miss Julie before it (but with a different variation on the mime), occurs in theatre time in what Gertrude Stein famously called “the continuous present” (qtd. in Robinson: 31): “This play is to be per formed relentlessly without a break”. There is no interval, but the interruptions in the action are nonetheless palpable, noisy, and real. One might even be tempted to “clock” them by counting out those heavy beats pounded by Eddie and May as each character enters and exits the acting arena, banging a door and setting piercing sound in dynamic motion. Electronically wired, every opening and closing amplifies the vastness of space which seems to impinge on the “very limits of the set” itself. Cowboy Eddie, who works so hard to be a “man”, not a “guy” (at one point he even does a backflip), has, after all, travelled some 2,480 miles to get to this performance space (or so he says). Shepard’s set aims for nothing less than holding time—at least fifteen years of it—in one place. And to do so he explores stage space tactfully and richly. Relying on a hyperreal scenography to establish a mood that may have been created by more conventional means before, the set for Fool for Love is oddly and permanently off-centre. Dramatist that he is, Shepard will encourage his audience to think spatially before they think thematically. The Old Man looming on the small extended platform stage left should be enough to clue us into the fact that the fourth-wall strategems of O’Neill, Miller, and Williams, however

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influential, will finally be subverted on this multi-purpose, multi-generational set. For this “working space”, to use Frank Stella’s telling phrase (1986), is deliberately and self-conscientiously working over time. Theatrically, one thinks almost instinctively of the gallery of simultaneous sets we have seen in the English-speaking theatre before: Christopher Sly, the drunken tinker off to one side in the induction to The Taming of the Shrew, the dual balconies for the first act of Noel Coward’s Private Lives, or the mad irregularities of “the other half” on a set idiosyncratically dressed by Alan Ayckbourn-a playwright not usually elevated to academic discussion, despite his exceedingly clever manipulation of stage time and place, as demonstrated in How the Other Half Loves (Ayckbourn, 1971) and Absurd Person Singular (Ayckbourn, 1977). Shepard’s division of stage space is at once more radical and more emotionally charged than any of these examples would seem to imply. For, as Toby Zinman has shrewdly noted, Shepard’s visual spectacle does “a lot of talking” (1987). Critics have been surprisingly literal in their otherwise sympathetic understanding of how these complementary spaces have been put to the test in Fool for Love. For while it is true that the Old Man’s platform set is “there” to remind us that the past is always present for May and Eddie—“It’s the future too”—it also reminds us that these characters are equally implicated in reinventing it. One image soon nourishes the other: Eddie will even go so far as to offer his father a drink, breaking the double frame as one stage time and one stage prop-in this case an opened bottle of tequila—suddenly “bleeds” into its strangely imperfect “other”. The Old Man bucks his son up, too, urging him to speak with far greater authority to “the male side a’ this thing”. In this “play”, however, collusion runs perilously close to delusion. Shepard heavily ironizes the arbitrary divisions between both stage times and both stage spaces by brutally undercutting the psychological truisms inherent to such performative acts of “make-believe” male bonding. In this visually binary world, suddenly shown to be no longer binary, opposites detract—especially so from the compression of the dramatic pinpointing now at hand. In the stubborn morphology of Shepard’s theatre, one and one does not necessarily make two. For though time moves linearly as May and Eddie run through the paces of their frenetic onstage encounter at the very edge of the Mojave Desert, the representation of time on that other platform makes us see that the characters are really situated elsewhere. In a sense the Old Man is located outside any semblance of real time: the movement of his rocking chair locks him into a theatrical present which will defy any systematic attempt at chronology. Wanted, dead or alive, there or not really there, he will always play his part as fateful time-bearer to Eddie and May’s skilful duets, for in this play his is the only real clock that counts. Time past and time present freeze into one: no matter how many times these characters enter and exit, in this “frieze” nobody ever comes and nobody ever goes. A gasoline fire burns itself out; but it’s only a matter of time, stage time, before Eddie and May will be back for another rehearsal. There will be other gun-slinging contessas and other down-home

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Martin-ets. But all walls for these low-rent fools for love will be as transparent as the Old Man’s imaginary picture of Barbara Mandrell. In these embodied spaces there can be no onlookers, only actors (Crohn Schmitt, 1990; Garner, 1990), and their image is fixed. In the constancy of this stage space, time always stands prophetic and still. The set for Fool for Love offers us, then, both a contraction and an expansion of time. For only in this way can Shepard avoid the strict, logical construction of the dramatic trap of his predecessors, where the past is fetishized and essentialized as some sort of historical/psychological explanation for what takes place in the theatrical “now”. In Shepard’s representation all margins have finally broken down, setting all time signatures equally askew. There is no stable “past”, only three compelling versions of it: May’s, Eddie’s, and the Old Man’sthe last now configured in the Fool’s costume of some dead-beat father-time. In other words, to quote Michael Smith, “It’s like real life. You can’t tell what’s going on” (qtd. by Wetzsteon in Shepard, 1984:4). When time plays in Fool for Love, it plays as an image of what stage time is itself: something which can only exist in “the actual moment by moment thing of it” (Shepard qtd. by Wetzsteon in Shepard, 1984:4). Exploring its own energies and its own possibilities, this play-time fatally turns the perception of the dramatic moment inward upon itself, making us confront that ultimate lie of the mind we take for theatre itself. Shakespeare called it “lies like truth” (Macbeth 5.5.43). Such restructurings of time in terms of stage space, space in terms of stage time,will figure even more prominently in Shepard’s next play, where the canvas is at once more elaborate and less complete. In A Lie of the Mind there are many more spaces framed by the single proscenium than we might initially suppose, for this repositioning of stage time can even reveal those visionary places long buried in the human heart. The play features two cosmically (and sometimes comically) dysfunctional families in three playing times; and those of us who like our dramatic strokes drawn broadly will certainly find them here: wifebeating followed by aphasia, patriarchal funeral ashes hidden in an urn under a bed, a display of toy-airplanes, spoon-fed cream of broccoli soup, deer-hunting, a bomber jacket and the Stars-and-Stripes, a vain search for lost Irish roots (Sligo County, Connaught), as well as a drunken father-son race to the U.S.-Mexican border, which ends in Oedipal disaster. This is the cruel iconography of Shepard’s own private Montana, Wyoming, and Southern California. The multiplatform set for this play therefore carries a lot of weight; and yet its flexibility in performance allows for several stunning intersections of subjective, objective, linear, and imaginary time. As the stage lights slowly dim on one “place” and quietly come up on another, all boundaries and all borders now seem blurred. The geography of this set can even transcend time, just as it can suddenly and spontaneously re-dress stage space. At the end of the first act, for example, Lorraine exits upstage, while Jake stays in place, staring out across to stage left:

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Very softly light begins to come up on Beth’s hospital bed, now made up with blue satin sheets. Beth is alone, sitting on the upstage side of the bed with her back to Jake. She is naked from the waist up with a blue silk dress pulled down around her waist and blue high heels with stockings. She is uninjured now—no bandage, her hair soft and beautiful. She is oiling her shoulders and chest from a small bottle beside her. Jake just stares across at her as the light slowly rises on her. She continues oiling herself slowly and seductively, unaware of Jake. She is simply his vision.

This is the same man who will later try to get to Montana in his underpants with an American flag wrapped around his neck. But an earlier scene ends on an even more unexpected and an even more romantic note as we hear Beth’s piercing cry, “HEEZ MY HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAART!!!” Eddie and May, those innocent fools for love, certainly have nothing on her. The movement of this play’s action from one side of the proscenium to the other, from Jake’s family to Beth’s, would seem to suggest that these contrastive spaces are mutually meant to exclude and inform one another. But that is not how things work in A Lie of the Mind. Shepard’s representation of time is far more ambitious than that. Each acting area, initially minimalist (in the first act there are no walls to define locations-only furniture and props and light on a bare space), becomes progressively more naturalistic with the addition of the paraphernalia of a highly inflected realism: although this set will never support any ceilings, Acts Two and Three gain the definition of two walls, a window, a door on stage left, and an old-style swinging kitchen door on stage right. In this way the two competing sites move not only back and forth, but even more so into themselves, as though attempting to certify their own authority and their own truth. Oddly enough, Lorraine will end by dismantling her own space as she watches both of her sons literally move into another time, as though Beth’s stage reality finally had more staying power. Although Shepard’s characters frequently disparage the relentless beat of their own American clocks (Lorraine says, “Time has nothing to do with it”; standing alone in a pool of light, Jake goes even further on a blue payphone when he denounces all “that Zen shit”), Shepard’s work shows time and time again that time has in fact everything to do with it. As they move so determinedly and so determinately in and out of a stage space they seek to dominate, such dramatis personae are invariably playing with the raw contingencies of a new time structure that holds their own states of shock for one isolated moment. Shepard’s scenic vocabulary offers them—and the American theatre—a new way to “look” at the presence of such time in drama, to stare it, so to speak, right in the face. In Shepard’s theatre time always plays, as it does for his predecessors, on a very tight space; only on his stage the movement of that time has been vastly and eccentrically accelerated:

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Looks like a fire in the snow. How could that be? (Light fades slowly to black except for fire.)

This stage space is full of temporal possibilities; as one brother says to another in True West, “I’m not talking about permanent. I’m talking about temporary”. What you do when you watch a Shepard work is explore how strangely and how suggestively this time plays. This time and this space, moreover, know no boundaries but their own, even and especially when such artificially induced images fade into the blankness of no-time before the house lights go up. HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME (Eliot, 1969:65–66). “It was”, after all, as Frankie tells his brother Jake in his stage time on his stage place, “just a play, wasn’t it?” Works Cited Ayckbourn, Alan. How the Other Half Loves. London: Evans Plays, 1971. — Three Plays. London: Chatto and Windus, 1977. Brater, Enoch. “Miller’s Realism and Death of a Salesman”. Arthur Miller: New Perspectives. Ed. Robert A.Martin. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1982. 115–26 . Clemen, Wolfgang. Shakespeare’s Soliloquies. Trans. Charity Scott Stokes. London: Methuen, 1987. Cohn, Ruby. Dialogue in American Drama. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1971. Crohn Schmitt, Natalie. Actors and Onlookers: Theatre and Twentieth-Century Scientific Views of Nature. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1990. Eliot, T.S. “The Waste Land”. The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot. London: Faber and Faber, 1969. 59–80 . Garner, Stanton B., Jr. “Post-Brechtian Anatomies: Weiss, Bond, and the Politics of Embodiment”. Theatre Journal 42 (May 1990): 145–64 . Miller, Arthur. After the Fall Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays. Vol. 2. New York: Viking, 1981. — After the Fall. Program Notes. London: National Theatre Production, 1990. Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. New York: Viking, 1958. — Death of a Salesman. Cover Notes. Theatre Recording Society Production. Caedmon, 1965. — Timebends: A Life. New York: Grove Press, 1987. O’Neill, Eugene. Long Day’s Journey Into Night. New Haven: Yale UP, 1956. Rasky, Harry. “Arthur Miller on Home Ground”. A Spectrum Series Canadian Broadcasting Company documentary, first broadcast 24 Oct. 1979 . Robinson, Marc. “Four Writers”. Theater 24.1 (1993): 31–42 . Shepard, Sam. Fool for Love and Other Plays. Introd. Ross Wetzsteon. New York: Bantam Books, 1984. — A Lie of the Mind. New York: New American Library, 1986. Stella, Frank. Working Space. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986. Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire. New York: Signet, 1949. Zinman, Toby Silverman. “Visual Histrionics: Shepard’s Theatre of the First Wall”. Paper read at the MLA Convention, San Francisco, 1987. Published in revised form in Theatre Journal 40 (Dec. 1988): 509–18 .

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Sam Shepard, Feminist Playwright: The Destination of A Lie of the Mind Carol Rosen

Always honing the theatrical tools with which to chart unknown emotional territory, Shepard in A Lie of the Mind more radically than before creates a new stage language, returning to the battered, objectified, and silenced female subject a voice of her own. It is a highly physical language, yet one that aims at dissolving the splits between mind and matter, as well as between conflicting and mutually exclusive genders, in an approach towards a concept of love not based on power and submission. This new form is borne by the mockery of men and by their treatment as women. The ensuing redefinition of male consciousness towards a recognition and incorporation of the feminine offers the promise for a shared redemption of the male and female characters alike. KEY WORDS: Cixous (Hélène), Feminization, Holism (ungendering), Language, Female language (body), Theatrical language (performance), Masculinity (mockery of).

Time and again I have been struck by the prismatic nature of Shepard’s plays, and by the variety of the languages of critical discourse they invite, each one a highly structured yet personal way of entering into a dialogue with the plays themselves. My premise is that Shepard is a collector of languages of the stage; his plays can embrace them all. We might even go so far as to suggest that the vector of action in his plays has to do with escaping from the perpetual prison of language, that his characters yearn for nothing less than to demolish words and to speak in “tongues”. A conventional literary analysis of Shepard’s plays is certainly valid, for his texts are thick with mythmaking and memory, and his overdetermined poetic language always rewards us with revelations about psychologized characters buoyed by the imagination, perplexed by the nuances of speech and action, and hopeful about the symbolic valence of the world they inhabit.

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However, to approach Shepard’s plays on their own terms, we should recognize their essential nature as theatrical vehicles, the engine of which is performance. To sight-read Shepard’s plays—that is, to experience them as compositions of time, space, and action energized by actors onstage—textual analysis alone will not suffice. This is not to discount Shepard’s words. His characters are often, as he himself has phrased it, “marooned with language”. His plays yield terrific surefire speeches for actors. In fact, we used to say that an actor is someone who wants to play Hamlet. Nowadays, auditions are veritable Shepard-fests, overrun by frenetic young actors who have prepared monologues from Shepard’s plays. Even scholars cannot resist quoting at length from Shepard’s loopy arias. But my own critical strategy is to chase Shepard into the “unknown territory” of the form and felt meaning of his plays in performance (qtd. in Wetzsteon, 1985:56). So I wish to start by taking the playwright’s cue. In the tradition of Yeats, whose plays for dancers sought to penetrate to levels of “deep consciousness”, Shepard’s project has always been somewhat mystical. His quest is to invent a theatrical non-linear counterlanguage, true only to itself, but akin to the languages of music, dance, and painting. Like what Joseph Chaikin has called “word music”, Shepard’s plays foreground pitch and rhythm, challenging the adequacy of conventional language to evoke states of emotion. And like dance, his plays require actors to kinesthetically articulate action, transformation, and surrender. Shepard’s language of scenography is also highly suggestive and allusive. His plays offer a field day for set and lighting designers, both of whom might begin work on his plays by posting desert-scapes by Dali and Hopper on their drawing boards. And like René Magritte’s “La Réponse Imprévue”, a painting of a door with a gaping black silhouette cut through it, Shepard’s plays—from La Turista through Suicide in B-Flat through Curse of the Starving Class and through A Lie of the Mind—all tend to reposition our relationship to familiar stage pictures by means of a personal vocabulary of colour, spatial relationships, and scale. Shepard’s plays direct us in new ways of seeing, new strategies for escape with “no destination” (Shepard, 1982: entry dated 14 Jan. 1980). At present, Sam Shepard, the gentleman farmer/horseman/cult film-noir character actor turned 50, prefers to labour over his prose and his screenplays (occasionally taking a break to check the day’s racing forms), refining and distilling the images that are by now his personal hiero glyphs of art as “a way to inhabit a life” (Shepard qtd. in Kakutani, 1988: 183), a way to redeem and forgive, and a way to chart new territory. Over the past three decades, some theatrical hieroglyphs have become recognizably Shepard’s, particularly foregrounded male figures abandoned and abandoning, beaten and flailing, rootless yet homeward bound. In Buried Child, Dodge scoffs and calls them “the hopers”. Shepard has always been a playwright to be reckoned with, but now he has become a playwright and filmmaker devoted to shaking up the status quo and to

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sounding the silent voices of women as well as of men. In his more recent work, notably Far North and A Lie of the Mind, Shepard has moved deeper into this area of exploration, and he has been using yet another mode of language to do it. He has been using what Hélène Cixous identifies in “The Laugh of the Medusa” as the language of women, the language of the “body”. According to Cixous, women “write the body” to speak their subjectivity: By writing her self, woman will return to the body, which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display. […] Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write your self. Your body must be heard.

America has always feminized (i.e., humiliated, fetishized, disempowered) artists. Hence, at its best, Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Sam Shepard’s public persona is akin to that of Eugene O’Neill or to that of Fitzgerald’s fictional Gatsby. At its People Magazine level, though, the public’s interest in movie-man Shepard’s fame is vulgar and intrusive. In this context, at best, Shepard is treated like Madonna. At worst, in the befuddled mind of the public, Shepard may be married to Dolly Parton. (He is not.) Of course, this tabloid style attitude is inappropriate in a discussion of Shepard’s plays. Yet even in Shepard criticism, gossipy “Fan’s Notes” and personal remarks occasionally surface, objectifying Shepard as physical icon, much as women are objectified by the male gaze. Now, surely such nonsense rolls right off Shepard’s back. It just reinforces his common-sense conviction that it is wise to keep a low profile. He continues to write mainly for himself, ignoring, as must a woman artist, the “cultural negation of her status as a speaking subject” (Forte, 1990:258). But it is an eye-opener for an artist to experience his public persona as feminized object (body) rather than as male subject (mind). Shepard’s style has always privileged the body. In his Off-Off Broad-way days at LaMama, or so the story goes, he used to practise the drums while he wrote plays, stressing the physical rhythm of writing over the words that came through. From the beginning of his theatrical career, writing has been a physical act. Like Hélène Cixous, then, Shepard believes we must “write the body” in order to possess it. To reclaim the self, that “uncanny stranger”, it is necessary to find a personal, visceral language. With the character of Beth in A Lie of the Mind, Shepard depicts just such a quest to banish the mind/body problem from cultural consciousness. Battered and brain-damaged, the aphasic Beth heals as she gropes towards a new idea of a “woman-man” and towards a new ungendered physical language to be apprehended sensually. In our 1991 interview, Shepard, a self-described “lucky […] renegade artist”, certainly did not describe himself as a feminist. In fact, he anticipated the ways in which his remarks on this topic might be taken out of context, and repeatedly

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demured at describing his new work in feminist terms. When pressed, however, he did allow that he had become interested in how “the female side of things”, the “female force in nature […] relates to being a man. You know in yourself that the female part of one’s self as a man is, for the most part, battered and beaten up and kicked to shit just like some women in relationships. That men batter their own female part to their own detriment. And it became interesting from that angle: as a man what is it like to embrace the female part of yourself that you historically damaged for one reason or another?” (Rosen, 1992:36). Keeping in mind that until recent years, Shepard’s most fully realized female characters have been Miss Scoons, the bimbo mesmerized by movies in Angel City, and Emma, the pre-teen rebel resisting womanhood in Curse of the Starving Class, it is astonishing that the 1985 journey play, A Lie of the Mind, and its companion piece, the family reunion film, Far North, derive their strength and laughter from women. Plenty of Shepard plays had been set in the kitchen, but until A Lie of the Mind and Far North, Shepard’s women were mainly functional rather than essential: so the cook had always been invisible, the hunger never sated. For Shepard, the danger had always been that “everything disappears”. But since he made cinematic use of the visual emblem of a one-way mirror, fusing a male and female face, blind to each other, lonesome twins behind the heavy glass, in the saddest moment of his Paris, Texas screenplay (directed by Wim Wenders), Shepard began to seek a new theatre language in which to express the yearning for and recognition of the sexual Other, an atavistic proto-language, a theatre music. In this context, A Lie of the Mind, which Shepard directed as a “love ballad” in late 1985 (qtd. in Wetzsteon, 1985:56), can be considered anew as a major turning point in his positioning as an artist who devotes himself to depictions of love as a hunger. In the light of today’s new wave feminism, this play can be appreciated now as it could not have been when it first opened in New York. As his work since A Lie of the Mind confirms, with this play Shepard was first trying to take “the female part”, to see and “embrace” things from the woman’s perspective. A Lie of the Mind could, in fact, be staged today as a gender journey, on the road to gentleness and hope. “You’re gonna try to get to Montana in your underpants with an American flag wrapped around your neck?” (Shepard, 1987:84). This is Sally’s question to Jake, her violent brother, as she watches him don their dead father’s medal-encrusted World War Two flight jacket and embark on a journey across a no-man’s-land toward his personal landscape of redemption: a vision—a lie—in his mind of Beth, the wife he has abused beyond recognition, a beaten, broken, healing woman. Sally’s question, which she poses with a mixture of incredulity and resignation, conjures up “this whole thing” (61), this whole slapstick tragedy of treacherous families and the minefield of love in A Lie of the Mind. Sally’s question, which hangs fire like the vibrating sound made by a blue-grass

