Sam Shepard

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Shepard, Sam [né Samuel Shepard Rogers Jr.) (b. 1943), playwright. Born in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, and reared in California, he is one of the more prolific of late 20th‐century playwrights. Shepard was first produced Off Off Broadway in 1964 and has since written over thirty plays, which have been offered in New York and in regional theatres. He was first noticed for his early short works Icarus's Mother (1965), Chicago (1966), Red Cross (1967), La Turista (1967), Forensic and the Navigators (1967), and Action (1975). Among his notable full‐length plays are The Tooth of Crime (1972), Buried Child (1978), The Curse of the Starving Class (1979), True West (1980), Fool for Love (1983), A Lie of the Mind (1985), The States of Shock (1991), Simpatico (1994), and Eyes for Consuela (1998). In Shepard's plays imaginative language composed of slang, scientific jargon, B‐movie dialogue, and rock and roll idioms, and a stage peopled with farmers, devils, witch doctors, rock stars, spacemen, cowboys, gangsters, and other American stereotypes demonstrate his interest in popular American culture and the folklore of the American Southwest. He has also had a successful career as a film actor.

Sam Shepard (Samuel Shepard Rogers VII; born 1943) began his career as a playwright in the livelyoff-off-Broadway scene of the 1960s and became one of the United States' most prolific and acclaimed dramatists. He was also a rock music performer and a film actor.

Samuel Shepard Rogers VII was born on November 5, 1943, at Fort Sheridan, Illinois, the son of a career Army man whose assignments took him to many locations, including Guam, while his son was growing up. After his father retired from the service, the family settled on a ranch in Duarte, California, where they grew avocados and raised sheep.

Shepard (there is some debate as to when he dropped the Rogers from his name) worked as a stable hand at the Conley Arabian Horse Ranch in Chino, California, from 1958 to 1960. Upon graduation from high school he attended Mount Antonio Junior College for a year, majoring in agriculture with some thought of becoming a veterinarian.

When he left college, he joined the Bishop's Company Repertory Players, a touring theater group with which he spent 1962 and 1963. He went to New York in 1963, where he got a job as a busboy at the Village Gate in Greenwich Village, hung out with the son of the famous jazz musician Charles Mingus, and, encouraged by Ralph Cook, the founder of Theater Genesis, began to write plays.

In the 1960s the New York theater scene consisted of three levels. There was Broadway, the center of commercial theater; off-Broadway, which presented some new works as well as revivals of classics not economically viable on Broadway, such as those by Ibsen and Strindberg; and offoff-Broadway (OOB), devoted to experimental works and often housed in bars or lofts in Greenwich Village and on Manhattan's Lower East Side, with little or no admission charged. The most celebrated OOB groups, in addition to Theater Genesis, were the Caffe Cino, La Mama Experimental Theater Company, the Open Theater, and the Judson Poets' Theater.

Shepard debuted at Theater Genesis on October 16, 1964, with the double bill Cowboys and Rock Garden. In 1965 he presented Up to Thursday and 4-H Clubat Theater 65, Dog and Rocking Chairat La Mama, Chicagoat Genesis, and Icarus's Mother at the Cino.

In 1966 he received the first of several grants, this one from the University of Minnesota, and presented Fourteen Hundred Thousand at the Firehouse Theater in Minneapolis; that same year Red Cross was given at the Judson.

The Village Voice was the chief organ of the counter-culture in the 1960s and specialized in covering both off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway. From the start of Shepard's career, Voice critic Michael Smith had been an enthusiastic fan, writing that there was something so free and direct about those plays. They seemed to catch the actual movement of the minds of people I know. It was something I had never seen before." The Voice annually presented awards called Obies for work in the theater and Shepard was given an unprecedented trio of them in 1966 for Chicago, Icarus's Mother, and Red Cross.

The Voice's support was vital to the young playwright's career, because the mainstream critics, those from the major newspapers, ranged from lukewarm to hostile. Jerry Tallmer, the New York Post's eye on OB and OOB, could summon no enthusiasm, while Clive Barnes of the New York Times (later a supporter) called Shepard's early plays disposable … like Kleenex." Indeed, years later, in his introduction to The Unseen Hand and Other Plays (1986), Shepard himself wrote, Basically, without apologizing, I can see that I was learning to write," and confessed, some of that work is slightly embarrassing to me now."

In 1967 Shepard wrote La Turista, his first full-length play, which won a 1967 Obie; Melodrama Play, an Obie winner the following year; Cowboys #2, which premiered in Los Angeles; and Forensic and the Navigators, which also won a 1968 Obie. He also received two more grants, one from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1967 and one from the Guggenheim Foundation in 1968.

