Horses and Cowboys on the Contemporary American Stage: The Horse as Prop in Sam Shepard’s Kicking a Dead Horse and Sarah Ruhl’s Late: a cowboy song

Abstract

ABSTRACT This comparative essay analyses the dramatic representation of horses in two early twenty-first-century American plays by Sam Shepard and Sarah Ruhl. Both plays bring a horse figure onto the stage as a prop and couple it to human characters fashioned by the iconography of the American cowboy. While both plays rely heavily on the symbolic power of horses and trope the animal, thus failing to achieve a portrayal of animality initially capable of challenging traditional humanist forms of representation, a close analysis of the materiality of equine presence on the stage shows the overlooked yet essential dramatic function horses have in these plays; that, far from being static symbols, they intervene decisively in the construction and cultural perception of space, gender and values of evolving American cowboy cultures; that their presence contributes to an appreciation of the potential of the horse-human partnership; and that, bringing to the stage their historical heritage as inhabitants of the American frontier, their presence contributes to the reconceptualization of borders making boundaries between humans and animals more permeable.