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musician as he plucks the “A” string on his fiddle, always gets a laugh from the audience, and it should get a laugh, for its quirky, quizzical tone is true to the play’s atmosphere of laissez-faire lunacy, its eccentric talisman-laden behaviour, and its presentation of action as a dangerous mission into unknown enemy territory. After all, Jake is dead serious. He will embark, half hero/half naked fool, and travel by night to arrive at what Shepard likes to call “emotional territory”. More than anything else, A Lie of the Mind depicts the journey from male to female consciousness, rendered literal by the geography of the original production’s stage picture of ramps and platforms at varying heights and levels. Jake, and his brother Frankie, who functions as a gentle extension of Jake, his peacemaking scout, his redemptive double, travel across the landscape of the stage. Shepard’s casting of the original production could be read as a shorthand of maleness: Harvey Keitel played Jake as an obsessive man, intense as a searchlight. His American flag, unlike the one he wore in the “renegade” young playwright’s Up to Thursday more than two decades earlier, was now bereft of symbolism. Keitel, who projects onstage the quality of a world-weary hand grenade of a man, now used the flag organically as an essential cloth to cover his nakedness in the snow. Playing Jake’s softer brother, the man to redeem men in a woman’s gaze, the man who functions here to soften and blur the edge between genders, was Aidan Quinn, who projects onstage the very gentleness for which Beth expresses yearning. The opening stage direction calls for an “impression of infinite space, going off to nowhere”. The action of the play moves back and forth for awhile, like a male/ female crossfire, mutually exclusive languages echoing across a great divide of dialogue, alternating between Jake’s family home, finally abandoned and burned to the ground by the women who are “desperate to get out”, to “go in a whole different direction” (92), and Beth’s family home, finally reclaimed by women, and wrenched open to the possibility of including a man other than Jake, but bound to him by blood, in a new family to be constructed. A Lie of the Mind, then, charts a simple pilgrimage. The voyagers are a man who finds stillness, silhouetted by the moon in the snow, and a woman who finds a voice, and rejects the old truth, the old love, choosing instead the gentler Frankie. The voyage is characterized by the hopelessness of life without love, by the feeling of death that love’s absence brings, and by the yearning to invent new patterns, to escape the past. If this sounds maudlin, and vaguely country-western, that is because it is. What saves the play from becoming a sentimental tear-jerking ballad about an abusive but contrite jealous husband is its relentless mockery of men and their fetishes: their games of war, their medals, their guns, their prey, their trophies, their spoils, their domestic tyrannies. If the main quest in the play is to construct a concept of love that is not also a concept of power, then a corollary quest is to redefine maleness in a way foreign to the neglectful, bullying, domineering, and abandoning fathers of both Jake and Beth. Most surprisingly, the play mocks

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love, a cornball notion concocted by self-serving men. “Love. What a crock a’ shit. Love! There’s another disease”, sneers Lorraine, Jake’s mother, as she remembers Jake’s Dad, his meanness “like hidden snakes”, and his disappearances “like an apparition” (89–92). In A Lie of the Mind, then, Shepard favours the female side of the hunt, putting a feminist spin on all of that macho paraphernalia of wilderness survival. The self-invention of men in nature, stalking, with equipment and camouflage, supplies and strategies, is demythologized and mocked. Male characters get tracked, shot, beaten, humiliated, and stripped bare, i.e., treated like women. Their journey is from a safe hearth to an open space with nowhere to hide. The man of A Lie of the Mind finally crawls towards a recognition that “These thingsin my head-lie to me. Everything in me lies” (128). He finally reconciles himself with the female perspective, with nature, with what Jake sees in Beth, something “true” (129). Throughout two thirds of the play, Jake believes he has killed Beth, and Beth believes that she is either dead or mentally mutilated beyond repair. Both are convinced that this time, they have gone too far. They are past redemption. At first, Jake stumbles through the darkness, from one phonebooth to another, from one motel to another, across America’s anonymous blacktop landscape in “YouName-It-U.S.A.” (36). By the end of Act One, Jake has found his way home, back to his mother, his sister, and his plastic memorabilia. They are all here, ready and waiting to lie for and to justify Jake: here are his women, the mother and sister who love him unconditionally, feeding and swaddling him, rationalizing his temper as his maleness, his father’s temper, his father’s “animal sound” (63). And here are his “model airplanes and bombers” hovering above him, while below, his father rests in a box of ashes in the dust under the boyhood bed. Withdrawing in sympathetic despair after beating Beth senseless and leaving her for dead, Jake sees a series of images of Beth in his mind, all of them sensual and more real than anything he experiences with his body. These visions are a kind of haunting—“a lie of the mind”—that is, paradoxically, the essence of love as fire, consumed by its own bed of ashes. Jake’s mind drifts to Beth at key moments in Acts One and Two. He will not “let go of her” (25). “You never did see me, did ya, Beth?”, he says, staring right through his sister, seeing instead a woman in his mind. “Just had a big wild notion about some dream life up ahead. Somebody who was gonna save yer ass.” At the end of Act One, Jake sees Beth “naked from the waist up”, surrounded by blue silk and satin, “seductively” oiling her chest and shoulders from a small bedside bottle (41). When Jake blows into the box of his father’s ashes downstage, he scatters some, and in a soft puff of ashes, this vision—which once drove him over the edge—vanishes. Towards the end of Act Two, Jake sees a more startling, less predictable flash. He sees Beth gently tending his wounded brother, wrapping her soft shirt around Frankie’s gangrenous leg (68).

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Jake’s quest in the play is to seek out the source of the mirages, to see as a mystic sees, that is, to conjure up the dead-living-murdered Beth that completes him, that makes him “one whole thing”, and to let it go. Just as surely as Gogo and Didi, Beth and Jake were tied. For both Jake and Beth, the greatest fear is losing the other. The first words Beth struggles to say are “He killed us both”, “Nobody can stop him in me”, and “He’s my heart” (19– 20). And although Beth sees no parallel vision of Jake’s struggle, she has complementary senses. She hears the voice that is Jake’s voice (in the outcry of Jake’s brother, mistaken for a deer and wounded in the thigh); she smells the sex of men in her father’s flannel fishing shirt; and she feels Jake near when he is outside, beaten in the snow. But Beth knows the terror, and the big joke that is the secret about love: “This whole world can disappear. Everything you know can go. You won’t even recognize your own hands” (81). In the course of the play Beth invents a new language, a counter-language to romance as submission to a stranger. Jake senses this happening at the end of Act Two. That is when he feels the urgency of the situation. He plots his “escape” from his kin to “travel by night” to Beth’s homestead in Montana. But “there’s this thing—this thing in my head”. This thing in his head is a premonition of imminent combustion: the next moment—the moment right after this one—will blow up. Explode with a voice. A scream from a voice I don’t know. Or a voice I knew once but now it’s changed. It doesn’t know me either. Now. It used to but not now. I’ve scared it into something else. Another form. A whole other person who doesn’t see me anymore. (85)

“Another form”. This is the only thing Jake sees that is not couched in lies and self-delusion. And with this phrase Jake sees the possibility of escape for him, too. So the hopeful gracenote struck at the end of this play even includes him. He loses his language, his male lexicon of conquest and contrition as the mode of interaction with women. He is speechless. He is also bereft of the use of women as objects to be bartered, tokens of a system of exchange between men. In the final moments of this play, the women are energized by the fire, the moon, the earth, the cold. It is the men who take each other’s place, who exchange positions, like hostages in the snow. Beth’s injury-induced aphasia has caused her to create language in a new key, an essential “thought music” derived from Chaikin’s theories and experiments, and shaped by Shepard’s quest to discover new “modes of expression lying dormant” (Chaikin, 1972:256; Shepard passim in Wren, 1980). Now, through Beth, it is a female language that emerges, like the ancient script called “nushi”, or “women’s writing”, invented in the mountains of central China over a thousand years ago.

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Robin Morgan describes “nushi” in her book, The Word of a Woman (1992: 275–77): It was a totally female language. […] Researchers had uncovered hundreds of stories, poems, songs, and letters written over the past millenium in a unique script invented by rural women for their own secret use […] because they were forbidden to learn standard writing. […] This female language was an underground code-an act of rebellion in conception, an utterance of rebellion in content.

And it is a kinesthetic language. It is the concrete, visual language of signs to be apprehended sensually. It is a language of the body that binds Beth to nature, to the earth and the moon. It is a slippery dream language, hard to come by and hard to hold on to, and in succeeding at doing both, Beth has become a woman shaman, capable of encircling and catching dreams. Such spiritual connections, and Beth’s transformation and transformative power, are clear in the centrepiece of the action, Beth’s pantomime of men and women, a dance of gender she performs with her father’s oversized flannel fishing shirt. “Look how big a man is. So big. He scares himself. His shirt scares him”, Beth giggles. Then she puts the shirt on, pumps her chest up, closes her fists, sticks her chin out and struts, laughing at her new self. “Shirt brings me a man. I am a shirt man”, she jokes. Next, Beth turns to Frankie, asking him to play, too, at this gender reversal. “You could pretend to be in love with me. With my shirt. You love my shirt. This shirt is a man to. you. You are my beautiful woman. You lie down.” Finally, she suggests what will turn out to be the only hope of this play, that Frankie become Jake, the “other one. […] Just like him. But soft. With me. Gentle. Like a woman-man” (74–76). In our interview, Shepard said that he, too, felt “that was one of the big changes […] in those few pieces, that the women suddenly took on a different light than they had before. Because before it felt so sort of overwhelmed by the confusion about masculinity, about the confusion about how these men identify themselves. That sort of overwhelmed the female. There wasn’t even any room to consider the female, because the men were so fucked up. You spent the whole play trying to figure out what these men were about, who had no idea themselves. But then, when the women characters began to emerge, then something began to make more sense for the men, too”. Shepard’s women refuse to disappear now. In fact, it is quite the contrary in Far North, where instead the men have all “disappeared”, leaving a world of women with unloaded shotguns and uneaten mountains of biscuits, wild horses, and sepia-toned photos of lovely young mothers waving goodbye. Shepard’s latest original film is Silent Tongue (1993), about a faith healer in the Wild West, a woman who cannot speak, but who holds power inside. Like a “woman-man”.

SAM SHEPARD, FEMINIST 35

Works Cited Chaikin, Joseph. The Presence of the Actor. New York: Atheneum, 1972. Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa”. New French Feminisms. Eds. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Schocken Books, 1981. Forte, Jeanie. “Women’s Performance Art: Feminism and Postmodernism”. Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre. Ed. Sue-Ellen Case. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. 251–69 . Kakutani, Michiko. The Poet at the Piano. New York: Random House, 1988. Morgan, Robin. The Word of a Woman. New York: Norton, 1992. Rosen, Carol. “Silent Tongues: Sam Shepard’s Explorations of Emotional Territory”. Village Voice 4 August 1992:32–41 . Shepard, Sam. A Lie of the Mind. New York: New American Library, 1987. — Motel Chronicles. San Francisco: City Lights, 1982. Wetzsteon, Ross. “Unknown Territory”. Village Voice 10 Dec. 1985:55–56 . Wren, Scott Christopher. “Camp Shepard: Exploring the Geography of Character”. West Coast Plays 7 (Fall 1980): 73–106 .

36 CAROL ROSEN

Figure 1. Schocks by Sam Shepard. Director: Hartmut Wickert. Costume: Peter Brower. Left to right: Ursula Mihelic (Glory Bee), Markus Graf (Weisser Mann), Martina Struppek (Weisse Frau), and Rainer Piwek (Stubbs). Copyright Guido Kasper.

SAM SHEPARD, FEMINIST 37

Figure 2. Schocks by Sam Shepard. Director: Hartmut Wickert. Costume: Peter Brower. Left to right: Hartmut Lange (Colonel), Ursula Mihelic (Glory Bee), Markus Graf (Weisser Mann), Martina Struppek (Weisse Frau) and Rainer Piwek (Stubbs). Copyright Guido Kasper.

Figure 3. Schocks by Sam Shepard. Director: Hartmut Wickert. Costume: Peter Brower. Left to right: Rainer Piwek (Stubbs), Markus Graf (Weisser Mann), Martina Struppek (Weisse Frau) and Harmut Lange (Colonel). Copyright Guido Kasper.

38 CAROL ROSEN

Shamanism Vilified and Redeemed: Sam Shepard’s States of Shock Alfred Nordmann and Hartmut Wickert

Sam Shepard’s “vaudeville nightmare” States of Shock turns a family restaurant into a battlefield as the Colonel and Stubbs rehearse memories and anticipations of war. The dismembered body of Stubbs is virtually remembered in the course of the play. In its final moments all customers and the waitress of the restaurant stand united in an act of aggression: Stubb’s virility is restored as are communal bonds. The process of healing thus becomes highly ambivalent in Shepard’s play. It follows a shaman dramaturgy by presenting the Colonel as a shaman healer who draws evil, pain, and violence upon himself in order to reconstitute fragmented society as a real community. By transforming impressions of war into ritualized experience the Colonel also turns memories of Vietnam into the strategic theatre of the Gulf war. We explore the dramaturgical background of this interpretation and its ramifications on a production at the Stadttheater Konstanz. KEY WORDS: Anthropology, Community, Concrete (non-representational) theatre, Community, Performance analysis, Shamanism, War (representation of).

In an interview with Carol Rosen, Sam Shepard recounts the genesis of States of Shock: When that war started [in Iraq]—I was in Kentucky when the war opened. I was in a bar that I go to a lot down there because it’s a horsemen’s bar. Normally that bar is just a din of conversation and people having a great time and talking about horses and this, that, and the other. And I walked in the bar and it was stone silence. The TV was on, and these planes were coming in, and suddenly… It just seemed like doomsday to me. I could not believe the systematic kind of insensitivity of it. That there was this punitive attitude’were just going to knock these people off the face of the earth. And then it’s devastating. Not only that, but they’ve convinced the American public that this was a good deed, that this was in fact a heroic fucking war, and welcome the heroes back. […]I couldn’t believe it. I

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still can’t believe it. I can’t believe that having come out of the ‘60s and the incredible reaction to Vietnam, that voice has all but disappeared. Vanished. There is no voice anymore. This is supposed to be what America’s about ?[…]I just got so outraged by the whole hoax of it, and the way everything is choked down and censored in the media. […]I wanted to create a character of such outrageous, repulsive, military, fascist demonism that the audience would recognize it and say, “Oh, this is the essence of this thing”. I thought Malkovich came pretty close to it. Just creating this monster fascist. (1992:39)

While Shepard’s account goes very far towards an interpretation of the play, it also renders it rather uninteresting at least to a European audience. His question whether “this is supposed to be what America’s about” confirms a pervasive prejudice, namely that Shepard is the quint-essential American playwright whose work can only be understood and appreciated if related to American myths, dreams, landscapes, and values. Moreover, his supposed intention to create a “monster fascist” would suggest that at the very centre of States of Shock he sees an unironic, all too simply construed character, an unlikely protagonist of a Shepard play. Shepard’s account can therefore guide a first encounter with his play only if one also considers what remains unsaid in it and what is implied by his words. This approach yields not only a fruitful hypothesis concerning Shepard’s aesthetics, his theatrical anthropology. It leads to a view of Shepard as a quintessentially Western European author and, by the same token, of the “monster fascist” as a shaman healer who involves the citizens of an advanced civilization in a confrontation with its societal subconscious. Finally, our approach corresponds to our staging of certainly the German, for all we know the European premiere on January 27, 1993 of States of Shock, with one of us (Hartmut Wickert) serving as director, the other one (Alfred Nordmann) as dramaturg. With his remarks Shepard suspends his “vaudeville nightmare” States of Shock between two wars. The experience of Vietnam and countless plays and movies about the Vietnam experience appear to lie behind the two protagonists Colonel and Stubbs. The Colonel provokes Stubbs to produce vivid impressions of the war which had left Stubbs debilitated: The middle of me is all dead. The core. I’m eighty percent mutilated. The part of me that goes on living has no memory of the parts that are all dead. (1993:14)

Now, if the Colonel wants to keep that war alive, he does so not for an indictment of war but for the restoration of Stubbs. Indeed, the voice of indictment has “all but disappeared” from the play, the Colonel refuses “to wallow in various states of insanity and self-abuse” (24). War is a job to be done, to be done well and brought to an end. There is a hole to be filled, a gaping wound to be healed, a split society to be mended, a prodigal son to be returned to his family, there are

SHAMANISM VILIFIED AND REDEEMED 41

veterans to finally receive their heroic welcome home: “How could we be so victorious and still suffer this terrible loss”, asks the Colonel (29). The loss is redeemed and defeat becomes victory only as the United States of America become a nation which does not remain debilitated by the Vietnam war but proves to itself that it can wage war again, that it can fight and win a just war. The American public was easily convinced that the Gulf war was “a good deed, that this was in fact a heroic fucking war”. It was easily convinced, not because it had forgotten Vietnam but because this new war was to heal the wounds torn open by that old war. And thus the past is remembered and comes alive in the mind of Stubbs as he gladly embraces and readies himself for the “friendly fire” (31) which was the defining way of becoming a hero in the war in the Gulf. And accordingly the play ends with a previously divided society united in a song, celebrating the resurrection of Stubbs who draws the sword and stands up against the Colonel. Finally he is the formidable antagonist whom the Colonel had been conjuring up from the start.1 So much for a very rudimentary first interpretation of the play based on Shepard’s account. To be sure, it disregards entirely the roles played by the two percussionists, by the White Couple, and by Glory Bee, waitress in the family restaurant where the Colonel and Stubbs rehearse a war that is equally of the future and present as of the past. Also, this interpretation suffers the defect identified above: for an American audience, does the play go beyond being a “vaudeville nightmare” about recent history, and for a European audience, how does it reverberate with its experience? Various strategies can be employed in response to these questions. These strategies are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, the following four are complementary, one informing the other.2 And yet, only one of them can define the rehearsal process and, after a brief survey of the first three, we will elaborate for the remainder of this paper that favoured and, we believe, the most promising and powerful strategy.

1

There is an alternative reading of the play which accords more significance to the historical circumstance that the small minority of opponents to the Gulf war consisted largely of Vietnam veterans. According to that reading, Stubbs is the Vietnam veteran who defies the attempts of the Colonel to heal and mobilize him for another war. The two readings rely on different interpretations of the final image which has Stubbs raise the sword against the Colonel. While for us it is most significant that Stubbs takes a militant stance and assumes the pose of the warrior, the alternative reading would see in that final image a culmination of Stubbs’s rage against the Colonel as the perpetrator of war (DeRose, 1992:134–37). 2 In practical terms: the first three strategies helped us frame the play and prepare the audience (e.g. in the playbill), the last strategy focused the collaboration of actors and director (see Nordmann, 1994).

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America Is Everywhere Most European productions of Shepard’s plays are implicitly premised on this postulate, certainly all those which in outward appearance differ very little from American stagings and which straightforwardly reproduce the American setting and idiom. Whether it is explicitly elaborated or not, the postulate expresses the recognition that in all essential respects and simply by eating hamburgers and watching Hollywood movies we are Americans already. The thesis of the colonization of our collective subconscious is not new, it implies however, that Shepard’s plays refer to a celluloid landscape, that we relate to the Colonel as to Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, to Stubbs as to Tom Cruise in Born on the Fourth of July, that we see the involvement of a father-image as in Platoon, and the rituals of remembering as perhaps in The Deer Hunter or Taxi Driver. Since these movies insinuate the Vietnam war into our European past, and since their imagery resonates on many levels with States of Shock, they clearly facilitate an understanding of the code to which Shepard alludes, which he cites and undermines, with which he plays. However, the postulate “America is everywhere” is also too sweeping, it relieves responsibility all too quickly in the search for specific meaning. Clearly, States of Shock ought to be more than a digest or summation or condensation of the movie-imagery of one and perhaps all wars.3 And the audience ought not just to watch as something familiar the ritual of self-definition through the representation of the past. Instead, the audience might either be drawn into the ritual, or, better still, discover the ritual in its archaic qualities as one of its own, i.e. discover how a representation of the past can literally make that past present again. At this point arise the remaining three strategies, and of these the first two work by overwhelming the audience with claims to generality and universality, i.e. by expanding the prima facie meaning of the play.

