Shepard’s Challenge to the Modernist Myths of Origin and Originality: Angel City and True West

Abstract

When ‘Picasso’ enters the dialogue of True West the audience is perhaps as startled by this apparent example of staring irrelevance as the two auditors on stage. The mother of Austin and Lee has just returned unexpectedly from her vacation trip to Alaska because, she says, she started missing all her plants. She discovers her kitchen a shambles and mysteriously full of toasters. Her son, Austin, who was supposedly minding the house while he wrote a screenplay in solitude, is taking dictation at his typewriter from his shirtless and beer-soaked ne’er-do-well brother Lee who, she is informed, has improbably sold his own story idea to a producer. The solid citizen Austin announces his intention of scavenging a living with Lee in the desert — not the desert where his derelict father subsists, but another one. And the beloved plants are dead of neglect. At this final discovery Mom remarks, ‘Oh well, one less thing to take care of I guess, (turns toward the brothers) Oh, that reminds me — You boys will probably never guess who’s in town. Try and guess’ (54). Peculiar as this shift of topic may be, ‘Picasso’ isn’t a minor digression merely illustrative of Mom’s mild dottiness. I take him as the point of departure for this paper because Picasso seems to me to serve as a lightly sketched but telling contrast for the challenges to modernist myths of authorial originality presented by True West.