SOURCE: Heilman, Robert B. “Shepard's Plays: Stylistic and Thematic Ties.” Sewanee Review 100, no. 4 (fall 1992): 630-44.

[In the following essay, Heilman provides a thematic overview of Shepard's plays, highlighting his literary style in each play.]

Any playwright with such a highly individualized manner as flashes out at us in the plays of Sam Shepard is likely to be called unique. There is of course no need to deny the uniqueness of Shepard's work. Even in his life, one can observe some shadow or flavor of uniqueness, or unusualness, or elected difference. Born Samuel Shepard Rogers, Jr., in 1943, he chose to be Sam Shepard. He began writing one-act plays, and having them produced, when he was twenty. By 1967, when he was twenty-four, he did his first full-length play, La Turista, and from then on he kept turning out numerous one-act-ers and full-length plays at the rate of almost one a year. In early years he went to a junior college, worked at a race track, and was drummer in a touring rock-pop band. One could imagine his turning toward the life of a professional outsider in the Kerouac manner.

Yet the overall Shepard career is hardly unique. It follows the lines of an American success story that is almost trite. He starts modestly and then makes it big in the manner of an American folk hero. The early career is small plays, small audiences, small off-off-Broadway productions. Then the later career is all success by the usual standards—production all over the country, wide critical discussion, and, when Shepard is thirty-five, the Pulitzer prize for Buried Child (1978). He is Dickensian in productivity (the only rival to Joyce Carol Oates, five years his senior), and in having energy for diverse activities—writing songs (words and music) for some plays, acting, making movies. And the once race-track handyman would later raise Appaloosa horses on a California ranch.

Again, if the plays often strike us as hallucinatory—discontinuous in action, mysterious in motivation, bizarre in humanity, incontinently dashing from puzzling shock to shocking puzzle, preferring madness to cliché—there are recurrences that suggest, if not positive coherence and even system, at least a recognizable sense of scene, movement, and human style. Since Shepard's career follows the design of the American success story, it is interesting that the materia dramatica often seem to critics to be quintessentially American. Of course Shepard does not use European or Asian or South American scenes, but American playwrights rarely do. Perhaps the idea is that he seldom uses metropolitan or cosmopolitan scenes. (The action of Angel City [1976] takes place in Hollywood, and of True West [1979] in a Los Angeles suburb; these are infrequent uses of an urban milieu.) He does not often use well-to-do, professional, or “successful” individuals as characters. What “American” apparently comes down to, then, is mostly rural scenes and characters who can be described variously as common people—marginal, dispossessed, wandering, lower middle class, and so on. The scenes are set repeatedly in the Southwest, Mexico, the desert, Louisiana bayou country, the beach. Shepard occasionally shows an interest in cowboy types, western singers, rock-and-roll musicians (he uses their kind of song in several plays; for the songs in one play he wrote both music and words), would-be writers, Indians, football players, farmers, racketeers. Often he specifies that a character is to wear blue jeans. He devotes one whole play to a phantasmagoria of hopes and yearnings in American events and characters that are now almost mythical: the Gold Rush, buried treasure, Paul Bunyan, Jesse James, Mae West, Marlena (Mad Dog Blues, 1979, an Americans-only version of Tennessee Williams's Camino Real). He can base a play on a common ailment of American travelers (La Turista) and include a madly fantastic satire of doctors, who appear as medicine men (or witch doctors) and as pretentious phonies.