3

If one reads States of Shock through the eyes of the movie-goer, it is easy to forget that it corresponds to the war in the Gulf, a war of altogether different dimensions than the Vietnam war, a war defined by an entirely different imagery. Shepard’s play leaves extant movies and plays about Vietnam far behind in that it shows how the archaic imagery of the Vietnam war can be mobilized for a technologically disembodied Gulf war which turns every television set into a remote control monitor from which the air strikes appear to be conducted. At the same time, it exposes the futility of all so-called anti-war movies and plays of the past. Instead of representing a return to the political theatre of the ′60s and ′ 70s, States of Shock extends Shepard’s earlier aesthetics towards a conception of “political” theatre which no longer relies on the adoption of a stance or the communication of a message, opinion or thesis; see Nordmann, 1995.

SHAMANISM VILIFIED AND REDEEMED 43

The Father of All Things States of Shock invokes all wars at all times, perhaps it deals with the state of war as a state of being, perhaps with a permanent and pervasive disposition towards warfare on all levels of interaction, perhaps with war as the “father of all things” which patterns all modes of production in modern industrial societies. This first and most obvious claim to generality finds support in Shepard’s description of the Colonel: From stage left enters the Colonel, dressed in a strange ensemble of military uniforms and paraphernelia that have no apparent rhyme or reason: an air force captain’s khaki hat from WW II, a marine sergeant’s coat with various medals and pins dangling from the chest and shoulders, knickers with leather leggings below the knees, and a Civil War saber hanging from his waist. (5)

The notion that the play is about no particular war, and therefore about every particular war is further supported by the fact that there are few allusions to time, place, historical events. Wherever the family restaurant is located (presumably in the United States, presumably in the South), war is coming there. Perhaps the only historical reference in the text, Glory Bee’s “I missed the Cold War with all my heart” (41), gears European perceptions to the wars in former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union. While the thrust of this generalization should therefore not be underestimated, it works in a country like Germany only by way of abstraction, i.e. it appeals to the intellect as a fairly general but non-concrete warning to look out for patterns, processes, and interactions that speak of warfare in only seemingly peaceful times. Beware of the Healthy After the Cold War and the demise of authoritarian states, many regions find themselves with the possibility of self-determination restored, and prove their ethnic identity to themselves and the world by waging war. After reunification, the division of Germany is healed by abandoning previous limitations on the use of the military, and by seeking a sense of identity no longer defined by a debilitating past. The ideal of health as pursued in fitness studios all over the world consists in steeling the body, moulding it to a machine technology, patterning fitness on the model of a body ready for warfare. And the split in families is healed often enough by engaging together in a battle for gifts and goods at, for instance, Christmas time. All these examples are structurally similar to the story of the United States overcoming the trauma of a nation divided over the Vietnam war by engaging the whole nation in a good war in the Gulf. If violence is the means of proving to ourselves that we are healthy, that we are someone, that we can act again, then we should beware of the healthy as we should beware of Stubbs with his manhood restored at the end of

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States of Shock.4 With this structural similarity, a generalization more interesting and more difficult than the first presents itself. It suffers from the same limitation as its predecessor: in theatrical terms it is clearly not enough to merely stage the play in a conventional straightforward manner and then to rely on the audience to draw some generalizing conclusion as something that can be latched on to somewhat gratuitously; at the same time, the theatre as a political arena for the communication of theses about plays or about the world is a thing of the past. In the spirit of a concrete non-representational theatre, the question is whether one can reveal some of the previously mentioned dimensions of meaning by involving more closely Shepard’s aesthetics, i.e. by adhering to a kind of theatre which does not make claims to anything that goes beyond the processes actually involved in the staging of the play and the physical unfolding in the time and space shared by actors and audience in the course of the performance. If it is the director who constructs these processes, it is appropriate for him to reconstruct them and the thoughts governing the decisions that shaped the staging at the Stadttheater Konstanz. By necessity, his recapitulation conflates interpretive remarks concerning Shepard’s work with a description of the production which, after all, serves as a warrant for the interpretation, exemplifying the cogency and power of our views concerning Shepard’s aesthetics and anthropology or ethnology. The Playwright as Shaman The cue for our approach and thus for the fourth and final strategy of safeguarding the meaning and relevance of States of Shock was provided by Jack Gelber in his short and often-cited essay:5

4 Shepard may thus provide feminist critics of his work with a way to appreciate his portrayal of a male dominated world as profoundly critical. 5 Carol Rosen asked Shepard what he thought of Gelber’s famous designation. He answered that “It’s very flattering, but the problem I find with this kind of stuff is that in a way it is embarrassing, because having come across some of this stuff for real, you realize how far you personally are, say, from real shamanism or real magic or real wisdom, that kind of stuff’ (Rosen, 1992:3–9). Shepard’s response enjoins the critic not to use that label in a facile and exaggerated manner. At the same time it invites scrutiny: how far, precisely, can the theatre go towards the real shamanism that must remain unachieved; and what structural elements of an archaic shaman tradition can actually be utilized in the production of Shepard’s play? Our investigation therefore marries Gelber’s glossy label with the kind of ethnological inquiry pursued by Richard Schechner in his production of The Tooth of Crime (1973). Indeed, pace Shepard, our investigation redeems Schechner’s approach as quite in the spirit of Shepard’s aesthetics. (There is another line of ancestry involved here: Schechner’s work at the Performance Garage helped shape the work of the Wooster Group, and the performances of the Wooster Group are an important influence on our conception of contemporary theatre.)

SHAMANISM VILIFIED AND REDEEMED 45

Not only are the characters in [Shepard’s plays] on trips, for they tell us as much, but also the shapes of the plays themselves are in the form of trips, quests, adventures. Many of the characters are high on drugs, some are high on music, still others are flying on their own words. These characters speak directly to us or to each other or to their visions, the likes of Mae West, Paul Bunyon, Jesse James, or Lobster Man. These visionary beings are in search of gold, fame, or love, as indeed are the principals. Along the way we see cures, clairvoyance, the finding of lost objects, and the foretelling of the future. And all of this action takes place in play after play on a bare stage accompanied by spell-binding music and trance-inducing monologues. (Gelber, 1981:46)

We responded to Gelber’s cue not by somehow illustrating or evoking moods of drug-induced intoxication. Instead, our production was guided by the idea that, using the tools of the actor, we should scenically investigate or reconstruct the process of socio-political integration that has been associated with shamanism. And instead of establishing or strengthening an interpretive thesis on Shepard’s work and its shaman themes, heroes, and ideals, we took as a value-neutral heuristic the suggestion of a shaman dramaturgy or a shaman conception of theatrical action. Shamanism is here understood as traffic with supernatural powers for the purpose of “preserving societal norms and values and of treating their violation on an emotional level” (Stolz, 1988:59; our translation). Other tasks of shamans include “healing the sick, accompanying souls into the realm of the dead, delivering sacrifices or their souls to the Gods, defence against evil spirits and demons, forecasting and influencing of the weather, discovery of hunting grounds, prophesies of the future” (Stolz: 17). Still more important for our context were reports about the initiation of shamans, since in them we find clues and processes that also apply to the structure of States of Shock: The soul of the person to be initiated traveled into the beyond. There it was killed, cut up into parts, frequently eaten by the Gods, newly assembled, educated by the Gods and spirits and returned finally with the power to serve as a shaman. The initiated soul would be able from now on to leave the here and now and to traffic with matters beyond. (Stolz: 47)

This travel to the beyond matches the exposure to war of the individual soldier Stubbs, an exposure that occurs beyond the social context of his biography, e.g. on other continents such as Asia, Europe, the Near East. The event of war is in the concrete instance associated with pain, mutilation, even death, with a loss of experience under the onslaught of impressions as described by Walter Benjamin for the soldiers of World War I: […] the people returned muted from the field of war. They returned not richer but poorer of those experiences that can be passed on […] A generation that had still

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traveled to school in horse-drawn tramways, now stood under the open sky in a landscape in which only the clouds had remained unchanged. In the midst of that landscape, in a forcefield of destructive currents and explosions there was the tiny and frail human body […] This poverty of experience is not a lack of private experience but of experience that can be credited to humanity in general. This poverty is thus a kind of new barbarism.6 (1977: 214ff; our translation)

The disjunctive exposure to war may signify a gain in literary and historical stability when it becomes a subject of ritual. And if it should thus be lived by someone and rendered relivable, this person need not be physically invulnerable but psychologically able completely to create and recreate the situation of war. In other words, this person should submit again and again to the pain and extraordinary state of battle, he is the shaman, the actor, the character, the Colonel. Through him, the impressions of war and the exposure to warfare occasion experience, something that can be rendered for the senses here and everywhere: it becomes theatre.7 Our treatment of the play as a shaman session is further justified as it describes a society in a sick, apathetic, state of immobility: the inept waitress and the White Couple in a kind of rigor mortis. Disconnected information, dismembererd persons without identity, fragments of memo ries, fragments of music are remembered and assembled as in a jig-saw puzzle, creating an image of our world. And what we behold in that image is a society that has spun itself into networks of security which insulate it against reality. From the point of view of this self-absorbed society reality cannot be experienced anymore but is mediated, in the hands of demons, if you will. Access to reality is reserved for highly skilled specialists. Anything more than a narrowly defined segment of reality can be mobilized or unearthed by only one kind of specialist, the warrior. This specialist and his grasp of reality have been shaped by an archaic past and its magical conception of the world. Today he is also informed by technologically advanced military thinking according to which remote scenarios and war games are more significant, more real, than the rather exceptional direct physical encounters with the enemy. The postmodern militaristic shaman manipulates virtual realities. As a shaman the Colonel takes upon himself all that is vilified by society, violence and unruliness or disorder, for example. Together with his assistant and 6

Walter Benjamin here operates with the crucial distinction between “Erlebnis” and “Erfahrung”. However, both terms are usually translated as “experience”. To maintain the distinction we here translate “Erlebnis” as “exposure” to the “situation” of warfare, whereas “Erfahrung” is an “experience” that makes war communicable and incorporates it into the stock of human narratives. 7 For an attempt in another literary genre to transform personal exposure to the situation of war into historically valid experience, see the work of Ernst Jünger.

SHAMANISM VILIFIED AND REDEEMED 47

companion Stubbs he uses all this evil matter to cast the fragmented elements of society into a closed form and to reconstitute society as a real community. When the Colonel and Stubbs enter the stage or the family restaurant as outcasts, outsiders, representatives of a vanished race, they become something like agitators at a rally, at a war dance. In the first part of the play this war dance mainly serves the reconstitution of Stubbs’s body. His trauma is healed as the Colonel employs his ability to create virtual realities. The archaic shaman thus becomes conflated with the technocratic manipulator of multiple scenarios. Both command techniques for artificially inducing states of shock in which a dismembered body can be remembered, a suspended life history reinvented, a lost individual reintegrated, and a trauma healed. The Colonel uses the method of suggestion to travel into a virtual reality in the heart of darkness behind the situation of war: COLONEL: (moving toys around on table) […] When you were hit, Stubbs— you were backed up against the mountain. Is that right? Pretend the sugar is the mountain. Right here. Just pretend. (13) The Colonel involves Stubbs in a common transgression of family restaurant values and also in common exclamations of slogans, thus conjuring a reality of an us against them: COLONEL: […] We’re in a public situation. We have to use a little diplomacy. Some discretion. Restraint. You have to remember that the enemy is always sneaking. Always slimy. Lurking. Ready to snatch the slightest secret. The smallest slipup. Here—Have a drink. I’ve doctored it up some. Go ahead. It’ll open your pipes. […] Let’s have a toast. […] TO THE ENEMY! […] WITHOUT THE ENEMY WE ARE NOTHING! […] THE ENEMY HAS BROUGHT US TOGETHER! (14–15) Finally, the Colonel gives Stubbs a beating, creating a state of shock in which his own energy is imparted to Stubbs and reconfigures his life: COLONEL: […] Have to learn to pay for your actions. Become a man. […] You must never forget that your punishment has a purpose. LONG LIVE THE ENEMY. (Colonel begins to savagely whip Stubbs with the belt […]) (26–28) Stubbs is brought to a state that is determined by the Colonel. As is appropriate for shaman travelling and healing, however, it is precisely from this point of utter deprivation of a self, that the diseased and deprived person can emancipate himself. In this case, Stubbs becomes a true subject and begins to dominate the situation: STUBBS: (on floor with toys) It’s very clear what happened. We were back to back. Like this. (He moves toys) Exactly like this. […] Don’t yell at me. That’ll get you nowhere. (31)

48 A.NORDMANN AND H.WICKERT

Shepard here invents a kind of theatre which reaches back to the roots of theatre, to the rite of social self-reaffirmation. This is apparent in the basic shape of the play and in its development, or, to cite Gelber, in the form of the trip which defines the shape of the play. Unity of time, place, and action lend the play just about classical form. There is an exposition that consists in the arrival of the heroes, the return home of the lost ones, the resurfacing of what was suppressed. At the beginning one sees a social setting, a site devoted to the self-perpetuating cult of a consumption that consumes productive forces. It is a place for eating, a place of sacrifice, a place of trade for nourishment, customs, and social recognition. And from the beginning this place is defined by a fundamental disruption, namely that it has ceased to function, that its internal equilibrium is disturbed. GLORY BEE: Excuse me, Sir, but would you mind taking these for me. I have the darndest time balancing liquids. I don’t know what it is. Ever since I was very little. […] The manager is dead. […] Sorry for the delay but the cook has been wounded. (10, 22, 25) The metaphor of war runs like a system of veins through this society or this concentrate of a society. It is yet another defining element of Shepard’s basic shape, i.e. of an open space that serves as an appropriate environment or site for ritual, a theatrical space that presents an elementary condition of social anomy, asking to be clarified, described, fixed in time and space, and acted out. In Edward Kienholz’s installation “A Portable War Memorial” we found a confrontation of images which corresponded almost too precisely to the juxtapositions and confrontations in States of Shock.8 With our stage designer Peter Brower we deboned this installation and formed a skeletal version of it which emphasized the tall black chalkboard wall, the actual memorial within the installation. Of course, the Colonel and Stubbs take the place of the soldiers in the famous statue of the flag-rasing at Iwo Jima, a hollow silvery shell of which is included in Kienholz’s installation. This basic visual composition also corresponds to the shaman conception of a world-tree or a world-pillar, home for the souls of the unborn. It was here that the Gods worked, here emerged the dualism of good and evil, here it was that new life was created. (Stolz: 152)

Provoked by the savage whipping he has received from the Colonel, which left him lying in front of this black monolith, Stubbs moves outward to claim the space on his reawakened own:

8

The installation is permanently on view at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne (Schmidt, 1988). An aesthetic link between the installations of Robert Rauschenberg and the plays of Shepard has been forged by Gay Gibson Cima (1986).

SHAMANISM VILIFIED AND REDEEMED 49

From here I can see their boots. […] From here, I can see their bodies mixed with ours. […] Their heads are blown off. (28–29)

Another shaman prop of tremendous importance is the drum employed for shaman sessions. It “served for musical accompaniment […] helped the shaman move into a state of trance, and like the costume it possessed a spiritual and symbolic power” (Stolz: 143). Accordingly, while Shepard calls for the visual as well as musical imagery of war as the “cyclorama is lit up with tracer fire, rockets, explosions in the night” (5), we left this entirely to the two drummers whose shapes were more or less vividly discernible behind a gauze curtain.9 And instead of merely illustrating a scenery of war, the drummers emphasized the ritualistic elements in the performance, the dance-like qualities of the play. By assigning the drumming to the shaman, the musical evocation of war was transferred to the inner states of the characters and of the world created on stage. Frequently, for example, the eruptions, solos, and dialogues of the drums were provoked by the Colonel. At the beginning of the performance the characters sit on stage like actors waiting for their cue. They are sitting in expectation of their destiny, of a beginning. During the opening assault of the drums, the Colonel is visible dancing in the wings. He wears a coat which resembles the shaman costume as described in the literature but which also features the requisite references to the uniform of the eternal soldier. 10 The Colonel then proceeds to check the experimental set-up, the rehearsal set, in other words, his battlefield. He establishes or reconstructs the daily situation. His acting assistant or actorcolleague Stubbs is lurking for his cue. He is the actor without text, without a biography, without instructions, left alone with the wheelchair and a huge scar as his only props, an actor who has to invent his character from scratch and without any ground to stand on. The situation at the beginning of the play is a summons to begin. The Colonel responds to the summons and assumes the strenuous task to initiate life. Mentally he is permanently geared towards battle, and he accepts that challenge as a battle for the theatre and against the dullness of the empty stage: COLONEL: […] All those days. All those horrible long days without the enemy. Longing out the window. Staring at the stupid boredom of peacetime. The dullnes of it. The idiot deadness in everyone’s eyes. (39)

9

Ditschgi Gutzwiller, a rock musician, and Peter Haas, a heavy-metal drummer, developed and performed the music towering above appropriately menacing equipment. 10 Shepard himself points in this direction as he describes Stubbs’s wheelchair “with small American flags, raccoon tails and various talismans and good luck charms flapping and dangling from the back of the seat and arm rests” (6).