In 1968 Shepard began a three-year stint with the Holy Modal Rounders, a rock group, playing drums and guitar. Interestingly, in an interview conducted in 1971, he stated that he would rather be a rock star than a playwright, yet he did not abandon writing while he was playing, completing Holy Ghostly and The Unseen Hand in 1969, Operation Sidewinder and Shaved Splits in 1970, and Mad Dog Blues and Back Bog Beast Baitin 1971. He was awarded a second Guggenheim in 1971.

Leaving the Holy Modal Rounders, Shepard went to England, and his next five plays were premiered there: Cowboy Mouth (written with Patti Smith), The Tooth of Crime, Blue Bitch (presented on BBC television), Geography of a Horse Dreamer, and Little Ocean. When The Tooth of Crime, widely acclaimed in England, was presented in the United States, it won an Obie in 1973. That same year saw the publication of his first book of essays and poems, Hawk Moon. Two other similar collections followed in 1977 and 1982.

Back in the United States, Shepard became the playwright in residence at the Magic Theater in San Francisco, a position he held from 1974 to 1984. His plays Killer's Head and Action opened in New York in 1975, the latter winning an Obie that year. The year 1976 saw Suicide in Band Angel City; 1977, Inacoma, and 1978, The Sad Lament of Pecos Bill on the Eve of Killing His Wife and The Curse of the Starving Class, a critical success.

It was also in 1978 that Shepard began his career as a film actor, appearing in Renaldo and Clara and Days of Heaven. He also started his collaboration with Joseph Chaikin on the theater piece Tongues; this was a stage work, with music, heavily dependent on the theories of Antonin Artaud. Shepard and Chaikin collaborated on two more pieces, Savage/Love in 1979 and War in Heaven, presented on WBAI radio in 1985.

In 1979 Shepard achieved his warmest critical reception with Buried Child, which won both an Obie and the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Writing in the Washington Post, critic David Richards said, Shepard delivers a requiem for America, land of the surreal and home of the crazed…the amber waves of grain mask a dark secret. The fruited plain is rotting and the purple mountain's majesty is like a bad bruise on the landscape."

Shepard continued to write plays, including Seduced in 1979; True West, which had a run of over 600 performances in New York in 1980-81; Fool for Love, which won him his 11th Obie in 1984; and A Lie of the Mind, which garnered the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1986. In 1987 the one-act True Dylan, was published in Esquire magazine.

At the same time, however, he was expanding his work in film, not only writing screenplays but taking on more acting roles. He appeared in Resurrection in 1980, Raggedy Man in 1981, Frances in 1982, The Right Stuff in 1983, Country in 1984, and Fool for Love in 1985. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his portrayal of jet pilot Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff. He had worked on several screenplays, including Me and My Brother and Zabriskie Point, but achieved his greatest success in this genre with Paris, Texas, which was given a Golden Palm Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1984. He also wrote the script for Fool for Love in 1985.

Shepard continued to demonstrate his rich multi-dimensional talents during the 1990s. States of Shock was produced in 1991 and Curse of the Starving Class in 1997. The Signature Theater, in New York City devoted a whole season (1996-97) to plays by Shepard. He was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Drama in 1992.

Writing in the New Republic, Robert Brustein called Shepard one of our most celebrated writers," adding that his plays have overturned theatrical conventions and created a new kind of drama." And, in his introduction to Sam Shepard: Seven Plays, Richard Gilman writes, Not many critics would dispute the proposition that Sam Shepard is our most interesting and exciting playwright."

Further Reading

Books on Shepard abound, although many of them have a shrill, cheerleading tone. Probably the best is Ellen Oumano's Sam Shepard: The Life and Work of an American Dreamer (1986). Also worthwhile are Kimball King's Sam Shepard: A Casebook (1988) and Ron Mottram's Inner Landscapes: The Theatre of Sam Shepard (1984). Newer works on Shepard include: Leonard Shewey, editor, Rereading Shepard: Contemporary Critical Essays on the Plays of Sam Shepard, (1993); Don Shewey, Sam Shepard (1997); and Leslie Wade, Sam Shepard and the American Theater (1997). In addition, John Blackburn wrote a Master's Thesis Portrait of the Artist: Sam Shepard and the Anxiety of Identity (University of Virginia, 1996).