Shepard is often described as a self-conscious critic of the American life that appears in his plays. It is a possible reading, but I am not sure that it gets to the heart of things. Shepard is too original to be simply another censorious observer of a highly organized, institutionalized, technological, commercialized credit-economy life. Such matters may appear, but they do not seem primary. When he deals with a rich old man, Henry Hackamore, in Seduced (1979)—a recluse who makes us think of Howard Hughes—Shepard presents him not only as a miserable medley of paranoia and delusions of power, but also as the possessor of a kind of mysterious hold on people. Shepard does not fall into the obvious romantic alternative of glorifying the primitive: while he may see in it an unsophisticated close-to-nature kind of goodness (as in the Indians in Operation Sidewinder [1970], and the cowboy rescuers in Geography of a Horse Dreamer [1974]; he can also see in it a superstitiousness and a capacity for bestial violence [Back Bog Beast Bait, 1971]). One doesn't have to be rich to be wretched: misery of one kind or another is widespread in Shepard's cast of characters. If one looks at them sociologically, one can find plenty or evidence of a malaise often ascribed to American life: noncommunication, isolation, alienation. Action (1975) parodies a Christmas dinner: four participants seem to live wholly in private lives, talking to but almost unaware of each other. In various plays, including Rock Garden (1964) and Buried Child (1978), the characters sometimes talk at cross purposes, or as if no one else were there, or as if they did not hear or could not make sense of what others say. Such separateness may lead to total withdrawal or to hostility, and hence to the family infighting that is one staple of Shepard drama (and one that I will return to later). In this dramatic material Shepard gives a special flavor to a theme that Arthur Miller has dealt with in several plays beginning in 1949, and that two other playwrights had used brilliantly just a year or two before Shepard's first one-act-ers: Arthur Kopit's Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad (1962) and Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) and The American Dream (1961). Many critics have, as it were, picked up Albee's title—The American Dream—to denote what they believe Shepard is poking full of holes. Maybe he is, but it is doubtful that this is a primary or principal objective of his, or even a side effect of his theatrical style.

For one thing various aspects of his plays, as other critics have noted, suggest affiliations that lie outside the narrow arena of national debunking. More than once what Shepard does reminds us of European writing. For instance Operation Sidewinder (1970), a fantasy in the sci-fi style, has resemblances to R.U.R. (1920) by Karel Capek, a Czech. In Capek's play, robots manufactured by men acquire “souls”; in Operation Sidewinder a new master computer in the form of a snake seems to be in tune with cosmic rhythms or transcendental forces, and thus can serve in a Hopi Indian snake ritual presaging a new vitality of nature immune to the hostility of organized society. The Indian as a natural being with special powers is a D. H. Lawrence conception. Likewise Lawrence is brought to mind by Shepard's Geography of a Horse Dreamer (1974), a play about the artist exploited by commercial interests, for Shepard's central situation is almost identical with that in Lawrence's short story, “The Rocking-Horse Winner”: a character with a special intuition or extrasensory perception or clairvoyance can “see” which horses will win races, and so he is mercilessly or even destructively victimized by gamblers. The interpolation of songs, which Shepard uses in several plays, is a technique made familiar by Bertolt Brecht. While Shepard is justly credited with an unusual ear for speech rhythms, his frequent reliance on an apparently characterless dialogue that is made striking by flatness and repetitiousness is remarkably like that of Pinter and Beckett (Waiting for Godot). Like these two playwrights Shepard uses such dialogue as the unlikely context for extraordinary, puzzling, apparently nonrational events, a combination that also reminds some readers of the fiction of Franz Kafka. The use of a familiar everyday scene in which there is an air, occasional or persistent, of the ominous or sinister, is standard Pinter; such a scene as the background for flamboyantly out-of-the-ordinary actions is written in the manner of Jean Genet. It makes sense to think of Buried Child as T. S. Eliot's Family Reunion (1939) filtered through Pinter's The Homecoming (1965). The pattern is that of a son or grandson (one with a wife, one with a girlfriend) returning to a home where all is not serene, where past or present mysteries seize our attention, where a parent dies, and where one of the newcomers departs for a different life. In Cowboy Mouth (1971) characters quote W. B. Yeats and various innovative, antitraditional French poets, notably Gerard de Nerval (1808-55), a wandering, highly productive, periodically insane poet and prose writer who often wrote in a striking nonrealistic, even grotesque vein, re-creating fantasies and visions. Thus de Nerval—and a little later Jarry—was a precursor of such movements and fashions as surrealism, expressionism, dadaism, and automatic or hallucinatory writing. The simplest over-all term for this long succession of radical antirational modes is symbolism. Though Shepard does not like this term and its synonyms, it serves very well to describe what he does in many plays. At times he uses a realistic style (characters talk and act in ways that come logically out of personalities and situations), and at times a symbolic style (actions and events seem to have their source elsewhere than in the “normal” probabilities of character and situation, and we have to go outside our expectations in order to get their drift).