50 A.NORDMANN AND H.WICKERT

When he begins to reconstruct with Stubbs the death of his or of a son, he realizes through the creative act of playing a ceremonial war scenario, he instantiates it that very moment. At the same time he reclaims Stubbs from the idiot deadness of his ecstatic trance. COLONEL: He’s suffered a uh—kind of disruption. Temporary kind of thing, they say. Takes some time to unscramble. […] Shot smack through his chest is what it was. Show the lady, Stubbs. (6–7) By ordering the banana splits, setting up the war scenario, holding speeches about nation and individual, bringing in the loud driving rhythms of the drums, the Colonel promotes the development of Stubbs. Stubbs moves from being a debilitated man without language and memory who exists on the mental and emotional level of an infant, from being an empty vessel at the beginning of a rehearsal process to an idiosyncratic creative character who controls his own motions at the end of the play. “My thing is arising! I can feel it! […] It’s coming back! It’s all coming back to me now” (43), says Stubbs as he produces the last proof of his male independence. The Colonel takes into account the most advanced forms of military thinking. While his actions are quite physical, at least with respect to the body of Stubbs, his system of reference is a virtual reality, it consists of war scenarios that take the place of physically experienced confrontations with the enemy. Once experience can no longer be remembered or communicated, like that of Stubbs in the first half of the play, scenarios become more important than actual experience. By the same token, disenfranchised and fully objectified subjects take the place of personal histories and destinies, and the subject appears only as a statistical entity. Stubbs’s trauma probably is to be referred to the Vietnam war, his pain is physical, it resulted from an actual confrontation with an actual enemy, it involves a loss of orientation and the severance of the individual. Not only Stubbs is drawn from social amnesia into a social context, and not only he is transformed from an actor without a defined character into a protagonist in a collective drama. Glory Bee and the White Couple are also reactivated by the pull of the shaman session. Glory Bee becomes empowered by the Colonel to take charge of her business. She learns that she can be trained and turned into a complex machine in perfect equilibrium (32–33). Also, she lends her own body to Stubbs and thus enables him to become a man again. With a song on her lips she casts her body into the play of forces. And at the end it is she who keeps the memory of peace-time and its beauties alive. She no longer embodies an imbalanced world but becomes a protagonist playing the part of mother, lover, and wife, the archetypal role of the woman who sacrifices happiness on the altar of warfare. While the White Couple had originally witnessed the Colonel’s educational measures in a voyeuristic manner, White Man and White Woman become differently involved in the community. Inspired by Glory Bee and her peace-time

SHAMANISM VILIFIED AND REDEEMED 51

reminiscences, the White Man becomes absorbed by memories, films, former relationships, he displays the sentimentality of a man who is dying. WHITE MAN: What was it we used to do in those “quiet times”? […] Didn’t we dance or something? Weren’t we on a pier? A dock of some kind? Watching the lights in the distance? […] Didn’t we dance cheek to cheek? (40) This “deflected glance”11 of the White Man testifies to the increasing disorientation in a society which refuses to acknowledge that it has embarked on a very definite common course. A rather different symptom of the same kind of disorientation can be discerned in the White Woman who perceives a threat but treats it as an easily manageable nuisance that will just have to give way. Perhaps she represents the perennial pragmatist who exemplifies the stance taken by the infamous “Duck and Cover”-Campaign which insisted on the basic harmlessness of nuclear war. At the end we find the catastrophe of war appropriated by and incorporated into a society. The remembered and represented war has become actual and present, and it is conjured and conducted with the same kind of magical energy as the tribal dance which supposedly makes rain. All five protagonists contribute, each in their own way, to this process. The Colonel now remains a partner to Stubbs. By playing for him the role of traitor, he serves as a foil and point of contact for Stubbs. He is the enemy and guarantees the continuation of war, he is the antagonist and indispensable partner at once. And while the Colonel talks of his trip into a world of terror, they all sing a song together which reassures them of their common race. They have created a space of complete actuality in which past, present, and future have become fused. As Stubbs raises his sword against the Colonel, the action has reached a point of resolution, however tentative, temporary or terrifying. Stubbs or the actor Rainer Piwek pats the Colonel or Hartmut Lange on the shoulder, the Colonel rises from the wheelchair and the two walk off together, arm in arm, quite pleased with themselves. Theirs is a resolution not of the kind which the author grants either himself or the audience as a conclusion or even a happy end. Their resolution is that of two musicians who reach a moment of temporary satisfaction and respite in their competing, often discordant pursuits. Shepard does not believe in resolutions because they strangulate a play and its audience alike (Lippman, 1984). The resolution reached by the Colonel and Stubbs is definitely one not to

11

Paul Virilio (1989:9) describes the “deflected glance” as a strategy for dissolving conscious perception and for inducing a collective trance: “The economic war which began in the New Deal of the Thirties turned into a total war all the way up to Blue Skies, the movie which portrayed Fred Astaire immediately after Hiroshima taking on a radiant and at the same time gloomy sky, just the kind of sky which those who lived in the ruins during the war had experienced as a reflex to their melancholy state”. It is a mere coincidence, to be sure, that the White Man also remembers a movie with Fred Astaire.

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be believed in. If the image of virility is completed in the act of killing, and if Stubbs’s final menacing posture becomes a terrifying strangulation of the action, one must hope that the music will go on. Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. “Erfahrung und Armut”. Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977. Vol. 2.1. 213–19 . Cima, Gay Gibson. “Shifting Perspectives: Combining Shepard and Rauschenberg”. Theatre Journal 38 (1986): 67–81 . DeRose, David J. Sam Shepard. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992. Gelber, Jack. “The Playwright as Shaman”. American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard. Ed. Bonnie Marranca. N.Y.: PAJ Publications, 1981. 45–8 . Lippman, Amy. “Rhythm and Truths: An Interview with Sam Shepard”. American Theatre Apr. 1984:9–13, 40–1 . Nordmann, Alfred. “The Actors’ Brief: Experiences with Chekhov”. Theatre Research International 19.2 (Summer 1994): 134–142 . —“Political Theater as Experimental Anthropology: On a Production of Kleist’s Prinz Friedrich von Homburg”. New German Critique 66 (Fall 1995): 17–34 . Rosen, Carol. “Silent Tongues: Sam Shepard’s Exploration of Emotional Territory”. Village Voice 4 August 1992:32–41 . Schechner, Richard. “Drama, Script, Theatre, and Performance”. The Drama Review 17.3 (Sept. 1973): 5–36 . Schmidt, Hans Werner. Edward Kienholz: The Portable War Memorial Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 1988. Shepard, Sam. States of Shock, Far North, Silent Tongue. New York: Random House, 1993. Stolz, Alfred. Schamanen: Ekstase und Jenseitssymbolik. Köln: n.p., 1988. Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. Trans. Patrick Camiller. New York: Verso, 1988.

Indian Country: Sam Shepard and the Cultural Other David J.DeRose

Using Sam Shepard’s recent screenplay Silent Tongue as a starting and ending point, this essay looks back over thirty years of Shepard’s writing, examining his evolving treatment of various American racial minorities, especially Native Americans, as cultural “Others”. In several plays, Shepard juxtaposes American racial minorities to his white male protagonists as mysterious and sometimes threatening Others in touch with their spiritual selves and in close spiritual harmony with their natural surroundings. They appear to somehow enjoy a more “authentic” and meaningful existence than Shepard’s white, male protagonists. These protagonists, by comparison, are frequently portrayed as miserably out of touch with their spiritual selves, adrift in a postmodern American landscape of technology, materialism, and media-generated simulacra. They are in search of “the authentic”, either through a discovery of their own spiritual origins or through the appropriation of the spiritual wholeness of the Other. In the case of the Native American women in Silent Tongue, that desired Otherness is both sexual and cultural. Employing cultural theory from bell hooks, Edward Said, Richard Schechner, and others, the essay examines the pattern of Shepard’s evolving use of the Other in plays such as Dog, La Turista, Shaved Splits, Operation Sidewinder, Blue Bitch, and others. KEY WORDS: African-Americans (Shepard’s portrayal of), Asian-Americans (Shepard’s portrayal of), Imperialist nostalgia, Indian Country, Native Americans (Shepard’s portrayal of), Otherness (commodification of), Typical Americans (Shepard’s portrayal of). I just feel like the West is much more ancient than the East. Much more. […] You really feel this ancient thing about the land. Ancient. That it’s primordial. […] No wonder these mysterious cults in Indian religions sprang up, you know? […] It has to do with the relationship between the land and the people—between human beings and the ground. (Shepard qtd. in Lippman, 1984:10)

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The white man does not understand the Indian for the reason that he does not understand America. He is too far removed from its formative processes. The roots of the tree of his life have not grasped the rock and soil. The white man is troubled by primitive fears. (Standing Bear, Lakota Chief, 1877)

From the beginning of his career, Sam Shepard has been writing about the people of the American West—both the mythological Old West and the glamorized new. He has even been canonized with the over-blown title of Poet Laureate of the American West. It should therefore come as no surprise that with Silent Tongue, Shepard’s recently published screenplay, he has returned again to the fertile imaginative landscape of America’s Old West. But Silent Tongue is a surprise. It is, one might be startled to realize, the first time in over twenty years that Shepard has utilized characters of the historical or mythological Old West. His more recent work has focused almost exclusively on contemporary Americans. Again surprisingly, the characters of Silent Tongue are not the usual “B movie” simulacra of the Old West which people Shepard’s fantastical plays of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Gone are the would-be urban wranglers of Cowboys #2, the pop-culture media-generated re-dreamings of Tooth of Crime, and the matinee stereotypes of The Unseen Hand and Back Bog Beast Bait. They are replaced by fleshed-out psychological entities more in keeping with the rich characterizations of Shepard’s recent family plays. Gone too are the timeless hallucinatory and metatheatrical settings of those earlier plays. Silent Tongue is firmly and naturalistically rooted in an historical time and place: the New Mexico Territory of 1873. It thus represents Shepard’s first attempt at a true “period piece” for either film or stage and his first real Western. Perhaps the biggest surprise of all is that Silent Tongue is not primarily about cowboys or ranchers or outlaws, but about Native Americans—specifically Native American women. Certainly, Shepard’s recent work has brought female characters more and more to the forefront; but the last Native Americans to appear in a Shepard play were the ritual Hopi snake dancers in his much criticized Operation Sidewinder (1970). Those Native Americans, like nearly all persons of colour portrayed in Shepard’s work, were employed to embody a kind of vague spiritual and cultural “Otherness”. Shepard has been remarkably consistent (one might choose to say redundant) in employing what bell hooks (1992:21) calls “the commodification of Otherness”, in treating persons of colour in his work as mysterious and exotic “Others”, possessing intangible, sometimes spiritual qualities of inner purpose, and endowed with impenetrable calm and resolve which make them both a threat to and the envy of Shepard’s white male protagonists. Richard Schechner might have been describing Shepard’s work when, commenting on the way in which American cultural institutions represent multiculturalism, he despaired that “These ‘Others’ are almost always shown as exotic, hardly advanced

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ideologically from The King and I, or romanticized as representations of ‘authentic or changeless beauty and truth’” (Schechner, 1991:29). In the words of bell hooks (1992:21), “ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture”. Such ethnic Otherness and the compulsion of white America to understand it, possess it, and exploit it, is the characterizing factor of nearly all relations between Shepard’s generally white male protagonists (sometimes known as nothing more than “the Young Man”) and the handful of persons of colour which Shepard has included in his work. But as Silent Tongue appears to have little in common with such earlier portrayals, the publication of the screenplay offers an appropriate opportunity to look backwards over Shepard’s treatment of persons of colour in general and Native Americans in specific. Common to nearly all instances where Shepard introduces persons of colour or cultural Others into his work is a vague connectedness to or sense of harmony between those Others and their indigenous terrain. This connectedness is a quality which Shepard’s white characters both lack and are frequently in search of. The territories (both real and imagined) which these cultural Others inhabit in Shepard’s mythological landscape are frequently foreign, mysterious, or threatening to Shepard’s protagonists. Such territories might, quite appropriately, be categorized collectively as “Indian Country”. “Indian Country” was, historically, those western American lands still under the control of the various Native American nations during the nineteenth century. It was, to white settlers, a hostile place where their presence was not welcome and where no white man or woman was safe. But what was hostile terrain to the white man was sacred land, representing an ancient and traditional way of life, to the Native American. To the Native American, Indian Country represented a sanctuary to be protected from the “civilizing” (i.e. contaminating) force of the white man, his government, his lifestyle, and his Judeo-Christian religion. Because Native Americans treated this land as sacred, Indian Country might be seen, from the white man’s perspective, as not only an immediate threat to his physical person, but as the locus of a primitive, foreign presence, a pagan Otherness, which constituted a threat to his relatively secular way of life and to his personal mythological sense of himself as the centre of the civilized, JudeoChristian universe. This vague sense of the Other, threatening to violate one’s sense of self and place, is present in many of Shepard’s plays from the 1960s and early 1970s. The first actors to step on stage in a Sam Shepard play-Cowboys at the Theatre Genesis in October of 1964—found themselves both literally and metaphysically in “Indian Country”, fighting off imagined Indians while struggling to make sense of their hostile urban surroundings. It was Shepard’s contemporaries, U.S. soldiers fighting in Vietnam during that same period, who brought the term “Indian Country” back into common usage in the United States by employing it to refer not only to those territories under the control of their Viet Cong enemies, but to the unsettling state of mind which such unfamiliar terrain evoked.1

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Eventually, the use of the phrase by Vietnam veterans was expanded to refer to any situation in which one felt threatened, whether physically, mentally, or emotionally. “Indian Country” was a state of personal anxiety that could happen anywhere, anytime. (DeRose, 1992:11)

It is this metaphysical Indian Country, this foreign and frightening mental and emotional terrain, which Shepard’s protagonists find so anxiety-provoking and which the persons of colour in his plays almost exclusively inhabit. Lakota Indian Chief Standing Bear could have been describing a number of Shepard’s protagonists from the 1960s and ‘70s when he said in 1877 that the white man “does not understand America” and is “troubled by primitive fears”. Shepard’s early protagonists often exist in a state of extreme psychic agitation. Suffering from a sense of personal alienation and estrangement from their immediate environment and from the world at large, they are fundamentally at odds with reality, enduring what I might call “postmodern discomfort”, but what Standing Bear would have rightfully recognized as the white man’s “primitive fears”, fears arising out of a sense of profound isolation from one’s past, one’s environment, and one’s spiritual self (DeRose, 1992:1–7, passim). In Shepard’s earliest work, the big city seemed to be the locus of distress for young, often naive protagonists. Part of that distress was the Otherness of city dwellers.2 In Dog (1965), “the Young Man”, a stand-in for the author who appears in many of Shepard’s early plays, is confronted on a city street by one of the city’s unsettling inhabitants: a drunken black panhandler. The black man— Shepard’s first attempt at writing a person of colour—informs the Young Man quite simply and straightforwardly that he, the Young Man, is a dog. This disturbing pronouncement is neither explained nor expanded upon by the black man, but simply repeated with resolve and certainty. When asked to elaborate, the black man responds with a series of personal questions which appear to seriously unnerve the Young Man.3 Before coming upon the black man, the Young Man had been practising different styles of walking, as if searching for a walk which would express his inner self. But (if one may so deduce from the obscure action of the play) the Young Man does not possess an inner sense of self; the walks suggest that he is trying to create that self externally through “acting out” a personal style. As Shooter says in Shepard’s Action (1975): “You hunt for a way of being with 1

The most obvious example of this usage in a literary source would have to be Philip Caputo’s novel, Indian Country (1987). 2 While they have nothing to do with racial or cultural “Others”, the two men in suits who appear at the end of Cowboys #2, reading in monotone voices from the script, certainly embody an urban threat of “Otherness” to Shepard’s young would-be cowboys. 3 My observations on this unpublished script are based on a copy of the typescript lent to me in 1984 by Patrick Fennell. Since that time, both Fennell (1989) and I (1992) have written briefly on Shepard’s unpublished early plays.

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everyone. A way of finding how to behave. […] You act yourself out” (Shepard, 1984:178). The confrontation with the black man so unsettles the Young Man that, when the black man leaves, the Young Man finds himself unable to move, unable to remember how to take a single step or even to utter a cry. The strange sequence of events suggests, in the typically indirect fashion of Shepard’s early work, that the black man, viewed as a denizen of the threatening streets, leaves the Young Man so unsure of himself and throws him into such a state of internal disequilibrium as to be unable to execute the acts of walking or talking. Thus Shepard’s naive Everyman, personally confronted by a representative of the urban terrain to which he is a stranger, is rooted to the spot in mute terror. Shepard refused to have Dog published and later dismissed it as a “sort of Zoo Story-type play” (Chubb, 1981:194). Five years passed before the next (and only other) time Shepard placed black characters in one of his plays: Operation Sidewinder (1970). It was during an attempt to have Operation Sidewinder produced at the Yale School of Drama in 1969 that Shepard was informed in no uncertain terms that it was “uncool for a white to write about [a black man] in America” (Chubb: 194).4 Shepard introduces three black urban revolutionaries into the early action of Operation Sidewinder. As the drunk in Dog, these characters appear to possess an inner conviction and self-assuredness—or, perhaps they possess nothing more specific than a certain “cool”—which the white characters lack. The three black men are juxtaposed not only to one of Shepard’s Young Men, whom they ridicule for trying to emulate their vernacular,5 but also, and more significantly, to an eager and gullible white car hop. Operation Sidewinder was never produced at the Yale Repertory Theatre because black students at Yale’s School of Drama protested what they called the stereotypical “Let’s Destroy Everything” image of black militancy which the play perpetuated. They publicly stated that the play “trivializes and makes a mockery of the black man’s struggle for dignity and liberation in this country” (qtd. in Brustein, 1984:74). After hearing of these objections, Shepard withdrew the play from production. When the script was later produced at the Lincoln Centre of New York City in 1970, Shepard had substantially rewritten the scenes involving the black revolutionaries.6 Several stereotypical images were either removed or toned down. The term “Negroes” was replaced by the more politically current term “Blacks”. The bright orange Cadillac in which the black characters were originally seen was replaced by a less racially-stereotypical Chevy. Gone as well

4

David Henry Hwang (1991:78) has noted that “Many writers, I believe, refrain from tackling ethnic characters for fear they will inadvertantly discover stereotypes they may not have even realized existed somewhere in their minds”. 5 “BLOOD: Oh, now he’s calling me man! He’s speakin’ my language! Yeah, brother! Bring on the chitlins!” (Shepard, 1986:230–231)

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were all specific references in the text to the black men as “Black Nationalists”, including their black leather berets, leather jackets, and sunglasses. Most significant, however, was the relocation of the first scene involving the black characters from a politically charged setting, a Black Nationalist rally, to a stereotypically white venue, a drive-in restaurant. In the earlier draft of the scene, the three black men are sitting in their car “watching a rally across the street” (217, Esquire). Over loud speakers, Stokely Carmichael’s passionate and inflammatory August 1968 speech to the people of Watts can be heard. In the revised version, the loud-speakers are gone and with them any suggestion of Stokely Carmichaers presence. These changes are, one might conclude, an attempt on Shepard’s part (perhaps at the suggestion of the black Yale students) to make the political affiliations of his black revolutionaries—revolutionaries planning the immediate overthrow of the military and the government—less specific and less potentially objectionable to Carmichael’s followers or to rival Black Power organizations. Shepard further defuses the scene by introducing a comic character, a white carhop “dressed in a stupid white mini outfit with a funny white hat” (217).7 The stereotyping of the black revolutionaries in the earlier draft—a stereotyping which was, however politically offensive or incorrect, totally in keeping with the cartoonish, one-dimensionality of the script in general, and certainly no more offensive than Shepard’s portrayal of women in the script—was upstaged in the revised draft by the stereotypically comic image of the white carhop: a cliché-spouting would-be revolutionary working at a drivethrough restaurant and wearing what amounts to little better than a clown suit. Her impassioned civil rights pronouncements are a combination of clichéd revolutionary jargon—“if we don’t get it together pretty soon we’re gonna’ be had. Am I right?” (218)—and buzz-words from black leaders. Shepard even has her paraphrase several of the statements from the Carmichael speech of the earlier draft; but in the carhop’s mouth, these words turn from powerful revolutionary rhetoric to comic recitation. When juxtaposed to the mock-revolutionary ranting of this ridiculous figure, the black characters have little trouble in projecting—often by nothing more than their relative silence—an air of clear political/ideological purpose. The carhop is

6 In the argument that follows I will refer to two drafts of the script. These are the draft which appeared in Esquire magazine in May 1969—which I will call the “earlier” draftand the final text which was published by Bobbs-Merrill in 1970 after the Lincoln Centre production—which I will call the “revised” or Lincoln Centre draft. I feel it is relatively safe to connect the earlier draft with the events at the Yale School of Drama and the revised draft to the Lincoln Centre production both because of their respective dates of publication and because of specific elements of the two production scripts which are noted in Brustein (1984) and in reviews of the Lincoln Centre production. 7 Production photos of the Lincoln Centre production (Davis, 1971) show the child-faced actress Catherine Burns in an exaggerated cowboy “theme” costume with a cartoonish cowboy hat and an oversized sheriff s badge stitched on her costume.