(b. 1943)

1964	Cowboy and The Rock Garden. The first of Shepard's plays to be produced are largely ignored by critics but generate a cult following for the playwright's disjointed dramatic structure, often explicit language, and explorations of character through lengthy monologues. Born on an Illinois army base and raised in southern California and on a succession of army bases, Shepard began his career as an actor and writer after arriving in Greenwich Village in 1963.
1965	Icarus's Mother. The playwright wins his second Obie Award for this drama about a group of picnickers who, prompted by the sight of a passing jet, discuss their obsessions.
1967	La Turista. Shepard's first full-length play is a surrealistic comedy depicting a couple suffering from dysentery on a vacation to Mexico. In act one they are treated by a Mexican doctor's voodoo cure; in act two, the couple prepares for their trip by being treated by a doctor dressed in a Civil War uniform.
1970	Operation Sidewinder. Shepard's first major production is a satire on the social and political turmoil of the 1960s. In it, various representatives of American society compete to appropriate an experimental computer designed in the form of rattlesnake.
1972	The Tooth of Crime. Regarded by many as Shepard's best play, the drama takes the form of a duel between competing rock stars, reflecting contemporary American values and myths.
1977	Curse of the Starving Class. Shepard dramatizes the disintegration of a family in southern California as a metaphor for the demise of the western frontier and American society.
1978	Buried Child. Shepard continues his depiction of the American family in one of his most conventionally structured, naturalistic dramas, about a Midwestern farm family beset by incest and infanticide. The play wins the Pulitzer Prize.
1980	True West. Set in the contemporary West, Shepard's play concerns two brothers--one a professional screenwriter and the other a scruffy drifter/cowboy. The latter proves to have the greater imagination and energy as the two wrangle over an improbable cliché-ridden screenplay. The plot becomes as much about their conflicts and the desire to get ahead as it is about the ostensible story they are developing.
1983	Fool for Love. Shepard's three-character play about a love-hate relationship between a half-brother and a half-sister opens at the Circle Repertory Company in New York, where it runs for one thousand performances. A play about sometimes violent, nearly inarticulate people nonetheless makes for good drama, winning four Obie Awards and going on to many revivals with regional theater companies.
1985	A Lie of the Mind. The play centers on Jake, who has beaten his wife, Beth, and run away. Jakes's brother intervenes and attempts to reconcile Jake and Beth. This bleak play probes family tensions and violence, though Shepard's tenderness and sympathy for his characters have been compared to that of Tennessee Williams, especially evident in The Glass Menagerie.
1991	The States of Shock. Shepard shifts between a battlefield scene and a coffee shop, making the point that the atrocities of war are ignored by characters preoccupied with their own trivial problems and conflicts. Although some critics call the play "glib," others are attracted to its provocative theme and intensive theatricality--with sound effects calling to mind the shattering impact of high-tech bombs.

Quotes:

"I didn't go out of my way to get into this movie stuff. I think of myself as a writer."

• Born: Nov 05, 1943 in Fort Sheridan, Illinois
• Occupation: Actor, Writer, Director
• Active: '80s-2000s
• Major Genres: Drama
• Career Highlights: The Right Stuff, Days of Heaven, Hamlet
• First Major Screen Credit: Me and My Brother (1968)

Biography

A Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (for 1979's Buried Child), an Oscar-nominated actor, and a director and screenwriter to boot, multi-talented Sam Shepard has made a career of plumbing the darker depths of middle-American rural sensibilities and Western myths. The son of a military man, he was born Samuel Shepard Rogers on November 3, 1943, in Fort Sheridan, IL. Following a peripatetic childhood, part of which was spent on a farm, Shepard left home in late adolescence to move to New York City, where by the age of 20, he already had two plays produced.

As a playwright, Shepard went on to win a number of Obies for such dramas as Curse of the Starving Class (1977), which he made into a film in 1994, and True West (aired on PBS in 1986). As an actor, the lanky and handsome Shepard made his feature film debut with a small role in Bronco Bullfrog (1969) and didn't resurface again until Bob Dylan's disastrous Renaldo and Clara (1978). The film followed Shepard's residence in London during the early '70s, where he worked on-stage as an actor and director when not playing drums for his band, The Holy Modal Rounders, which had performed as part of Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975. Also in 1978, Shepard made a big impression playing a wealthy landowner in Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven, but it was not until he received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for playing astronaut Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff (1983) that he became a well-known actor. Following this success, he went on to specialize in playing drifters, cowboys, con artists, and eccentric characters with only the occasional leading role. Some of his more notable work included Paris, Texas (1984), which he also wrote; Fool For Love (1985), which was adapted from his play of the same name; Baby Boom (1987), Steel Magnolias (1989), and The Pelican Brief (1993). In addition to acting and writing, Shepard has also directed: in 1988, he made his debut with Far North, a film he wrote especially for his off-screen leading lady, Jessica Lange, with whom he has acted in Frances (1982), Country (1984), and Crimes of the Heart (1986).

In 1999, Shepard could be seen on both the big and small screen. He appeared in Snow Falling on Cedars and Dash and Lilly, a made-for-TV movie for which he won an Emmy nomination in the role of the titular Dashiell Hammett. In addition, he also lent his writing skills to Simpatico, a Nick Nolte vehicle about friendship and loss adapted from Shepard's play of the same name. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

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