Abstract
Ever since Sam Shepard began his career on the Off-Off Broadway theatre scene of the mid-sixties, he managed to combine the formal experimentation and the contesting attitude expected from a celebrity brewed in the cafés of New York’s Lower East Side with a unique personal imagery that invoked popular-culture icons. However, when in the late 1970s he started to produce family dramas rooted in the US well-made play tradition, the harmonious critical response cracked. With this paper I mean to throw light onto Shepard’s extensively quoted and censured shift. I will hopefully illustrate the extent to which his family plays continue to address the same concerns as his early more experimental ones –mainly the adoption of popular myths, the persevering research on characterization in the theatre, and the exposition of the ingrained contradictions of the self– while, at the same time, they reconsider traditional notions of realism in the face of larger political changes.
Highlights
Sam Shepard’s True West was first produced at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco in July 1980 and was often considered his most realistic, accessible and straightforward play to date (Tucker 1992: 136; Shewey 1997: 131; Oumano 1987: 138; Kleb 1981: 120)
After Buried Child and Curse of the Starving Class, two melodramatic pieces that talked of decline and lineage degeneration, Shepard produced True West, a sincere and often blunt play about two antagonistic brothers that meet unexpectedly at their mother’s bungalow in a Southern California suburb
Shepard uses a wide variety of artifacts and icons taken from popular culture to create a nostalgic landscape that conjures up images of a golden past in the face of contemporary social breakup
Summary
Sam Shepard’s True West was first produced at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco in July 1980 and was often considered his most realistic, accessible and straightforward play to date (Tucker 1992: 136; Shewey 1997: 131; Oumano 1987: 138; Kleb 1981: 120). It is built on the continuous confrontation of two brothers Austin and Lee, and, during nine scenes that resonate with the musicality, unity and purpose of the different movements of an opera, they argue incessantly over their individual antagonistic present, past, and future lives as they try to write the script for a western.
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