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too little self-aware to feel the same distress as the Young Man in Dog; but she perceives in these three black men an apparent certainty of political purpose which she herself lacks and which she attempts to emulate by associating with them, even offering to find them guns. “I mean you people have such a groovy thing going. […] With you guys it’s all laid out”, she tells the three black men in her typically vague jargon. “With me it’s different. I got a lot of guessing to do.” (218) Like many of Shepard’s young white characters from this period of his work, the carhop possesses what Renato Rosaldo (qtd. in hooks: 25) terms an “imperialist nostalgia” typical of the late 1960s, in which the offspring of the dominant culture—“masses of young people dissatisfied by U.S. imperialism […] afflicted by the postmodern malaise of alienation” (hooks: 25)—assuage their inherited guilt by projecting onto the oppressed Other “a sense of plenty, bounty, a field of dreams” (hooks: 25). Her desire is not to dominate the Other, but by association with these black men, to somehow become the Other as a gesture of youthful defiance. Displaying a similar need to express some misguided youthful defiance is another incarnation of Shepard’s “Young Man”, this time a college student turned drug addict who has been hired by the black revolutionaries to help them drug the water supply of an Air Force base. The manner in which the black men refer to the Young Man is another of the noteworthy changes made between drafts of the play. In the earlier draft, the black men speak of him as a political collaborator of sorts, calling him “the desert dude”—a title which suggests that they perceive the Young Man as possessing a certain positive affinity for the desert. In point of fact, the Young Man has no such affinity, and in the revised version of the play the black characters justifiably deride him with such sarcastically invoked titles as “flower child” and “hippy cat”, expressing concern over his problematic drug dependency and describing him as far more of an unreliable hireling than a revolutionary equal. These altered references to the Young Man, as well as the addition of the carhop to the revised text, elevate the black characters in Operation Sidewinder to a position of superiority by virtue of little more than their relative “cool”. Their mystique of Otherness is unearned; and the absurdity of their plan to drug the water of a military installation—a plan which never materializes— demonstrates that they have little more savvy than their obsequious white admirers. They are also at odds with the mythological terrain of the play: they are contemporary inhabitants of the embattled city in a play which takes place in an ancient and mystical desert landscape. As Operation Sidewinder moves further into the desert and closer to the spiritual homeland of the Hopi nation, the black revolutionaries have little place in the developing plot. Their cultural Otherness is reduced, in light of the powerful spirituality of the Hopis, to little more than a sense of personal style, a studied silence, and a practised indifference toward the white characters. Such silence and seeming indifference, especially as perceived through the eyes of insecure white characters, are central aspects of the Otherness with which

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Shepard endows the majority of his fictional persons of colour. In Shaved Splits (1970), written at roughly the same time as Operation Sidewinder, Shepard introduces Wong, a nearly silent Chinese servant who, despite his position of servitude, exhibits a complete disinterest in, and even obliviousness to, the material wealth of and the aggressive physical advances of his employer, the rich and voluptuous Miss Cherry (Shepard, 1972:163).8 Shepard endows Wong with qualities stereotypical of American perceptions of Asian men. He is one of what Japanese-American playwright Philip Kan Gotanda in his 1991 play, Yankee Dawg You Die (qtd. in Moy, 1992:83) calls the “sexless houseboys” of American popular culture: “They fucking cut off our balls and made us all houseboys on the evening soaps. ‘Get your very own neutered, oriental houseboy!’” Wong certainly fulfills the role of asexual houseboy for the cartoonish Miss Cherry, but Cherry perceives Wong’s servility and his disinterest in either sex or power—the only sources of any pleasure in her life—as somehow threatening, somehow inhuman: “[D]on’t be so servile all the time. Act like a human being, for Christ’s sake” (166). Rather than leading with his balls, as do Shepard’s typically “red-blooded” heterosexual American males, Wong is guided by a stereotypically “inscrutable Asian” spirituality.9 In the characteristically vague words of yet another of Shepard’s Young Men (this time a reckless armed revolutionary who takes Miss Cherry hostage): “Look at Wong here. You and me can’t begin to imagine where he’s at. But he’s got ahold of something” (194). Whatever that “something” is, it appears to imbue Wong with a spiritual wealth which makes him somehow superior to his oversexed and materialistic white companions.10 While Wong is an anomaly in Shepard’s work-the only Asian character Shepard has created to date—the juxtaposition of this type of spiritual or mystical character to such American popular culture types as Miss Cherry and the Young Man is a common device in Shepard’s plays. Cultural Others are perceived, to

8 Note that Shaved Splits appears in the first volume to bear the title The Unseen Hand and Other Plays, but when this volume was expanded and republished by Bantam Books in 1986, Shaved Splits was not included, making it the only play Shepard has ever published and then subsequently removed from print. 9 Said (1978) deals with Western misperceptions and stereotypes of Asian sexuality and spirituality. An interesting dramatic treatment of Western misperceptions of the Orient as a mysterious and effeminate culture can be found in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly. See also his interview with DiGaetani (1989). 10 Wong attains his moment of transcendence over the material West when he enters a trance-like state during a shoot-out with the police. As bullets riddle Cherry’s bedroom, Wong appears in a Dragon Mask and ceremonial costume; he performs a ritual dance and, oblivious to the gunfire around him, steps onto the window sill and leaps calmly to his death. Of course Shepard’s fabrication of immutable Asian mystique is as embarrassingly naive and inaccurate as it is stereotypically racist. Ritual suicide is a stereotype of the Japanese warrior; Wong, however, is Chinese. Wong also crosses racial boundaries to perform a “weird Balinese type dance” (Shepard, 1972:185).

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various effect, through either the eyes of a Young Man or through the eyes of pop-culture figures which one might call “typical Americans”—that is, typical white Americans. The carhop in Operation Sidewinder is one such “typical American”. Frequently, Shepard introduces a white couple, sometimes identified only as “tourists” (i.e. travellers in a strange or foreign land). In Blue Bitch (1973) it is Cody and his wife Dixie, two Americans in London, who are terrified by a snarling Scotsman on the telephone. In La Turista (1965), it is through the eyes of two American tourists, Kent and Salem, that the audience experiences the rather surreal happenings in a Mexican hotel room and the bizarre mock-Mayan ritual of a Mexican witchdoctor and his apprentice son. And, in one of Shepard’s best-known and most often-quoted short stories, “Left Handed Kachina” (Shepard, 1981a: 60–2), a New York couple, identified only as “a tourist and his wife”, purchase a bewitched Kachina doll from Hopi Indians on a reservation in Arizona.11 Miss Cherry and her husband, D.T., from Shaved Splits are another such “typical American” couple, as are Honey and Dukie in Operation Sidewinder. In these two plays, the couples are more specifically typed as an older, wealthy white male and a young attractive white female (or “sexy chick” to use Shepard’s description of Honey in Operation Sidewinder). Representing the unsophisticated masses of pop-culture middle America, these “tourists” serve as our perceptual guides on unanticipated journeys into Indian Country. It is through their eyes that we experience the Otherness of the terrain and the inhabitants there.12 Journeys into Indian Country often include the attribution of mystical or supernatural powers to the indigenous racial or cultural clans of specific geographical locales such as Bayou Country, Central Mexico, or the Mojave Desert. Gris Gris, the cajun girl in Back Bog Beast Bait (1971) is an expert on the medicinal and spiritual (not to mention psychotropic) properties of local bayou swamp mushrooms. The witchdoctor in La Turista performs an ancient ritual which includes the decapitation of live chickens. His powers are authenticated by

11

When the couple return to New York, the man examines the Kachina in his apartment while listening to a recording of Hopi chants. He is thrown into a violent trance in which he moves like a dog around the apartment moaning and chanting slashing at his arm. Thunder cracks the plaster and lightning slashes through the furniture burning black brands across the walls and floor. Corn springs from the carpet Rivers gush and spread red earth into all the corners of the apartment. (Shepard, 1981a:62) Also of interest from Hawk Moon is the short story, “Can a 1/2 Ton Fly?”, in which a car full of tourists witness three young Native Americans driving their truck off the edge of a draw bridge and smashing it into the bow of a passing ship.

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the fact that, as one character explains, he and his people have lived on the same land “since the days of the great Mayan civilization” (Shepard, 1981b: 268–69). Thus a connection to the land, to a specific terrain, is a potent pedigree for supernatural powers. More than any other demographic group in Shepard’s work, Native Americans provide a powerful image of harmony with the land and with the cosmos at large. The deep spirituality which permeates every aspect of traditional Native American culture and daily activity is a prominent characteristic of Shepard’s portrayal of the American West in several of his plays.13 In Operation Sidewinder, Native American culture succeeds in fulfilling spiritual needs which the mythological Old West of cowboys, frontiersmen, and outlaws fails to do elsewhere in Shepard’s work. Of all Shepard’s plays, Operation Sidewinder is perhaps most representative of Shepard’s “imperialist nostalgia” and of an archetypal search for the authentic and for spiritual origins in a modern and material world of technology and mediagenerated simulacra. Nowhere else in his dramatic writings does Shepard so transparently attempt to acclaim the spiritual lifestyle of Native American culture as vastly superior to the high-tech, militarized, and industrialized world of the modern white man. And nowhere else does Shepard go through such pains to “authentically” re-create and re-present Native American legend and ritual ceremony. In Operation Sidewinder, U.S. military technocrats have constructed a sophisticated computer in the shape of a giant sidewinder snake. They hope to duplicate a real sidewinder’s natural rhythmic movements in a fashion which, they claim, will help them track and contact Unidentified Flying Objects. The computer/snake escapes into the desert where it is eventually captured and beheaded by Mickey Free, a half-breed Indian scout. Free brings the mysterious severed head to the Spider Lady, the spiritual leader of the Hopi snake clan.14 She recites an ancient Hopi legend of origins which includes a giant snake given to the Hopi people so that they might communicate with the gods (just as the Air Force now wishes to communicate with the heavens, i.e. extraterrestrials). According to the legend, the snake was torn in two by rival clans and, as a result,

12

Miss Scoons from Shepard’s Angel City might also be seen as falling roughly into this category. She is not a tourist, but she is most certainly a typically American B movie “type” who is part innocent and part psychic voyant. 13 Even in plays in which Native Americans do not appear, their culture and religious traditions are introduced with a certain reverence. In Angel City, for example—which has nothing to do with Native American culture, but which is, rather, about the Hollywood film industry—the character Rabbit Brown (even his name is taken from Native American folklore) possesses and attempts to use Native American medicine bundles, one of which he claims is an authentic relic from an Indian medicine man. The bundle possesses a great apocalyptic power which the white men in Angel City neither understand nor manage to control.

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“the people lost all knowledge of their origins” among the gods. “The Gods vanished from the earth. The people were lost.” (Shepard, 1986:234) She explains that the current subjugation of the Hopi people to the material realm of the white man is the result of this falling out with the gods. “Emergence” from the treachery of the current “fourth world” and into a glorious fifth world will take place only when the “severed halves of the ancient spirit snake” are “joined together again on a night of the great dance” (235). The sidewinder computer, the Spider Lady concludes, is the long-awaited spirit snake. The “Emergence” into a fifth world which the Spider Lady predicts and which appears to come to pass at the conclusion of Operation Sidewinder is part of a documented Hopi prophecy of the annihilation of Western civilization. The United States will be destroyed, land and people, by atomic bombs and radioactivity. Only the Hopis and their homeland will be preserved as an oasis to which refugees will flee. Bomb shelters are a fallacy. “It is only materialistic people who seek to make shelters. Those who are at peace in their hearts already are in the great shelter of life. There is no shelter for evil. Those who take no part in the making of world division by ideology are ready to resume life in another world, be they of Black, White, Red, or Yellow race. They are all one, brothers.” (Waters, 1963:334)

This “Hopi Prophecy”, cited in Frank Waters’s Book of the Hopi, is repeated almost verbatim by the Snake Lady in Shepard’s play, as are the descriptions of a “spiritual conflict with material matters” and of a “blue star” descending to earth. Blue light emanates from the sky on several occasions during Operation Sidewinder, culminating in a shower of lightning-like flashes during the elaborate ritual Snake Dance at the play’s climax. The Snake Dance which Shepard employs as the ritual evocation of Emergence into the Fifth World is borrowed in large part from a description of the Snake-Antelope Ceremony in

14

Mickey Free is an historical character from the 19th century American frontier: a halfbreed Indian scout known for having helped the U.S. military hunt down and destroy Geronimo and his army. The Spider Lady or more properly, “Spider Woman”, is a potent divinity of Hopi folklore: the life-force responsible for the creation of human life and a medium through which the Hopi people communicate with the spirit world. In Operation Sidewinder, Shepard re-writes these two figures as present-day characters, making the Spider Lady a “wizened old Indian shaman”, and bringing Mickey Free into the 20th century, thus giving him the opportunity to right his past wrongs to his Native American brothers by leading them into the Emergence. Shepard has employed historical and legendary figures before-such as the casting of Paul Bunyan, Captain Kidd, Marlène Dietrich, and others in Mad Dog Blues—but Operation Sidewinder is the only play in which he leaves their historical or legendary identity unrevealed in the text and simply appropriates their names. Why Shepard does so in Operation Sidewinder is unclear except that it may be part of his attempt to employ authentic, rather than fabricated, elements of Native American culture in the play.

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the Book of the Hopi.15 Shepard’s lengthy description incorporates elements of documented Hopi ceremonial costume, specific musical notations, precise choreography, ritual behaviour, and even, according to Shepard’s stage directions, the use of live snakes (246).16 Between Shepard’s early draft of the play, published in Esquire magazine in May of 1969, and the final text published after the Lincoln Centre production in 1970, Shepard not only adds several detailed elements to the ceremony itself, but also alters radically the conclusion of the play. In the earlier draft, military troops attack during the Snake Dance, attempting to recapture the Sidewinder computer. When the Hopi resist this attack, the soldiers open fire with machine guns in a “loud rapid fire that lasts for a full thirty seconds” (234, Esquire) and which kills all those participating in the ceremony. The soldiers then attempt to capture the Sidewinder computer, but are stopped as a huge flying saucer descends from above the stage. “Vague forms can be seen moving behind oval windows” as a sliding door opens and the Sidewinder computer drags the struggling soldiers into the craft (234, Esquire). The Hopi corpses are left littering the stage. In Shepard’s revised draft, as produced at Lincoln Centre, the stage directions suggest that if there is a non-earthly presence of some sort in the sky, it is supernatural, rather than extraterrestrial. Huge gusts of wind blow from upstage directly out into the audience, changing from hot to cold. Wind also blows across stage. Streams of smoke come from all around the proscenium arch and upstage. The chanting increases. A highfrequency whine. The chanting becomes amplified. The bright blue light flashes on, the Indians are in ecstasy as they chant. (253–54)

Rather than end in apocalypse, this sequence concludes in an ascension of sorts as the prophesied Emergence takes place and the Hopi are removed from this world. When the soldiers open fire on the Hopi, “the INDIANS just sway back and forth to the rhythm of the chant”(253), seemingly untouched by the bullets. The lights go to black. The blue light again and this time all the INDIANS plus the YOUNG MAN and HONEY are gone. Just the DESERT TACTICAL TROOPS holding their ears and shielding their eyes. The lights stay up and become brighter. The whine and the chanting get louder, then even/thing goes black. (254)

15

The description of this ceremony appears in Waters (1993:218–230). Shepard’s substantial borrowing from this source appears, not in the earlier Esquire draft, but in the final published Lincoln Centre script in which he goes into far greater detail over the qualities of the ceremony. 16 Suprareal elements such as fresh vegetables and live animals have often passed for the “authentic” in Shepard’s work. One might especially note the decapitation of live chickens called for in the Mayan ceremony in La Turista.

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Shepard’s direct quotation of lengthy passages from the Hopi prophecy as well as his near-total adoption of authentic detail from documented Hopi ritual exhibit a determined focus on authenticity seen nowhere else in his work. Certainly neither the Mayan ritual of La Turista nor the Asian dance of death in Shaved Splits show any concern for cultural authenticity on Shepard’s part. By contrast, such attention to authentic detail in Operation Sidewinder suggests a reverence on Shepard’s part for the Hopi people and their spiritual beliefs. He treats the prophecies and the Snake Dance as authentic elements of a sustaining and transcendent system of beliefs; and he favourably juxtaposes that system of belief to the empty militarism, materialism, and technocracy of a “civilized” world peopled with mad scientists, gunhappy militarists, and ill-considered youthful revolution. The spiritual transcendence of the Hopi in the rewritten conclusion of the play is thus offered as a viable alternative to, even an image of final triumph over, the material values of modern American society.17 Written twenty-three years later, Shepard’s Silent Tongue suggests no less faith in the spiritual realm of the Native American. But, rather than exhibit simplistic and naive images of technological apocalypse and spiritual transcendence, the screenplay offers a far more subtle examination of the interrelationship between Native American spirituality and representatives of Euro-American society. The screenplay takes its name from one of its characters: a Kiowa Indian woman who has had her tongue cut out for lying. She is the mother of two half-breed daughters, now both grown, whom she left with their white father when she returned to her people. The father is a former hunter, now Medicine Show man, who raped Silent Tongue and later married her. He has traded one of his daughters to a horse thief for fresh horses. The second daughter still travels with him. Shepard’s treatment of the women in the script, and of their male captors and tormentors, continues, in an increasingly serious tone, the exploration of abusive and exploitative male-female relations which he began with Fool for Love, A Lie

17

If this reading is naive and simplistic, then so, too, I would argue, is the faith this play exhibits in the transcendent power of Native American spirituality. The text itself is open to a far more complex (and less idealistic) reading, such as the one given it by Wilcox, who concludes on the following note of scepticism: Shepard’s desert, then, is not-even in this ambivalent text written in the wake of the romantic and essentialist sixties—some realm of original presence, the site of recuperative originality or eschatological salvation. It is not a landscape of organic or constitutive symbols that might lead to origins, but rather one that calls attention to the void that underlines signs, the yawning gaps between signifier and signified. (1993:56) While I feel Wilcox’s reading is an accurate one given the text’s weaknesses and ambivalences, I am here attempting to read, not only the text itself, but Shepard’s intent as illustrated in his obvious and easily-documented revisions and his attempts to create an “authentic” ritual of spiritual transcendence.

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of the Mind, and the film Far North. But by setting the piece in the Old West and by making the exploited women Native Americans, Shepard has linked his male characters’ compulsion to possess and exploit these women to a similar, characteristically Euro American compulsion to possess and exploit (or destroy in the attempt) the intangible Otherness of Third World or non-Euro-American cultures. Thus, the women in Silent Tongue are doubly Other and doubly desirable by virtue of their gender and their exotic race. They are the victims of what bell hooks identifies as the dominant culture’s desire to get “a bit of the Other” (22), forcibly violating taboos of both race and sex.18 In Silent Tongue, the Kiowa women possess supernatural powers of healing which the white men seek to control. Eamon MacCree, the man who marries Silent Tongue after raping her, is obsessed with the possession of her entire being. He rapes her, having been told that, speechless, she cannot utter a protest. But then he is compelled to marry her, as if having penetrated her body, he must find a way to penetrate her silence and her outward indifference. MacCree seems to believe that only by totally possessing Silent Tongue, by robbing her of her freedom and her separateness, will he obtain her healing medicine. The deep moral and psychic ambiguity of MacCree’s actions is revealed by Michael Taussig’s observation on white colonialism that “going to the Indians for their healing power and killing them for their wildness are not so far apart. Indeed, these actions are not only intertwined but are codependent” (Taussig, 1987:100 qtd. in Conquergood, 1992:43). As a Medicine Show man, MacCree turns white America’s belief in the “medicine” of Native Americans into a profitable business venture. He makes his living by selling what he claims is “Kickapoo Indian Sagua-The Mystery Cure of the Plains” (Shepard, 1993:129). Any doubts as to the curé’s authenticity are quelled by the presence of Silent Tongue’s younger daughter, Velada, in the Medicine Show. She is, her father confesses, “our main attraction”, drawing large crowds “like flies” with her Indian pony act (145). Silent Tongue’s elder daughter, Awbonnie, appears in the screenplay only as a spirit, inhabiting her own burial tree and haunting her former husband, a young white man named Talbot. It is Talbot who keeps Awbonnie from her final rest by refusing to burn her rotting corpse and accept her death. Awbonnie died in childbirth after being purchased for Talbot by his father as a cure for the young man’s faltering mind. But with her death, Talbot has slipped further into madness. His father returns to MacCree to attempt to purchase Velada as a second healing bride for his son.

