True West Research Articles

Nowhere Man and the Twentieth-Century Cowboy: Images of Identity and American History in Sam Shepard's True West

Nowhere Man and the Twentieth-Century Cowboy: Images of Identity and American History in Sam Shepard's True West

"A kind of Alaska": women in the plays of O'Neill, Pinter, and Shepard

In an effort to define what constitutes a feminist reading literary works, Ann C. offers an analytic technique that is both a feminist a psychoanalytic approach, applying this technique to her study women characters in modern dramatic texts Eugene O Neill, Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard. This is first study to treat these three writers in tandem, while uses work Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, other psychoanalytic feminist critics in her close readings specific dramatic texts, she also brings in commentaries by critics, directors, performers, historians. Her technique thereby provides us with a new significant method for addressing female characters as written by male playwrights, a task that she argues is not only a valid necessary part feminist dramatic criticism but a part theatrical production as well. From s play A Kind Alaska, Hall extracts a metaphor for patriarchal oppression women, contextualizing such oppression through an examination O Neill s madonnas, s whores, Shepard s female saviors as they are represented in O Neill s Iceman Cometh, Long Day s Journey into Night, A Moon for Misbegotten; Pinter s Homecoming, No Man s Land, Betrayal, and A Kind Alaska; and Shepard s Buried Child, True West, A Lie of the Mind. Since works O Neill, Pinter, Shepard continue to be performed to popular acclaim, hopes that a better understanding female characters in these plays will influence performances themselves.

“All Growed Up” in the True West, or Huck and Tom Meet Sam Shepard

S U Z Y C L A R K S O N H O L S T E I N Carroll College “All GrowedUp”in the True West, orHuckandTomMeetSamShepard Cowboys are really interesting to me—these guys, most of them really young, about 16 or 17, who decided they didn’t want to have anything to do with the East Coast, with thatway of life,and took on this immense country, and didn’t have any real rules. —Sam Shepard (qtd. in Chubb 190) Although Huck Finn probably didn’t wear cowboy boots and chaps, Sam Shepard’swords neatly fit Mark Twain’s hero: the boy/man who resists being “sivilized” and who looks toward a natural wilderness to find escape and freedom from rules. Essentially, Huck’strip down the Mississippi symbolizes a yearning for the “West,”even if it aims east and runs aground south. Although Mississippi rafts, “Injun Territory,” and even the “Old West” had disappeared by the time Shepard wrote True West (first performed in 1980), the type of characters who roam the corresponding literary landscape have changed very litde. Indeed, my reading of the brothers Lee and Austin in True West is as contemporary (and slightly grown up) versions of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. But Lee, the older brother of Shepard’s play, cannot possibly be Huck grown up, can he? Although like Huck he has avoided all conven­ tional life styles and survives, for the most part, as a loner in the wilderness,1he’sunpleasant and menacing, and he lacks Huck’scharm­ ing naivete. Yet ifwe try to imagine Huck after twenty years of being on his own in twentieth-century America, perhaps Lee’s connection to the young hero begins to come into focus. Although both Lee and Huck repeatedly demonstrate their discomfortwith conventional (and uncon­ ventional) family life, each character also reveals his concomitantyearn­ ing for the stability of home. As critics have noted, Huck at first cannot see past the Grangerford family’s glitter of respectability and comfort into its destructive, murderous core. He almost gushes as he describes 42 WesternAmerican Literature the details of their house: ‘There was a little old piano, too, that had tin pans in it, I reckon, and nothing was ever so lovely as to hear the young ladies sing ‘The Last Link is Broken’and play ‘The Batde of Prague’on it. The walls of all the rooms was plastered, and most had carpets on the floors, and the whole house was whitewashed on the outside. . . . Nothing couldn’t be better. And warn’t the cooking good, and just bushels of it too” (Twain 141). For a boy who had praised the “lazy and jolly”life of Pap’s cabin (Twain 30), such admiration seems odd. Yetwe see the same phenomenon in Lee, who prides himself on his indepen­ dence and ability to survive on his own but also repeatedly displays a wistful longing for connection, respectability, and even conformity. He appears at his mother’s Southern California house and finds his brother, Austin, working on a screenplay and house-sitting for the absent mother. Lee first makes an early morning “tour”of the neighbor­ hood. (Like Huck, he is a confirmed “borrower,” although Lee’s habit has a much more sinister aura than that of Twain’s young hero.) The drifter then describes his findings to a fearful Austin. Austin: See any houses? (pause) Lee: Couple. Couple a’ real nice ones. One of 'em didn’t even have a dog. . . -Just a sweet kinda’suburban silence. Austin: What kind of a place was it? Lee: Like a paradise. Kinda’ place that sorta’kills ya’ inside. Warm yellow lights. Mexican tile all around. Copper pots hangin’over the stove. Ya’know like they got in the maga­ zines. Blonde people movin’ in and outa’ the rooms, talkin’ to each other, (pause) Kinda’ place you wish you sorta’grew up in, ya’ know. Austin: That’s the kind of place you wish you’d grown up in? Lee: Yeah, why not? Austin: I thought you hated that kind of stuff. Lee: Yeah, well you never knew too much aboutme did ya? (Shepard 12) Of course, Austin...

