Staging Violence in West's "The Day of the Locust" and Shepard's "True West"

Abstract

IN A 1993 INTERVIEW, RESPONDING TO A QUESTION ABOUT how his play Angel City (1976) relates to other plays and films depicting Hollywood themes, Sam Shepard declares Nathanael West's 7he Day ofthe Locust brilliant book that says it all about Hollywood (Rosen 9). This essay explores similarities between West's 1939 novel and Shepard's later play, True WEst (1980), not as they depict Hollywood but as they depict violence--specifically how West and Shepard 'stage' their various scenes of violence, as well as how violence ultimately overflows the acting set, the cockfighting pit, and even the literary text.' Both Day) of the Locust and True West begin by eliciting our sympathies toward a character with artistic sensibilities and an Ivy League education, one who lives outside Los Angeles and works on a major artistic project connected to Hollywood: West's Tod Hackett on his painting The Burning of Los Angeles, and Shepard's Austin on a screenplay which his producer feels is his best yet. By the end of each work, both the sanity and the narrative centrality of these two main characters has come into question. Both works also constantly play with cliches of Hollywood plots and character types, cliches that play into the various outbreaks of violence.' If the violence of TheDay of the Locust culminates in a mob scene in which the child Adore Loomis, who was lured to Hollywood from suburban America, is pummeled and trampled (probably) to death, the off-stage sound of Trme West effects a mob scene in the increasing sound of the crickets and more pointedly of the coyotes, whose r'apping grous more intense and maniacal as the pack grous in