Shepard III: Re-Enacting the Myth of Origin

Abstract

Compared with his family drama, Shepard’s two subsequent plays, True West and Fool for Love, can be seen as chamber pieces. They pare down and strip away the ballast of the madcap family intrigue. What they lose in scope and power they gain through a concentrated purity of acting and re-enacting the puzzle of origin. They are in effect covert family dramas where the larger family is absent, and the relationship is that of siblings in True West or lovers in Fool for Love. In the latter it could well be both. But origin entails place as well as kin, myth as well as ancestry. Who Shepard’s heroes actually are now depends on where they come from in a wider sense, where they were born as well as who they were born to. The nature of the places in which they have lived can no more be taken for granted than their ancestors. Though they differ significantly in terms of place both plays evoke the desert in Southern California, a locale which for Shepard refuses any obvious pigeonholing. The suburban home of Lee and Austin’s mother forty miles east of Los Angeles in True West, and May’s bleak motel room on the fringe of the Mojave in Fool for Love are both just on this side of civilisation, nearing the edge of a sparsely populated wilderness. In both plays we are witnessing an enclosed action on the verge of something bleak and vast, something which makes the identity of the modern West just as problematic as the mythical ‘true west’ which preceded it. Moreover, one cannot be understood without the other.