18

“What is clear now is that the West’s fascination with the primitive has to do with its own crises in identity, with its own need to clearly demarcate subject and object even while flirting with other ways of experiencing the universe.” (Torgovnick, 1990, qtd. in hooks: 22)

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Even as captive brides, both Silent Tongue and Awbonnie appear, from what is said by their husbands and implied in the screenplay, to have brought great mental wellness and peace to their white husbands. Even Velada, kidnapped and coerced into aiding the fragile Talbot, appears to bring him great comfort simply by her presence. By virtue of this powerful medicine, these women maintain a psychic power of sorts over the self-absorbed men who hold them captive. This scenario could easily deteriorate into yet another version of the clichéd “female enchantress” who ensnares her male victims, but Shepard does not treat the Native American women in that reductive fashion. As drawn by Shepard, these women truly possess spiritual powers which they seem compelled to offer unselfishly, even in captivity. And yet, the women’s medicine is much more than the ability to embody and project some sort of vague healing tranquility. They eventually use supernatural forces to free themselves of their enslavers, turning their medicine against those who hope to profit from it. Awbonnie’s ghost haunts first her profoundly disturbed husband and then his father in an attempt to release her spirit from the bonds of earthly life. “She is my mother’s weapon!” Velada says of her sister. “She is moving on you now with vengeance.” (173) Silent Tongue also attains a vengeance of sorts by “haunting” her former husband, MacCree. She first appears in the film only in a snapshot. Much later, she is seen as a silent figure on a distant ridge. Over the course of the screenplay, MacCree is slowly driven to distraction by the growing numbers of Kiowa warriors who appear and disappear around him in the desert. When these warriors finally take the frantic man prisoner, Silent Tongue is seen in the distance, observing or possibly even directing their activities. Supernatural forces notwithstanding, Shepard has written the Kiowa women of Silent Tongue as part of a naturalistically pitched action, giving them the appearance of fully developed psychological entities. They are, without question, more subtle, sophisticated, and credible than the comic book portrayals of persons of colour in Shepard’s earlier pieces. And yet, Silent Tongue and her daughters are still defined and represented primarily in terms of their intangible and desirable Otherness. In this respect, Shepard’s particular preoccupation with the Other has changed very little since the writing of Dog in 1965. As does the black man in that play, the cultural Others in Silent Tongue still have the ability to overwhelm Shepard’s white male characters; they still appear to be in harmony with their threatening surroundings—quite literally Indian Country in Silent Tongue’, and, they still demonstrate a certain disdain for their strangely obsequious white companions. Shepard might even be said to have become more outrageous in his portrayal of such Others by openly introducing elements of the supernatural into their actions. But, having acknowledged these potentially problematic similarities to Shepard’s earlier work, there remains an overall redirection of focus in Silent Tongue away from the self-absorbed personal pursuits of Shepard’s white men and toward the repercussions of those pursuits on the marginalized and

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objectified Others.19 Native Americans and African Americans were merely supporting characters in the story of the Young (white) Man’s journey of selfdiscovery in Operation Sidewinder. The same is true of the role played by the Asian in Shaved Splits, the Scotsman on the telephone in Blue Bitch, or the Mayan witchdoctor in La Turista. In Dog, the black man is an outright antagonist, an inescapable threat to the Young Man’s perceptual universe. If Shepard was exploring Indian Country in these plays, then it was his Young Man, among other stand-ins for the author, who was guiding the perceptual exploration. In Silent Tongue there is no Young Man bent upon either exploration or selfdiscovery; and although white frontiersmen dominate the screen time and the dialogue, white male America is no longer Shepard’s protagonist. The white men in Silent Tongue have become brutal antagonists in a story about the objects of their fear and desire, about the other Americans. So while intangible Otherness may still be a quality which characterizes Shepard’s portrayal of persons of colour in Silent Tongue, the playwright demonstrates a new consciousness which clearly distinguishes between the white characters’ hegemonic perceptions of the Kiowa women as desirable, unattainable Others, and the narrative’s (i.e. the author’s) perspective and representation of them, not as objects, not as Others, but as the protagonists of their own story, struggling against outsiders’ misperceptions. By embracing (some might say, “appropriating”) this previously marginal perspective, Shepard exhibits a much heightened sensitivity to contemporary issues of American cultural and gender politics. And yet Shepard once told an interviewer that as a writer he was “not interested in the American social scene at all”, but that he was far more interested in ancient mythic stories, in which he found “the communication of emotions, at the same time ancient and for all

19

In the period of time which has elapsed between my writing of this essay and reading the final copy for publication, the film Silent Tongue has been released. It is a let-down from the screenplay, to say the least; and I must temper my original enthusiasm. Most disturbing is the manner in which the film has been wrested away from the female characters and given over to their male counterparts perhaps by Shepard’s direction but, more obviously, by the casting of highly recognizable stars in the three male leads: Alan Bates as McCree, Richard Harris as Prescott, and River Phoenix as Talbot, all of whom are given premiere billing in the opening credits and whose visages dominate the screen time far more powerfully than was apparent to me in reading the screenplay. The Indian women’s perspective, which I felt so strongly in the screenplay, is far less of a force in the film. The film does deal with the brutal repercussions of the men’s self-absorbed pursuits, as I suggest in the essay; but their self-absorption, on screen, is a much more potent presence than I gave it credit for being when reading the screenplay. By casting widelyknown film stars, and by allowing their well-known faces to dominate the screen time, Shepard has created far more empathy for these unlikable characters than the screenplay alone suggests they are deserving of. The relative silence of the female characters, which film makers have frequently employed as a source of powerful screen presence, is here managed in such a fashion as to reduce the women to mere supporting characters.

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time” (Lippman, 1984:9). However disingenuous Shepard’s blanket denial of social interests may be, his desire to create on a mythic scale reveals a motive for writing about Native Americans of the Old West which proves to be far more fruitful than mere political correctness. Silent Tongue projects a fictional landscape which is closer than anything Shepard has previously created to the primordial realm of ancient myth. The primitive and unconquered terrain, the palpable presence of supernatural forces, the sorceresses, the unburied corpse, the avenging ghost, the feuding parents, the absent sibling, and the conquered people survived by their raped and kidnapped war brides: these are elements more akin to the powerful tragedy of Aeschylus’ Oresteia than to the traditional folklore of the American frontiersman. Shepard has attempted before, in various dramatic incarnations, to create a truly American mythical realm, a realm capable of sustaining events metaphysical in nature and tragic in scope. But the pop-culture mythology of The Tooth of Crime, the ponderous family secrets of Buried Child, and the violent genetic traits of Curse of the Starving Class never offered Shepard the vehicle for stories of tragic intensity that Native American culture, folklore, and history provide. Indian Country, in the end, proves to be not only a valuable pop-culture metaphor for the vague “Otherness” and the “unknown territories” Shepard has felt obliged to explore as a writer; it has also proven an appropriate historical and cultural setting for a truly mythical tale of the people of the American West. Gone is the Young Man. Gone too are the “typical Americans”, our perceptual guides. Sam Shepard is no longer writing as a bewildered tourist in uncharted regions. His new screenplay fully inhabits the kind of powerful and mysterious landscape only viewed from an historical and conceptual distance in so much of his previous work. Works Cited Brustein, Robert. Making Scenes. New York: Limelight Editions, 1984. Chubb, Kenneth and the Editors of Theatre Quarterly. “Metaphors, Mad Dogs and old Time Cowboys: Interview with Sam Shepard”. American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard. Ed. Bonnie Marranca. New York: PAJ Publications, 1981. 187–209 . Conquergood, Dwight. “Performance Theory, Hmong Shamans, and Cultural Politics”. Critical Theory and Performance. Ed. Janelle G.Reinelt and Joseph R.Roach. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1992. 41–64 . Davis, Richard A. “Get Up Out A’ Your Homemade Beds”. Players Magazine Oct.-Dec. 1971:12–19 . DeRose, David J. Sam Shepard. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992. DiGaetani, John Louis. “M.Butterfly: An Interview with David Henry Hwang”. The Drama Review 33:3/T123 (Fall 1989): 141–153 . Fennell, Patrick. “Shepard’s Lost Sheep”. Sam Shepard: A Casebook. Ed. Kimball King. New York: Garland Publishing, 1989. 3–20 .

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hooks, bell. “Eating the Other”. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992. 21–39 . Hwang, David Henry. “Islands in the Mainstream”. American Theatre Oct. 1991:76–8, 154 . Lippman, Amy. “Rhythm and Truths: An Interview with Sam Shepard”. American Theatre April 1984:9–13, 40–41 . Moy, James. “David Henry Hwang’s M.Butterfly and Philip Kan Gotanda’s Yankee Dawg You Die: Repositioning Chinese American Marginality on the American Stage”. Critical Theory and Performance. Ed. Janelle G.Reinelt and Joseph R.Roach. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1992. 79–87 . Rosaldo, Renato. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon, 1989. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Schechner, Richard. “An Intercultural Primer”. American Theatre Oct. 1991:28–31, 135–6 . Shepard, Sam. Fool for Love and Other Plays. New York: Bantam Books, 1984. — Hawk Moon. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1981a. — Operation Sidewinder. Esquire May 1969:152, 160, 210–34 . — Seven Plays. New York: Bantam Books, 1981b. — Silent Tongue. States of Shock, Far North, Silent Tongue. NewYork: Vintage, 1993. — The Unseen Hand and Other Plays. New York: Urizen Books, 1972. New York: Bantam Books, 1986. Taussig, Michael. Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study In Terror and Healing. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1987. Torgovnick, Marianna. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1990. Waters, Frank. Book of the Hopi. New York: Viking Press, 1963. Wilcox, Leonard. “The Desert and the City: Operation Sidewinder and Shepard’s Postmodern Allegory”. Rereading Shepard: Contemporary Critical Essays on the Plays of Sam Shepard. Ed. Leonard Wilcox. New York: St. Martin’s Press; London: Macmillan, 1993, 42–57 .

Hidden in Plain Sight: 25 Notes on Shepard’s Stage Silence and Screen Presence, 1984–1993 Don Shewey

This paper offers a descriptive overview of Shepard’s work in theatre and film during the third decade of his career. Highlights include Shewey’s speculation on the Gurdjieffian subtext to A Lie of the Mind (inspired by the playwright’s dedication of the published play to “L.P.”, who is identified as Lord Pentland, the now-deceased leader of the Gurdjieff movement in America). Also discussed are the mystical/Jungian aspects of gender conflict in the plays Fool for Love and A Lie of the Mind and the films Far North and Silent Tongue. Surveying the body of Shepard’s film work as actor and director, Shewey frankly inspects Shepard’s physical body and catalogues favourite images from his plays that figure prominently in the films, especially trucks, detectives, Native American culture, and horses. KEY WORDS: Body (of Shepard), Film roles (choice of), Gurdjieff, Horses, Productivity of Shepard (reduced).

Dedicated to Liberace, who would have been 76 on March 29, 1993 O shadow, O mother, O stronger than me, you are the soul’s self-same dichotomy… O power, O lover, O deep mystery, you are desiré’s impossibility. In the true arms, loved and lover wonder, “Who is holding you? Whose

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is the third arm under?” Yea, though he walk, he falters. Yea, though he run, he falls back in the true arms of love. (Lee Breuer, The Warrior Ant) Sam Shepard turned 50 years old November 1993, at the end of his third decade as a playwright. In his first decade as a playwright, Shepard wrote 25 plays that were produced onstage. At the beginning of that decade—the year was 1964—he was a busboy in a Greenwich Village jazz club who had only recently dropped the name his family had given him, Steve Rogers. By the end of that first decade of his career, he was already internationally renowned as the most important American playwright of his generation. He had won numerous awards, spent three years working in the London theatre, published a book of prose poems, and written the screenplay for Michelangelo Antonioni’s film, Zabriskie Point. In other words, it was a busy decade. At the end of the second decade of his career, Shepard had completed another 16 plays that had been professionally produced and contributed texts to four theatre pieces by other artists. He had published a second volume of poetry and prose. He had also launched a second career as a film actor and had six films to his credit, including The Right Stuff, for which he received an Academy Award nomination. And he had written the screenplay for another European filmmaker’s first American film, Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Another busy decade. In his third decade as a writer-from 1984 to 1993-Shepard has completed three new works for the stage. During that period he has also written and directed two films and acted in nine others. All in all, a relatively quiet time for a writer formerly renowned for his prolific output. Dividing an artist’s career into decades may be an arbitrary, factitious, and unnecessarily journalistic task. Nonetheless, my approach to Sam Shepard has always been primarily journalistic and biographical, and so it is my intention to address this third decade of Shepard’s career and the questions it raises. The most obvious question is “Why has Shepard written so little in the last ten years?” There may be perfectly logical, practical explanations for the reduced quantity of Shepard’s writings during this period. For one thing, writing a play and making a film are not necessarily comparable time commitments. It is possible to write a play in as little as a week or even a day, given enough inspiration and/ or amphetamines. Most films take approximately 13 weeks to shoot, and that is not counting writing the script, raising the money, editing the film, and

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marketing it. Then, too, Shepard and his sweetheart Jessica Lange have had two children in the last decade, and perhaps the fertility of his writing has gone into parenting. On the other hand, there may well be more metaphysical explanations for his writing less. After twenty years of extraordinary productivity, Shepard could be coming up against the inevitable existential question of “What more is there to say?” Only Shepard himself could give definitive explanations for these inquiries, and as usual he is not talking. I have never met the man, and I do not pretend to speak for him. And though I confess to being somewhat literal-minded and seeking concrete answers to questions, as journalists do, I am less interested in explanation than in imagination. Why has Shepard written so little in the last ten years? What does his writing tell us about his life, and vice versa? What is the relationship between his writing for the stage and his writing for the screen? How does his choice of film roles continue, and depart from, his concerns as a writer? In the tradition of that pioneering cowboy of postmodern criticism, Roland Barthes, I would like to imagine, for the purposes of this paper, that all of Shepard’s work- as playwright, screenwriter, filmmaker, and actor—constitutes a text which can be read. So I offer my own personal, necessarily cursory notes on reading this text. The Stage Plays 1. Three plays in ten years, two of them small, one self-consciously big. 2. An angel speaks of being put on earth with a mission. The mission seems to have been a failure. The angel entertains the possibility that there are other good reasons for being on earth—music, fucking, the delicious yearning for God-but mostly he considers birth a mistake. “Take me back”, he begs, growls, demands. The War In Heaven, subtitled “Angel’s Monologue”, is a brief poem for the theatre that Shepard created in collaboration with Joseph Chaikin. They first worked on it together in the spring of 1984 at the American Repertory Theater in Boston. Shortly afterwards, Chaikin had a stroke that severely impaired his speaking. In the fall of 1984, it was taped for radio broadcast, with Chaikin speaking and Shepard playing music. Years later, Chaikin performed the play on stage, after he and Shepard had refined the text further to something almost skeletal. Like Chaikin himself, the speaker in the play perches between life and death. Almost out the door. Beautiful, bitter, and Beckett-like, the language is close to prayer. 3. A young man in a wheelchair keeps pulling up his shirt to show off a ghastly war wound and to complain, “My thing hangs like dead meat!” His companion, a crypto-fascist military man, smashes banana splits in half. A waitress struggles to carry cups of coffee across the stage without spilling them. An elderly man dressed in white, waiting with his white wife to be served their clam chowder, masturbates underneath his dinner napkin. Two drummers create an ominous racket behind a scrim. States of Shock is the kind of play Shepard

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used to toss off in the late ′60s, full of repetitious dialogue, raw images, food fights, and other juvenile comic gestures. Clearly written very fast, the play seems to be Shepard’s response to the Persian Gulf war. In the Shepard canon, it is almost completely negligible. The most admirable thing about States of Shock is that Shepard chose to do it at all: to confound critical expectations, to ignore his reputation, to work fast and messy as if he were a young punk doing midnight shows at La Mama. It was in some ways the perfect-that is to say, perfectly perverse—follow-up to a long, laboriously worked-out play like A Lie of the Mind. 4. When A Lie of the Mind premiered in the fall of 1985, it appeared to encapsulate the previous four of Shepard’s major plays, which themselves were an imaginative reflection of his own life story. Curse of the Starving Class takes place on an avocado ranch in Southern California and portrays a family— alcoholic father, coping mother, brooding teenage son, tomboy daughter— tearing itself apart from the inside, not unlike the real family of Shepard’s adolescence. Similar drunken-daddy and sensitive-son characters appear in Buried Child. Visiting his grandparents in rural Illinois, young Vince unexpectedly encounters his derelict father and uncovers some family secrets. True West pits a clean-cut, aspiring Hollywood screenwriter against his brother, a good-fornothing drifter said to resemble his father. And Fool for Love features the last blowout between a movie stuntman and his childhood sweetheart, who is also his half-sister. Though it is never explicitly stated, the central characters in these plays could be said to represent Shepard at various stages of his life—withdrawn teenager, estranged son, struggling writer, straying lover. In each case, Shepard subsumed the autobiographical elements to a deeper philosophical investigation. The family plays explored heredity as destiny, while True West and Fool for Love examined what Shepard has called “double nature”, the ongoing clash of good and bad, male and female in a single individual. A Lie of the Mind picks up almost exactly where Fool for Love left off. On the phone with his brother Frankie, Jake confesses that he has just had a brutal argument with his wife, Beth, and he has beaten her to death. It turns out that Beth is not dead, though she has suffered severe brain damage. Still, Jake experiences the catastrophe as a kind of death and returns to his family to mourn. While enduring the doting concern of his mother and tomboy sister, he contemplates the demons he inherited from his father, recently run over by a truck during a drinking spree. Meanwhile, Frankie follows Beth to her family’s house to determine the exact nature of her injuries and winds up winning her heart. Anyone well-versed in Shepard’s work could recognize in A Lie of the Mind relationships from other plays (the brothers in True West, the lovers in Fool for Love—all of whom have counterparts in the film Paris, Texas). The play also contains echoes of the playwright’s personal history: the break-up of his 14-year marriage when he left his wife, O-Lan, for Jessica Lange; his father’s death in an auto accident; Chaikin’s debilitating stroke. Shepard could be and was accused

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of merely recycling familiar obsessions and autobiographical fragments to the point of self-parody. But A Lie of the Mind tells a different story. It is a meditation on loss and the tricks it plays on the human psyche, making a grieving survivor feel responsible for a loved one’s death or turning emotional crimes into physical ones. And the sense of loss or finality seems to extend to Shepard’s work as a writer. It is as if he intentionally conjures elements from earlier plays to bid them farewell. A Lie of the Mind so boldly announced itself as a career summary of sorts that one wondered where Shepard could possibly go next. 5. In retrospect it is possible to analyse A Lie of the Mind from perspectives other than the autobiographical. Two threads from A Lie of the Mind continue in Shepard’s films, Far North and Silent Tongue. One is a technical development, the technique of sustaining parallel narratives within one piece of work. And the other is an increasing investment in examining the female psyche. Much of Shepard’s earlier work consumed itself with masculine mythology and identity. The conflicts almost always boiled down to a stand-off between two men, often clearly signifying an inner conflict between the civilized man and the wild man. Beginning with Fool for Love, though, the dramatic warfare shifted to men and women. I fantasized that the demise of his marriage inspired Shepard’s new interest in gender conflict, that it made him examine why men mistreat women. I imagined that Shepard felt guilty about abandoning one woman for another and sought to dramatize his emotional turmoil. Perhaps that is true, but it is just as possible that Fool for Love and A Lie of the Mind represent just as much of an inner conflict as, say, True West, and that the abused women he is writing about are part of his own psyche. As he told Carol Rosen in an interview published in the Village Voice, “the female force in nature…became more and more interesting to me because of how that female thing relates to being a man. You know, in yourself, that the female part of one’s self as a man is, for the most part, battered and beaten up and kicked to shit just like some women in relationships. That men themselves batter their own female part to their own detriment. And it became interesting from that angle—as a man, what is it like to embrace the female part of yourself that you historically damaged for one reason or another?” (1992:36)

1 That Shepard attended Lord Pentland’s funeral in February of 1984 came from personal communication with LuAnn Walther, Shepard’s book editor. (The New York Times ran an obituary of Lord Pentland, whose given name was Henry John Sinclair, on 17 February 1984.) Joseph Chaikin confirmed that A Lie of the Mind was dedicated to Lord Pentland. In several important interviews, Shepard has indicated the friendship and influence of Peter Brook, a well-known Gurdjieffian who made a film based on Gurdjieffs book Meetings with Remarkable Men. I assume that Shepard met Brook through Gurdjieff circles. In letters I read among Shepard’s papers at Boston University’s Mugar Library, there were a few scattered references to being “in the work”, an expression that students of Gurdjieff use to characterize their relationship to the late thinker/teacher.