Cain, Canaanites, and Philistines in Sam Shepard's True West

Cain, Canaanites, and Philistines in Sam Shepard's True West

The Frontier Myth” on Stage: From the Nineteenth Century to Sam Shepard’s True West

R I C H A R D W A T T E N B E R G University of California, Riverside "The Frontier Myth”on Stage: Fromthe Nineteenth Century to SamShepard’s True West Throughout his playwriting career, Sam Shepard has challenged the presuppositions and myths that underlie the modern American self-image. Bonnie Marranca (16-19) and Ruby Cohn (Dramatists 172-3, “Passion­ ate” 164-65) have pointed out that Shepard is especially fascinated by the hold that the myth of the western cowboy has had on the contemporary American imagination. In Cowboys #2 (1967), Action (1974), Curse of the Starving Class (1976), True West (1981), and Fool for Love (1983), Shepard focuses on protagonists embodying the rough-hewn independence of the untamed West as they struggle to find a place in modern America. Of these plays, True West, as its name implies, represents Shepard’s most direct attempt to deal with the incompatibility of so-called “old western” ideals with new technological and bureaucratic values. Although the title lacks a question mark, it suggests a question: Which is the “true West”— the frontier legend or the settled, suburban present?1While confronting the ambiguous nature of the “true West,” Shepard also explores a more funda­ mental question: How has the frontier, western experience contributed to the development of distinctly American traits or what might be called the “American character”? In True West, Shepard explores ideas that have intrigued Americans since Frederick Jackson Turner claimed that the frontier furnished “the forces dominating American character” (3). In fact, Ronald Mottram (136, 137) and Lynda Hart (97-98) use some of Turner’s ideas to expli­ cate Shepard’s True West. Relating Shepard’s play to Turner’s notion of the frontier, both Mottram and Hart cite the historian’s description of the 226 Western American Literature frontier as “the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savag­ ery and civilization” (3). Both critics, however, view Turner’s frontier as a general state of being, capturing the eternal tension between savagery and civilization. Neither Mottram nor Hart views Turner’s frontier for what it really is: a particular process of Americanization in which the confrontation between eastern civilization and western savagery produced a distinctly American entity.2 As the description of a process of Americanization, Turner’s frontier thesis has taken on major cultural significance. While there is controversy among historians over the validity ofhis thesis, Turner’sideas have assumed the dimensions of myth in their power to explain American history for non-historians (Smith 3-4, 250-60). Indeed, if a function of “myth” is to relate stories that clarify the patterns underlying experience, then Turner’s thesis becomes myth because it provides a story that suggests an underlying pattern for American history. Moreover, the roots of this myth in popular culture are made clear by the fact that a story pattern similar to Turner’s serves as a structural device controlling the selection and arrangement of incidents in various works of popular drama, especially successful late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century frontier plays like Bartley Camp­ bell’s M y Partner (1879) and William Vaughn Moody’s The Great Divide (1906). In the mid and late twentieth century, the historical pattern—or frontier myth—described by Turner has lost much of its luster. In fact, Shepard’sTrue West represents a revised version of this myth. An examina­ tion of the frontier myth and its interpretation on the American stage can clarify the place of Shepard’s True West within the larger context of Ameri­ can drama. Such an examination not only can illuminate the connections between Shepard’s play and earlier American plays like My Partner, The Great Divide, and even—perhaps surprisingly—Death of a Salesman, but can indicate changing popular attitudes about the significance of the fron­ tier western experience for American development. I Noting that the Superintendent of the Census had reported in 1890 that a frontier line no longer existed in the West, Frederick Jackson Turner sought to draw conclusions about a stage of American history which had come to an end (1). He may or may not have been the father of the...

