Sam Shepard

I received this week's copy of The New Yorker and was pleasantly surprised to find it included a short story by Sam Shepard. I haven't thought much about him lately, but I read the story, a brief and tough one called "Indianapolis (Highway 74)" and got to thinking about how important he's been in my life.

When I was a theater student back in college, he was omnipresent. My mentor, Professor Carol Rosen, was something of an expert on him, and led me to read his work, especially his more experimental stuff like The Tooth of Crime. Over the years I've managed to catch productions of his plays in far-flung places: I saw his brilliant Curse of the Starving Class off-Broadway, starring a then unknown Kathy Bates; A Lie of the Mind, all three hours of it, on Broadway (during which I was having a mild asthma incident, but didn't leave); his minor work States of Shock, also off-Broadway (I don't remember much about that production, other than than Michael Wincott played a man who had a hole in his mid-section); Fool for Love at the McCarter Theater in Princeton; and, on a visit to Dartmouth College, a student production of the one-act Cowboy Mouth, which was co-written by Patti Smith, who was at the time Shepard's girlfriend.

The rest of his stuff I've either read or seen adaptations of on film or TV, such as True West. He's also written screenplays, most notably for Zabriskie Point (a dud), and Paris, Texas (decidedly not a dud). He was also a drummer for the sixties band The Holy Modal Rounders, has written a song with Bob Dylan (the monumental "Brownsville Girl") and, of course, has had a long and rich career as a film actor, earning an Oscar-nomination for playing Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff. I thought he was even better as a farmer losing his land in Country.

But it's Shepard as a writer that is most exciting. He brings to the table a heady mixture of two distinct American types--the cowboy and the punk. He's like a mash-up of the Marlboro Man and Iggy Pop. Most of his work is about the dying of the American dream in the mythical West, set in the dusty towns or wide expanses of the North American desert. His characters are near-crazy, or flat-out crazy. In his Pulitzer-Prize winning Buried Child, the titular object is indeed a baby buried in the backyard, a metaphor for all sorts of things. There is a scene in which a one-legged man is forced to crawl across the stage for his prosthetic limb. In Curse of the Starving Class we hear the riveting metaphor, spoken by the father of the family, who has returned after an absence, describing an eagle that has grabbed a tomcat and carried him into the sky. The cat then claws the eagle, who does not let go of the cat, and together they plummet to their mutual deaths. True West is the modernization of one of the oldest dynamics in human history--Cain and Abel--two brothers locked in perpetual combat. The Tooth of Crime combines the West with rock and roll, as rock stars face off against each other like gunfighters.

These plays enlivened the American theater throughout the '70s. His output slowed after his film career began, and he's written some prose--I think there's a novel or two out there by him, which I should check out. But beyond his gifts as a writer and actor, Shepard has represented something that I think many men, not just me, have responded to. He's like the big brother we always wanted to be. I have no ideas of the trials or tribulations of Shepard's life, but I would like to be him, or someone like him. I know I'm not the only one who thinks this way because Spalding Gray, in one of his monologues, spoke of playing a game of pool with Shepard, and almost being emasculated by it, as Shepard was so rugged and masculine that any other man paled in comparison.