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6. The published text of A Lie of the Mind carries a dedication “to the memory of L.P”. Who is L.P.? Two events that heavily influenced the writing of A Lie of the Mind were his father’s death in March, 1984, and Chaikin’s stroke in April that same year. Around the same time, Shepard attended the funeral of Lord Pentland, the leader of the Gurdjieff movement in the United States.1 Shepard has long been involved with the Gurdjieff work but, like most Gurdjieffians, has never spoken about it publicly. It is my speculation that the wall of secrecy that successfully shields the Gurdjieff work from any but the most committed students has contributed to Shepard’s steadfastness in refusing to seek publicity and maintaining a personal life that is private. It is hard to say what influence Gurdjieffs esoteric teachings have had on Shepard’s work, because they cannot be reduced to doctrine or dogma. (One of his disciples, Claudio Naranjo, has noted that Gurdjieff “took it upon himself to show the Western world that mankind is asleep, that there are higher levels of being, and that there are somewhere people who know” [Speeth, 1976:11].) But dedicating A Lie of the Mind to the memory of Lord Pentland invites a reading of the play that has little to do with Shepard’s biography. What if the play is much more dreamlike than it appears on the surface? What if the various characters represent aspects of the same psyche? What if Beth’s recovery from her brutalization at the hands of Jake and her awakening to a loving kinship with Frankie holds a mystical or spiritual meaning for Shepard? The Film Roles 7. Shepard’s acting career came about so unexpectedly, even accidentally, that he seems content to treat it as a running joke. In movie after movie, whether he is a farmer or a doctor or a drifter or a bad cop, he generally plays some version of what Hollywood considers a Sam Shepard character. And he does not seem to mind. Put him in a pickup truck, surround him with animals, and call him Spud or Doc or Cooch, and he is happy. The most curious thing about the movies Shepard has been in is that he does not seem to care if they are any good or not, as long as they allow him to inhabit some aspect of his favourite masculine iconography. More often than not, his motivation for appearing in a film seems to have more to do with loyalty to friends or colleagues than anything the movie wants to say. 8. Fool for Love is the first Shepard play to be filmed, and the first time he played one of his own characters in a movie. Ironically, it is the most misguided film project he has ever done. Originally, the plan was for Shepard and Jessica Lange to star in the film, along with Randy Quaid (who appeared in True West onstage in New York) and Harry Dean Stanton (who played the lead in Paris, Texas)—in other words, a true “family affair”. But family got in the way: Lange became pregnant and wisely chose not to do the movie. Everything about it is a mistake. Robert Altman has made some great movies, but this is one of his most perverse. The director took a play set in a tiny motel room made claustrophobic

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with erotic tension and spread it out over the desert sky. To give just one example of wrongheaded direction, instead of practising his rope tricks on the bedpost, Altman has Shepard lasso a garbage can and drag it around the parking lot. Shepard turns out to be all wrong as Eddie. Pale, scrawny, beady-eyed, he acts more like a mangy sidekick than the irresistible leading man. The erotic presence he commands in other films disappears when he has to say more than a few words. Lange was replaced with Kim Basinger, who is equally blonde but virtually talent-free. Onstage the figure of the Old Man occupied his own mysterious theatrical space; in the film, Harry Dean Stanton simply tiptoes around the motel, eavesdropping and looking embarrassed. The pacing of the scenes is strangely slow and slack, as if to leave room for the numerous countryand-western songs written for the film by Shepard’s sister, Sandy Rogers. Perhaps the only consolation for Shepard was that he got to drive a pickup and ride a horse. 9. In Bruce Beresford’s film of the Beth Henley play, Crimes of the Heart, about a day in the life of three Mississippi sisters, Shepard plays the small part of Doc Porter, a married man who fools around with wayward sister Meg, played by Jessica Lange. It is not an especially good movie. Shepard’s character wears glasses and walks with a limp (something about an accident during Hurricane Cordelia). You notice that Shepard has really long legs and a small high butt. You also notice that Lange is a little bit chubby, having recently given birth to her and Shepard’s first child, a daughter named Hannah. Shepard and Lange definitely appear to be enjoying themselves in the scene where they take a ride in the country to look at the moon. They dance in a field as the sun comes up while the radio plays Willie Nelson singing “Don’t Fence Me In”, and they get back to town falling down drunk. Obviously, Shepard wanted to do the movie to work with Jessica Lange, but as a bonus he also got to drive a pickup. And perhaps he also enjoyed the dark Southern humor of Beth Henley’s play, which manages to get a big laugh with the line “Granddaddy’s in a coma”. 10. Baby Boom is a completely idiotic screwball comedy. Shepard shows up in the last half hour playing a veterinarian named Dr. Cooper, whose clients include a horse, a pig, a dog, and Diane Keaton. He is the first thing Keaton sees after she comes out of a faint. Shepard has very little to do except stand around with his hands in his pockets, listening politely and trying to keep a straight face. Why would he agree to be in such a silly movie? Probably because Diane Keaton, who was in Crimes of the Heart, asked him to. Maybe he got a kick out of playing a veterinarian, since he had worked for a vet the summer he got out of high school and briefly entertained the idea of becoming one himself. But also he might have considered the movie fitting, because he and Jessica Lange were having their own baby boom; at the time, Lange was pregnant with their second child, Sam Jr. 11. In Herbert Ross’s film of Robert Harling’s stage comedy Steel Magnolias, Shepard has a small part as Spud Jones, the husband of a hairdresser named Truvy, played by Dolly Parton. They have a son named Louie who drives a

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motorcycle and wears an earring. Onstage Steel Magnolias featured an all-female cast; the male characters added for the film are completely overwhelmed by the female stars. It is amusing to see Sam Shepard in this predominantly female environment. The film capitalizes on the comic, sexy pairing of Parton and Shepard. He first appears when Truvy yells, “Spud, get in here and finish colouring these Easter eggs”. His mock-sullen reply: “I live to serve”. In another scene, Truvy brandishes a bottle of champagne she has bought to celebrate Spud’s return from a seven-day stretch working on an offshore oil rig. “When he gets home, all he wants to do is sleep”, she says, “but I plan to keep him up as long as I can”. Besides giving him the opportunity to drive a pickup and play Dolly Parton’s husband, Steel Magnolias probably also appealed to Shepard’s taste in Southern humor. In fact, one line from the play could serve as Shepard’s artistic credo: “An ounce of pretension is worth a pound of manure”. 12. Richard Ford, the American author who practises what the British like to call “dirty realism”, writes stories about the kind of people who show up in Sam Shepard’s plays. So it makes sense that Shepard would be cast in Bright Angel, Martin Fields’s film based on Ford’s Rock Springs. The movie is a rather good coming-of-age story about the adventures that allow a teen-ager named George to escape a prairie town in Montana. Shepard plays his father, Jack, who struggles without much luck to support his household. He and his son do some illegal duck hunting to raise cash, and he teases his son about his sex life. But then he stands by helplessly as his wife, played by Valerie Perrine, walks out on him with her new boyfriend Woody. Shepard does have an angry scene where he threatens to shoot the boyfriend, who is played by Will Patton, an actor who has played starring roles in Fool for Love and A Lie of the Mind onstage. After his wife leaves, Shepard cries on his son’s shoulder. His crying is awkward and embarrassing to watch, which is probably appropriate for the character. Shepard disappears after the first half hour, when George takes to the road in a dusty pickup. 13. Shepard ended his streak of driving-a-pickup movies with Defense less in which he plays a gum-chewing gumshoe named Detective Beutel who smokes Lucky Strikes and says things like “I’m a cop, my job is to find out what happened” and “Just look for the truth, that’s all”. It is hard to understand why Shepard would bother to take a role in a forgettable cop thriller like this, but again he probably did it out of loyalty to another leading lady. This time it was Barbara Hershey, who made a sexy and soulful partner playing Shepard’s horseriding wife in The Right Stuff. 14. Voyager, Volker Schlőndorff’s adaptation of the Max Frisch novel Homo Faber, is Shepard’s first “star vehicle”, the first time his performance has to carry the movie. From beginning to end, it is several cuts above all the Hollywood movies he has made since The Right Stuff. Shepard plays Walter Faber, a globe-trotting engineer who proudly proclaims his strictly scientific view of the world. “I don’t read fiction”, he declares, “and I don’t dream”. But in the course of two months, between April and June of 1957, he encounters a chain of

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coincidences that shake him up and cause him to recognize that there is another level of reality beyond the material. The film was an international production, shot in France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the United States, and Mexico, and the script was co-written by Schlondőrff and Rudi Wurlitzer, an American hipster who has travelled through many of the same worlds of offbeat writers and musicians that Shepard has. As an inveterate Shepard watcher, I could not help spying the numerous connections between Voyager and Shepard’s own work and life. The plane crash in the desert somewhere in Mexico is a perfect Shepard nightmare; it was a turbulent flight back to New York from Oaxaca in 1965 that made Shepard swear off travelling by airplane.2 While stranded in the desert, Shepard’s character occupies himself by typing letters on his manual typewriter and filming the wreckage with his portable movie camera. Wherever he goes, the character is surrounded by willing women. He makes out with the stewardess on the plane. Home in New York, his girlfriend Ivy has a romantic dinner waiting for him. He pulls her fully dressed into the shower. We see more of Shepard’s body than usual in this film. He has rather skinny legs and no muscles to speak of in his upper arms. On board an ocean liner to Europe, he meets a beautiful young French girl named Elisabeth, whom he calls Sabeth, and the night before they land he impulsively proposes marriage to her. Their first kiss at the ship’s railing by moonlight has all the steamy eroticism missing from Shepard’s scenes with Kim Basinger in Fool for Love. And when Faber learns, after consummating his relationship with Sabeth in Avignon, that she is the offspring of a romance with his college sweetheart in Zűrich, this again conjures the unconsciously incestuous relationship at the heart of Fool for Love. And Sabeth’s mother is named Hanna, which is also the name of Shepard’s daughter with Jessica Lange. Voyager is an unusually classy entry among Shepard’s film acting credits, and it is not hard to see why he chose to accept the job. It had a good director, good sex scenes, and a good script. My fantasy is that Shepard took a special interest in Faber’s engineering jargon, as when he gives Sabeth a tour of the ship’s machinery and explains to her “what a kilowatt is, what hydraulics is, what an ampere is…problems of torsion, index of friction, fatigue of the steel through vibration, and so on”. 15. Michael Apted’s Thunderheart opens with a brief visual image of Native Americans calling the directions at the beginning of a prayer ceremony. That alone would probably be enough to intrigue Sam Shepard, who has long been interested in Native American lore and sacred rituals. Perversely, in the film Shepard plays an enemy of the Native people, a hardass FBI agent investigating a murder on an Indian reservation that he and some other crooked cops

2

The story about Shepard’s aversion to airplane travel after a scary flight to New York from Mexico, which appeared in my biography of Shepard, was told to me by Joyce Aaron, Shepard’s girlfriend at the time who accompanied him on the trip.

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apparently set up to silence political opposition to uranium mining on sacred Indian ground. Shepard’s character, Frank Coutelle, is nicknamed Cooch. He leads an FBI raid on a sweat lodge ceremony, and in the course of arresting a suspect, Cooch gets bit by a badger. Throughout the film, Shepard looks tired and smokes a lot of cigarettes. One of the anti-Indian yahoos that Cooch collaborates with is played by Fred Ward, who also played one of the astronauts in The Right Stuff. Shepard gives an especially good performance in Thunderheart, playing a man whose belief in realpolitik leads him to make choices with disastrous moral consequences. In admirably Brechtian fashion, Cooch’s bad example teaches a good lesson to the film’s main character, a halfbreed FBI agent played by Val Kilmer, who learns to respect his own Native heritage. The movie ends with a somewhat ludicrous car chase in the desert that suggests a Native American Thelma and Louise. But overall it is a pretty good film, and the fact that it was filmed in the Badlands of South Dakota was probably a plus for Shepard. 16. As I write, Shepard has just gone to New Orleans to play a role in Alan Pakula’s film version of John Grisham’s best-selling novel The Pelican Brief, in which Julia Roberts (who appeared with Shepard in Steel Magnolias) plays a woman law student who investigates the murder of two Supreme Court justices.3 17. A film we will never see is the version of Woody Allen’s September that Shepard acted in (Lax, 1991). After the photography was completed, Allen decided he was unhappy with the script and wanted to rewrite and reshoot a number of scenes. By that time, Shepard was no longer available, so he was replaced by Sam Waterston in the final version of the film. The idea of Sam Shepard in a Woody Allen film is intriguing and incongruous. September portrayed a group of artists and professionals renting a house together in Vermont. In some ways, it pays homage to Chekhov’s play The Seagull. Shepard’s character was a writer who corresponds to Trigorin in the Chekhov play. 18. Shepard himself is currently said to be at work on a novel. He also published another book of prose writings similar to Motel Chronicles, called Cruising Paradise (working title, Slave of the Camera). An excerpt from this book appeared in the Spring 1991 issue of Antaeus, the literary journal founded by Paul Bowles (Halprin, 1991). This excerpt consists ostensibly of three entries from a journal Shepard kept during the shooting of The Right Stuff. These journal entries suggest that Shepard has been faithfully collecting good yarns from his adventures in film-making. The most amusing section of the very brief excerpt in Antaeus transcribes a conversation Shepard has with a stranger in the

3

Shepard subsequently co-starred with Susan Sarandon in Safe Passage, a 1994 film produced by Gale Anne Hurd, written by Deena Goldstone, and directed by Robert Allen Ackerman, who is primarily known as a New York-based stage director. Also in the cast was Marcia Gay Harden, who subsequently appeared onstage in the first production of Shepard’s Simpatico, directed by the playwright, at the New York Shakespeare Festival in December, 1994.

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next toilet stall in a truck stop bathroom in El Paso. While chatting about cowboy boots, the population of New Mexico, and the horrors of California, the unseen trucker keeps asking Shepard, “You sure yer not a faggot?” To which Shepard finally replies, “Well, nobody’s ever sure, are they?” The Films 19. In Shepard’s first film as writer and director, Jessica Lange plays a woman who returns to her parents’ house in Minnesota from New York after her father had an accident with a runaway horse. The extremely slim plot centers on the promise Lange’s father extracts from her to avenge him by shooting his horse. Essentially the film is a comedy that jokes cartoonishly about strong women and ineffectual men, at times pining nostalgically for a time when men ran the world and all women had to do was make them a hearty breakfast. The somewhat stagy realism and talkiness of the screenplay occasionally gets interrupted with brief flashes of horses running, sometimes ridden by women wearing tribal makeup. Visually, you could say that Far North is a poem about blonde women and wild horses. 20. In Shepard’s iconography, he associates his central male character geographically with the South and the West, which correlates with his own family background, and his central female character with the North and the East, which correlates with Jessica Lange’s background (she is from Minnesota). Thematically, you could say that Shepard broke A Lie of the Mind in half and further develops the women’s side of the story in Far North. The family constellation of Beth-Meg-Baylor from A Lie of the Mind is represented in Far North by Jessica Lange, Ann Wedgeworth (who played the same ditsy mother onstage in A Lie of the Mind), and Charles Durning (who played opposite Lange in the movie Tootsie and opposite Shepard in Woody Allen’s September). Durning plays the kind of blustery, drunken father who appears throughout Shepard’s work. And the film ends, as so many Shepard pieces do, with a man heading out into the unknown all by himself. But the recurring refrain “Where are all the men?” suggests that even in this strong female territory, there is a longing for the other half of the equation. 21. The men’s side of the story from A Lie of the Mind continues indirectly in Shepard’s second film, Silent Tongue. The setting is New Mexico in 1873, a Wild West medicine show. This is territory dominated by men and horses, violence and trickery, ancestral crimes and earth wisdom. The film tells two parallel stories about fathers and sons. The only women who figure in the movie are a pair of half-breed sisters, one living and one ghost, who constitute the currency in a complicated emotional economic exchange between the male characters. Their mother also appears briefly and symbolically—she is the title character, an Indian woman who had her tongue cut out after being raped by a white man. When one sister dies in childbirth, her young white husband goes crazy with grief and refuses to give her body proper burial. His shocked father

82 DON SHEWEY

returns to the man who sold him the girl—Eamon McCree, master of the bogus “Indian Medicine Show”—and tries to buy her sister, to assuage his son’s grief. But the second sister is one of the stars of the medicine show, and besides, McCree’s own son is in love with her. It is not that women are merely something to be bought and sold. In the language of the film, the female is ultimately the only thing that has value to the men. 22. Silent Tongue overflows with motifs from other works of Shepard’s: Irish cowboys, half-breed Indians, damaged women, Native ritual, old-time country music, clowns, and sideshows. The dualities of good/bad, male/female that Shepard has long struggled with have blossomed into parallel stories that he tracks with Shakespearean symmetry. Even the name Eamon (an Irish variation on Edmund) is one that Shepard has long been attached to. It turns up in the manuscripts of several unfinished plays. There was a time when Shepard even considered writing under the pseudonym “Eamon Reese”.4 Conclusion/No Conclusion 23. In the crazy turns that Shepard’s life and work have taken, there is an irony that sits up and begs to be acknowledged. Though he keeps himself hidden awayor what passes as “hidden away” in media-addicted, celebrity-obsessed American culture—his face and voice and skinny legs and crooked teeth are available for inspection any day of the week at your nearest video rental outlet. He does want to be seen and to be known. Despite his refusal to do a lot of interviews or personal publicity, it is clear that Shepard shows himself in many ways and guises throughout his work. His work as a playwright, as a film actor, and as a filmmaker in the last decade make it clear that he has a lot of tolerance for imperfection and respect for artistic accidents. He is not afraid to be personal, stubborn, idiosyncratic, and single-minded. He does not require variety for the sake of variety. He does not mind digging in the same vein, turning up variations on the same material. He knows that digging in the same spot is the only way to achieve depth. 24. Through Shepard’s writing over the last decade runs a thread of woundedness and a search for healing, especially for healing the split between the man and the woman. The women seeking the men in Far North and the men in Silent Tongue longing for the women even beyond death—they are responding to more than just a biological mating call. Is this not what Jung would call the

4

The information about Shepard’s entertaining the pseudonym “Eamon Reese”, which I mentioned in my biography of Shepard, came from examining notebooks among his papers at the Mugar Memorial Library. For instance, Eamon McCree was the name of one of the sons in Last American Gas Station (1974), an unfinished early verion of Buried Child. And from October to December of 1978, he worked on a play—or possibly a screenplay—called Rage of Unknown Origin (alternate title: Drifter), for which he considered using the pseudonym Eamon Reese.

HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT 83

appearance of the anima or animus, a figure of the opposite gender who emerges from the depths of dreams and imagination, calling us toward the mysteries of the soul? Looking in the mirror of the strange, powerful women—mournful mothers, tribal warriors, avenging ghosts—I make an association with the angel in The War in Heaven: “I’m hovering above myself looking for a way back in… Take me back” (Shepard, 1987). 25. If the films Far North and Silent Tongue tell us anything about what Shepard has been up to in the last ten years, they probably most accurately represent his obsession with horses, which is as ardent and mysterious as that of any 12-year-old girl’s. In Native American mythology, the horse is a symbol of power. It is associated also with stealing and with abuse of power. And historically it is considered the oldest animal medicine. It is said that when humans first rode on horseback, it altered the human conception of self beyond what was previously thought possible. The horse also represents the spirit that enables shamans to fly to heaven (Sams & Carson, 1988). In Yoruba culture, a person through whom spirits and ancestors speak is known as a caballo, a horse, making it clearly understood who is riding and who is being ridden.5 Shepard has been crazy about horses since he worked as a hot walker at the Santa Anita Race Track as a teen-ager. He has raised them on his ranches in California, New Mexico, and Virginia. He plays polo on them. He has written about them in Geography of a Horse Dreamer. He has ridden them in movies whenever he can: in Days of Heaven, The Right Stuff, Country, Fool for Love. He told Carol Rosen his favourite reading these days is the Thoroughbred Times. His former girlfriend Patti Smith titled her first album Horses (1975), and maybe she was talking about Shepard in “Gloria” when she wrote about “Horses, horses, horses, horses Comin’ in from all directions White, shining, silver studs with their nose in flames He saw horses, horses, horses, horses, Horses, horses, horses, horses… Do you know how to pony?”

Works Cited Baby Boom. Dir. Charles Shyer. Prod. Nancy Meyers. Screenplay by Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer. MGM/UA Pictures, 1987.