Sam Shepard’s Metaphorical Stages by Lynda Hart

146 Western American Literature twenty-seven years, since Leonard McDonald of A Shooting Star, has Stegner created anyone who lives quite as successfully and contentedly as does Morgan. To balance his experiments with narration, Stegner has again chosen gardens as his setting. In overly-tended gardens, he carries forward a theme that he’s much concerned with, the abuse of land. As have other characters before her, Charity Lang vainly sets out to secure her happiness by dominating land. She always tries, “in defiance of the genius of the country” (228), to “bulldoze” land to her purposes (265). But, as reward for her work, she only discovers “the miserable failure of the law of nature to conform to the dream of man” (267). Stegner’s success with this latest work lies in the ability to use contempor­ ary art to express ageless truths about the human heart and about the earth. This novel is at once a fresh beginning and a comforting benediction. It’s Stegner at his best. RUSSELL BURROWS Utah State University Sam Shepard’s Metaphorical Stages. By Lynda Hart. (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. 157 pages, $29.95.) Lynda Hart’s Sam Shepard’s Metaphorical Stages is one of the series Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies being brought out by the Green­ wood Press under the general editorship of Joseph Donohue. In this volume Hart sets herself the task of offering a “unified vision” of Shepard’s drama. On the face of it, this does not seem to be an easy task, as Shepard, in his career spread over more than two decades, has experimented with every known style and has eluded categorization. But by focusing on the metaphorical dimensions of the plays, Hart successfully traces the continuity between Shepard’s early, fragmentary plays and the later full-length family dramas. Recent studies of Shepard’s work, including Ellen Oumana’s Sam Shep­ ard: The Life and Work of an American Dreamer (1986) and Ron Mottram’s Inner Landscapes: The Theatre of Sam Shepard (1984) highlight his Americanness and his ability to articulate the “collective unconscious.” Shepard is seen as an American phenomenon. Hart, while supporting this, goes beyond this to examine the European roots of his experimentation. Shepard’s work is not sui generis; and it is not born out of nothing. Towards this end, she views the early plays as necessarily self-reflexive, as an answer to the question “what is drama?” This also involves an exploration of the meaning of character. Shepard has behind him the anti-illusionistic and anti-realistic tradition pro­ vided by writers like Pirandello, Artaud, Beckett, Brecht and Ionesco. His concept of character, though drawing immediately on the transformation exercises of the Open Theatre, has its roots in the fluidity of Pirandello’s characters, and the multiple selves which inhabit the world of European Reviews 147 drama. It is this fluidity of character which helps him to revitalize the realistic form when he turns to it in his later plays. Hart devotes a complete section to the study of five full-length plays— Buried Child, Curse of the Starving Class, True West, Fool for Love and A Lie of the Mind. They are plays about family relationships, relationships between generations, between parents and children, and between lovers. But they are not projected in conventional terms; they are psychological (and metaphori­ cal) explorations of the human mind. The realism of these plays is laced with experimentation and Shepard moves freely between different forms. Shepard, in Hart’s words, uses a “myriad of theatrical techniques and forms that he borrows from nearly every major movement in contemporary theatre.” This slim volume is a welcome addition to the body of criticism on Shepard’swork for several reasons. Not cluttered with an examination of every play, it provides a clear focus. It also has two appendices, one providing a career chronology, and the other listing his published works and premiere pro­ ductions. And finally it helps set the perspective right by drawing attention to a dramatic tradition outside the bounds of geography. JASBIR JAIN University of Rajasthan, Jaipur, India Howard Hawks: A Jungian Study. By Clark Branson. (Santa Barbara: Garland-Clark Editions/Capra...

New West, True West: Interpreting The Region's History

say to my colleague in Chinese studies that I teach western history. Doesn't almost everyone in this department, he complains. history of England, Germany, France, Italy-it is all western history in our courses. Nobody here knows or cares anything about the East. I cut him short to explain that what I mean by the is not Europe, not the whole of western civilization. My is the American West: that fabled land where the restless pioneer moves ever forward, settling one frontier after another; where the American character becomes self-reliant, democratic, and endlessly eager for the new; where we strip off the garments of civilization and don a rude buckskin shirt; where millions of dejected immigrants gather from around the world to be rejuvenated as Americans, sounding together a manly, wild, barbaric yawp of freedom. That is my West: precisely that and nothing more. Oh, my colleague ventures, more perplexed now than cantankerous, you mean 'the West'the frontier, Indians, Clint Eastwood? I nod vaguely and sidle off. It is all so hard to convey over a single, polite glass of academic sherry. For a field that has been around so long, western American history can be frustratingly difficult to pin down. Soon it will be a full century old. Often, with such advanced age comes a clarity of purpose as well as a record of achievement. Not so in this case. The record is impressive enough: the field now has several excellent journals, regularly holds good scholarly conferences, and boasts an immense bibliography that no one could read in a lifetime. But as for clarity of purpose, the field is still groping about in adolescence. It doesn't quite know who it is or what it wants to be when it grows up. What are its boundaries? Where is West and where is not? There is still no settled, mature answer. There is, to be sure, an established body of writing about the history of the West, and usually it would be to such a body that we would turn for resolving what the field of study is or ought to be. In this case, however,

Theater in San Francisco: Sam Shepard's True West

Theater in San Francisco: Sam Shepard's True West

Causes of Inter-County Variations in Farmers' Earnings

This article reports the findings of a cross-sectional regional analysis of inter-county variations in farmers' earnings in 1959. Location relative to industrial-urban concentrations and local demographic and economic factors were used to explain median earnings of farmers by geographic divisions in the United States. The findings indicate the following: (a) In the divisions east of the Mississippi River, the closer a county to a large city and the larger the city, the higher the farmers' earnings. The reverse is true west of the Mississippi. (b) It is truer in the South than elsewhere that local demographic factors (age, education, and color) are more important than local market conditions in explaining the levels of farmers' earnings. (c) Land and capital inputs per farm are the most important factors influencing the level of farmers' earnings. Policy implications of the findings are discussed.

The Astronomical History of on and Thebes

IN a previous article I have attempted to show that there was a considerable difference of astronomical thought between those, on the one hand, who built pyramids and temples facing true east and west and those, on the other, who built solar temples not oriented to the equinox, but rather, though not exclusively, to the solstice.