5 The Yoruba lore about horses came from personal communication with Hal Carter, a Philadelphia-based Yoruban priest.

84 DON SHEWEY

Breuer, Lee. Sister Suzie Cinema: The Collected Poems and Performances, 1976–1986. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1986. Bright Angel. Dir. Martin Fields. Screenplay by Richard Ford. Hemdale Pictures, 1990. Crimes of the Heart. Dir. Bruce Beresford. Prod. Freddie Fields. Screenplay by Beth Henley. DEG Pictures, 1986. Defenseless. Dir. Martin Campbell. Prod. Taylory Hackford and Stuart Benjamin. Screenplay by James Hicks. New Visions Pictures, 1991. Far North. Dir. Sam Shepard. Prod. Carolyn Pfeiffer and Malcolm Harding. Screenplay by Sam Shepard. Alive Films/Nelson Entertainment/Circle JS Productions, 1988. Fool for Love. Dir. Robert Altman. Prod. Golan and Globus. Screenplay by Sam Shepard. Cannon Pictures, 1985. Halprin, Daniel, ed. Plays in One Act. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1991. Lax, Eric. Woody Allen. New York: Knopf, 1991. The Pelican Brief. Dir. Alan J.Pakula. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1993. Rosen, Carol. “Silent Tongues: Sam Shepard’s Exploration of Emotional Territory”. Village Voice. 4 Aug. 1992:32–41 . Sams, Jamie and David Carson. Medicine Cards. Santa Fe: Bear & Co., 1988. Shepard, Sam. Cruising Paradise. New York: Kuopf, 1996. A Lie of the Mind and The War in Heaven. New York: New American Library, 1987. — Excerpts from Slave of the Camera. Plays in One Act. Ed. Daniel Halprin. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1991. — States of Shock, Far North, and Silent Tongue. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Silent Tongue. Dir. Sam Shepard. Prod. Caroline Pfeiffer. Screenplay by Sam Shepard. Studio Canal +/ Belbo/Alive Productions, 1992. Speeth, Kathleen Riordan. The Gurdjieff Work. New York: Pocket Books, 1976. Steel Magnolias. Dir. Herbert Ross. Prod. Ray Stark. Screenplay by Robert Harling. TriStar Pictures, 1989. Thunderheart. Dir. Michael Apted. Prod. John Fusco, Robert DeNiro, and Jane Rosenthal. Screenplay by John Fusco. TriStar Pictures, 1992. Voyager. Dir. Volker Schlöndorff. Prod. Castle Hill. Screenplay by Volker Schlöndorff and Rudi Wurlitzer, based on the novel Homo Faber by Max Frisch. Bioskop/Argos/ Hellas Pictures, 1991.

Notes on Contributors

Enoch Brater is Professor of English and Theatre at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His published works include The Drama in the Text: Beckett’s Late Fiction, Beyond Minimalism: Beckett’s Late Style in the Theater, Why Beckett, as well as the edited volumes Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights, Beckett at 80/Beckett in Context, Around the Absurd: Essays on Modern and Postmodern Drama (co-edited by Ruby Cohn), Approaches to Teaching Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”, and The Critical Gamut: Notes for a Post-Beckettian Stage. Johan Callens is the author of Double Binds: Existentialist Inspiration and Generic Experimentation in the Early Work of Jack Richardson (Rodopi, 1993) and From Middleton and Rowley’s “Changeling” to Sam Shepard’s “Bodyguard”: A Contemporary Appropriation of a Renaissance Drama (Edwin Mellen, 1997). Essays of his have appeared among others in Modern Drama, American Studies/Amerikastudien, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Pynchon Notes, and Post-War Literatures in English. A Lexicon of Contemporary Authors. Currently he is a postdoctoral fellow of the Fund for Scientific Research (Flanders) and Associate Professor of English at the Free University of Brussels (VUB). David J.DeRose is the author of Sam Shepard (Twayne Publishers, 1992) and a contributor to the collection Rereading Shepard (St. Martin’s Press, 1992). His work has appeared in American Theatre, Theatre Journal, Theater, TDR, and Viet Nam Generation to which he is a Contributing Editor. He holds a Ph.D. in Dramatic Art from the University of California at Berkeley and is the former Director of Yale University’s Theater Studies Program. He is currently Associate Professor of English and Drama at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California. William E.Kleb is Professor Emeritus of Dramatic Art at the University of California (Davis), where he taught courses in theatre history, theory, criticism,

86 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

and playwriting. He has published articles and reviews in Theatre Survey, Theatre History Studies, Performing Arts Journal, and Theatre (for which he has served as contributing editor). His critical bibliography on Sam Shepard appears in American Playwrights Since 1945: A Guide to Scholarship, Criticism, and Performance (Greenwood, 1989). Alfred Nordmann has worked as dramaturg for Hartmut Wickert and other directors in Tübingen, Konstanz, and Hannover. He is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina in Columbia specializing in the History and Philosophy of Science. Carol Rosen is the author of Plays of Impasse (Princeton UP, 1983) and Sam Shepard: A Poetic Rodeo (forthcoming from Macmillan). She has also written for a variety of periodicals, including The Village Voice, Theater Week, The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Modern Drama, The Drama Review, Salmagundi, Performing Arts Journal, Comparative Drama, Theater, and Shakespeare Quarterly. She is now working on studies of modern tragedy and gender. She teaches dramatic theory and criticism at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Don Shewey is a journalist, writer, an editor who has written for The New York Times, The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, Esquire, American Theater, and numerous other publications. He has published three books: the biography Sam Shepard (1985, revised 1997), Caught in the Act: New York Actors Face to Face, a collaboration with photographer Susan Shacter (1986), and Out Front: Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Plays (1988). His 1991 interview with Madonna for the Advocate was syndicated around the world to 19 countries in 11 languages. His 1992 Village Voice cover story, “In Defense of the Men’s Movement”, was republished by Ally Press in its Dragonsmoke Pamplet Series. He has taught theatre at New York University and the Playwrights Horizon Theater School. Hartmut Wickert was an assistant of Claus Peymann and other directors in Stuttgart and Bochum before he became artistic director of the Tübinger Zimmertheater. He served as director in residence at the Stadttheater Konstanz from 1989 to 1993, since then at Staatsschauspiel Hannover. He studied political sciences and literature, graduating with a thesis on Walter Benjamin and Heiner Müller.

Contents of Sam Shepard: Between the Margin and the Centre (1), Volume 8 Part 3

Introduction Johan Callens Blood and Bones Yet Dressed in Poetry: The Drama of Sam Shepard C.W.E.Bigsby Trying to Like Sam Shepard: Or, the Emperor’s New Dungarees Susan Harris Smith Shepard’s Sit-Trag: Salvation Subverted Toby Silverman Zinman Staging “Things”: Realism and the Theatrical Object in Shepard’s Theatre Stanton B.Garner, Jr. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Musician, Writer, Actor Ruby Cohn The Sadomasochist in the Closet David Savran

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Index

Aaron, Joyce, 78 Abjection, iii, 3–4, 9, 11–12, 14–15 Absurd Person Singular, 21 Ackerman, Robert Allen, 80 Action, 3, 56 Actor/actress as characters, 22, 46, 48–49 Shepard as, 76–80 Aeschylus, 68 African-Americans (Shepard’s portrayal of), 52, 55–58, 67 After the Fall, 20 Allen, Woody, 80–81 Altman, Robert, 75 Angel, 73, 82 Angel City, 3–4, 29, 61 Anthropology, 38–40, 44 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 72 Apocalypse Now, 41 Apocalyptic imagery, 61–62, 64–65 Apted, Michael, 79 Asian Americans (Shepard’s portrayal of), 59–60, 67 Astaire, Fred, 50 Ayckbourn, Alan, 21

Benvenuto, Bice, 5, 11–12 Beresford, Bruce, 75 Bigsby, C.W.E., 2 Blakemore, Michael, 20 Blue Bitch, 52, 60, 67 Blue Skies, 50 Body, 3, 5, 12, 22, 28, 41–43, 44, 46, 49 of Shepard, 70, 75, 79, 82 Born on the Fourth of July, 41 Bowles, Paul, 80 Brando, Marlon, 41 Brecht, Bertolt, 79 Breuer, Lee, 70 Bright Angel, 77 Brook, Peter, 76 Brower, Peter, 28–37, 48 Brustein, Robert, 57 Bunyan, Paul, 44, 62 Buried Child, 2, 28, 68, 73, 82 Burns, Catherine, 57 Caldwell, Erskine, 2 Camus, Albert, 20 “Can a 1/2 Ton Fly?”, 60 Canonization, 54 Caputo, Philip, 55 Carmichael, Stokely, 57–58 Carson, David, 83 Carter, Hal, 83 Chaikin, Joseph, 28, 33, 73, 74–76 Chekhov, Anton, 2, 80 Cherry Orchard, The, 2 Chubb, Kenneth, 56 Cima, Gay Gibson, 48 Cixous, Hélène, 25, 28

Baby Boom, 77 Back Bog Beast Bait, 54, 61 Barthelme, Donald, 2 Barthes, Roland, 73 Basinger, Kim, 75, 79 Bates, Alan, 67 Beats, The, 2 Beckett, Samuel, 73 Benjamin, Walter, 44–46

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96 INDEX

Clemen, Wolfgang, 20 Coe, Robert, 2, 7 Cohn, Ruby, 2, 19 Community, 38, 43, 44–48, 49–50 Concrete (non-representational) theatre, 5– 6, 14, 38, 44–46, 48–49, 64 Conquergood, Dwight, 66 Conservatism, 2 Cory, Joya, 3 Country, 83 Coward, Noel, 21 Cowboy Mouth, 3 Cowboys, 55 Cowboys #2, 54, 55 Crimes of the Heart, 75–77 Crohn Schmitt, Natalie, 22 Cruise, Tom, 41 Cruising Paradise (Slave of the Camera), 80 Curse of the Starving Class, iii–15, 28, 29, 68, 73 Dali, Salvador, 28 Davis, Richard, 57 Days of Heaven, 83 Death of a Salesman, 19 Deer Hunter, The, 41 Defenseless, 78 Demastes, William, 2 DeRose, David, 55 Descartes, René, 14 Desert, 58–59, 64, 75, 78–79 Dietrich, Marlène, 62 DiGaetani, John, 59 Dog, 52, 55–56, 58, 67 “Don’t Fence Me In”, 75 Durning, Charles, 81 Dylan, Bob, 2 Eagleton, Terry, 8 Eliot, T.S., 24 Fall, The, 20 Far North, 28–29, 34, 65, 70, 74, 80–83 Father (failed), iii, 8–9, 12–14, 41 Felman, Shoshana, 12

Female characters, 29, 34, 52–54, 57–58, 65–68, 74, 80–82 Feminization, 25, 28–32, 74 Fennell, Patrick, 55 Fields, Martin, 77 Film, 8, 28, 40, 41, 50, 54, 61, 65–69, 70– 72, 73, 76–80 choice of roles, 70, 73 Fitzgerald, Scott, 28 Fool for Love, 16, 20–22, 65, 70, 73–74, 75, 78–79, 83 Ford, Richard, 77 Forte, Jeanie, 28 Fox, Terry Curtis, 2 Fragmentation (alienation), 5–6, 9–11, 14– 15, 16, 20–21, 30, 38–41, 43, 46–48, 52, 55–55, 58, 62–63, 82 Free, Mickey, 62 Freud, Sigmund, 5, 8, 12, 14 Frisch, Max, 78 Garner, Stanton Jr., 22 Gelber, Jack, 44–44, 48 Gender, 13, 29, 68, 70, 74, 82 Geography of a Horse Dreamer, 2 , 83 Geronimo, 62 “Gloria”, 83 Goldstone, Deena, 80 Gotanda, Philip Kan, 59 Graf, Markus, 35–37 Grisham, John, 79 Gurdjieff (Lord Pentland), 70, 76 Gutzwiller, Ditschgi, 48 Haas, Peter, 48 Halprin, Daniel, 80 Harden, Marcia Gay, 80 Harling, Robert, 77 Harris, Richard, 67 Hart, Lynda, 2 Hawk Moon, 60 Hellmuth, Suzanne, 3 Henley, Beth, 75–77 Hershey, Barbara, 78 Holism, iii, 10–14, 38–41, 43, 44–46, 52, 55, 58, 61–63, 67, 82 ungendering, 25, 28–31, 33–34, 82

INDEX 97

Homo Faber, 78 hooks, bell, 52–54, 58, 65 Hopper, Edward, 28 Horses, 34, 70, 80–81, 83 Hospital, 3 How the Other Half Loves, 21 Hurd, Gale Anne, 80 Hwang, David Henry, 56, 59 Illusionism, 5 Imaginary Order, 5–6, 12, 14 Imperialist nostalgia, 52, 58, 61 Improvisation, 3 Inacoma, 3 Indian Country, 52, 55–55, 60, 67–68 James, Jesse, 44 Jung, 70, 82 Jünger, Ernst, 46 Kakutani, Michiko, 28 Kauffmann, Stanley, 2 Keaton, Diane, 77 Keitel, Harvey, 30 Kennedy, Roger, 5, 11–12 Kidd, Captain, 62 Kienholz, Edward, 48 Kilmer, Val, 79 King and I, The, 54 Kleb, William, 3 Kristeva, Julia, iii, 4, 9, 12, 15 Lacan, Jacques, iii, 5, 8, 10–12, 14 Lamb, 4–6, 9, 13 Lange, Hartmut, 36–37, 50 Lange, Jessica, 72, 74, 75–77, 79–81 Language absence/failure of, 25, 28, 33, 44, 49, 58–59, 65–67 female (body), 9, 25, 28–30, 32–33, 75 textual/verbal, iii, 4, 6, 8, 10–11, 20, 25–28, 43, 56, 58 theatrical, see performance Last American Gas Station, 82 La Turista, 28, 52, 60–61, 63–64, 67 Lee, Jonathan Scott, 8 “Left Handed Kachina”, 60

Liberace, 70 Lie of the Mind, The, 16–18, 22–23, 25–34, 65, 70, 73–76, 78, 81 Lippman, Amy, 52, 68 Long Day’s Journey into Night, 18 Macbeth, 22 Mad Dog Blues, The, 62 Madonna, 28 Magritte, René, 28 Malkovich, John, 38 Mamet, David, iii Masculinity, 2, 5, 25–28, 30–31, 34, 43, 49, 51, 74, 75 mockery of, 20, 25, 30–32, 80 M.Butterfly, 59 Meckler, Nancy, 2 Meetings with Remarkable Men, 76 Mihelic, Ursula, 35–36 Miller, Arthur, 2, 16, 19–20, 21 Miss Julie, 20 Monroe, Marylin, 20 Morgan, Robin, 33 Motel Chronicles, 80 Motion, 3–4 Moy, James, 59 Myth, 7–10, 25, 40, 52–55, 59, 61, 68–69 Naranjo, Claudio, 76 Native Americans (Shepard’s portrayal of), 52–55, 60–62, 64–68, 70, 79, 81, 83 Nelson, Willie, 75 Nordmann, Alfred, 40 “Nushi”, 34 Odets, Clifford, 2 O’Neill, Eugene, 2, 16–19, 21 Operation Sidewinder, 52–54, 56, 58–64, 67 Oresteia, 68 Otherness commodification of, 54 cultural, 55–55, 58–59, 65, 67 psychological, 8–9, 12, 16 sexual, 29, 33, 52, 65, 67–68 Pakula, Alan J., 79

98 INDEX

Papp, Joseph, 2 Paris, Texas, 29, 72, 74 Parton, Dolly, 28, 77 Patton, Will, 78 Pelican Brief, The, 80 Performance, 56 analysis, 38, 44 art, iii, 3–4 text (countertext, stage directions), iii, 4–4, 6–7, 9–14, 25–28, 29 Perrine, Valerie, 77 Phoenix, River, 67 Piwek, Rainer, 35–37, 50 Platoon, 41 Play, 41, indeterminacy, 3, 6–7, 8–11, 14, 16– 24, 48, 49–50 with time, 16–24 “Portable War Memorial, A”, 48 Private Lives, 21 Productivity of Shepard (reduced), 70–72 Quaid, Randy, 75 Quinn, Aidan, 30 Rage of Unknown Origin (Drifter), 82 Rauschenberg, Robert, 48 Realism, iii–3, 5, 7–11, 13, 18, 20, 23, 77, 81 naturalism, 2, 19, 54, 67 Realistic detail (absence of), 3, 43 Real Order, iii, 5–8, 11, 13–15 Rease, Eamon, 82 Rebirth (failed), 5, 9, 11, 25, 30–31, 38– 41, 43, 44, 46–48, 49 Red Cross, 4 Rehm, Rush, 2 “Réponse Imprévue, La,” 28 Reynolds, Jock, 3–4 Right Stuff, The, 72, 78–80, 83 Roberts, Julia, 80 Robinson, Marc, 20 Rock Garden, The, 3 Rock Springs, 77 Rogers, Sandy, 75 Rogers, Steve, 72 Rosaldo, Renato, 58

Rosen, Carol, 38, 44, 74, 83 Ross, Herbert, 77 Sad Lament of Pecos Bill, The, 3 Safe Passage, 80 Said, Edward, 52, 59 Sams, Jamie, 83 Sarandon, Susan, 80 Schechner, Richard, 4, 44, 52–54 Schlöndorff, Volker, 78 Schmidt, Hans Werner, 48 Seagull, The, 80 September, 80–81 Shakespeare, William, 22, 82 Shaman, 11, 33, 38–40, 44–49, 62, 83 Shaved Splits, 52, 59–60, 64, 67 Shepard, Hannah, 75, 79 Shepard, Samuel Walker, 77 Shewey, Don, 2 Silent Tongue, 34, 52–55, 65–69, 70, 74, 81–83 Simon, Josette, 20 Simpatico, 80 Simultaneity, 16–23, 41–43, 44, 49–50 Sinclair, Henry John, 76 Smith, Michael, 22 Smith, Patti, 83 Songs, 49–50, 75 Speeth, Kathleen Riordan, 76 Standing Bear, 52, 55 Stanton, Harry Dean, 75 Stasis, 3, 4, 14, 22, 46, 56 States of Shock, 35–51, 73 Steel Magnolias, 77, 80 Stein, Gertrude, 20 Steinbeck, John, 2 Stella, Frank, 21 Stolz, Alfred, 44, 48 Streetcar Named Desire, A, 20–20 Strindberg, August, 18 Struppek, Martina, 35–37 Suicide in B-flat, 3, 28 Symbolic Order, iii, 5–6, 8–10, 14–15 Taming of the Shrew, The, 21 Taussig, Michael, 65–66 Taxi Driver, The, 41

INDEX 99

Theatre morphology, 21–24 Theatrical object (prop), 3, 4–6, 10, 21, 48, 64 Theatrical space, 3–4, 5–6, 9, 16–19, 20– 24, 30, 48, 75 Thelma and Louise, 79 Thunderheart, 79 Time, 3, 16–24 presence of, 20–24 Tooth of Crime, The, 4, 44, 54, 68 Tootsie, 81 Torgovnick, Marianna, 65 Traven, B., 12 True West, 2, 18, 24, 73–74, 75 Typical Americans (Shepard’s portrayal of), 52, 60–61, 69 Unseen Hand, The, 54 Up to Thursday, 30 Virilio, Paul, 50 Voyager, 78–79 Walther, LuAnn, 76 War in Heaven, The, (Angel’s Monologue), 73, 82 War (representation of), 38–41, 46, 50 Ward, Fred, 79 Warrior Ant, The, 70 Waters, Frank, 63 Waterston, Sam, 80 Wedgeworth, Ann, 81 Wenders, Wim, 29, 72 West, Mae, 44 Wetzsteon, Ross, 22, 28, 29 Whitebread, 3 Wickert, Hartmut, 35–37, 40 Wilcox, Leonard, 4, 64 Williams, Tennessee, 16, 20–21 Wilson, Lanford, iii Wise, Nina, 3 Woodruff, Robert, 2 Wren, Christopher, 33 Wurlitzer, Rudi, 78 Yankee Dawg You Die, 59 Yeats, William Butler, 28

Zabriskie Point, 72 Zinman, Toby Silverman, 21 Zoo Story, 56