II

We can sense a connection between this effect and the writing process as Shepard describes it. For him, he insists, writing is an “unending mystery,” based not on “ideas,” but on an “inner visualizing,” a “picture … moving in the mind and being allowed to move more and more freely as you follow it.” He feels as if “something in me writes but it's not necessarily me.” The result is an “open-ended structure where anything could happen,” not a “carefully planned and regurgitated event.” Behind this lies “the real quest of a writer,” which is “to penetrate into another world.” Thus we get, so to speak, a familiar “this world” and “another world” that may be surprising or puzzling. “Ideas emerge from plays … not the other way around” (The Drama Review, 21 [1971]).

We need not take too seriously Shepard's claim that his work is not “carefully planned.” But it is probably right to think of him primarily as spontaneous producer of “pictures,” images or “visions” of people in action. He is fertile and energetic in his productivity. In Buried Child the products of his rich imagination are generally clear enough: there is a troubled family with a dark event in its past, a great deal of dissatisfaction and quarrelsomeness in its present, and a reliance on different consolations—liquor, religion, and a “security blanket” that several adults quarrel over. These are shown in various fresh and unusual ways, although the situation is realistic in its basic outlines and indeed in most of the details. Insofar as the technique is symbolic, the symbolic drift is often a byproduct or implication of basic facts that are plain enough. When one son is dead, another an amputee, and a third apparently brain-damaged, they represent both a defect in the family life and a defeat of the hopes that parents attach to the next generation: the atmosphere in this house “cripples” the children. This situation and its meaning could be the work of Eugene O'Neill (the former football player as retarded or permanently immature appears both in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and in this connection we think also of Jason Miller's That Championship Season). But other Shepard “visualizations” lead to a free-wheeling, usually startling, symbolism that lies outside the realistic: often we cannot make literal interpretations but have to let the symbols soak into our imagination and work as best they may. In Buried Child we can usually sense the drift of the nonrealistic symbols. Bradley's hair-clipping is a resentful man's style of attack and triumph; his putting his hand into Shelly's mouth a kind of triumph-by-rape. Everyone's failure or unwillingness to recognize Vince and to pay attention to Shelly suggests the self-enclosure of the others, their shut-off-ness from their kind, the elusiveness of identities. When Halie goes out to lunch dressed in black, and comes back a day later dressed in yellow, we can, if we want to, speculate about what happened literally; but the main point is that she has undergone a striking change of mood. Vince's mad “war games” when he returns belong to a battle of moods which ends in his decision to stay. Finally Shepard takes the worn-out figure of speech, “skeleton in the closet” (compare Kopit's Oh Dad, Poor Dad), and revitalizes it as a literal skeleton in the back yard, and one that appears shockingly. But the point is not the detective-story surprise or the criminal charges that might follow in a literal account. Instead, the skeleton gives physical reality to a destructive family life, and at the same time, we assume, its being brought to light exorcises a dark past. (Here we remember a similar exorcism of the past—ironically the killing of a fantasy life—that may be conducive to peace in the present—the final scene of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.)

III

Symbols and myths are interconnected, as we know; one can think of myth as the extension of the symbolic element into a narrative structure in which the individualized tale reveals an archetypal pattern of experience. Shepard is drawn to myths, but, as we might expect, he pulls away from a feared triteness (in a sense his whole career is a campaign against triteness, though perhaps more instinctive than planned). By myth he means, he says, “a sense of mystery and not necessarily a traditional formula.” He constantly achieves the “sense of mystery” through characters' actions that conform, not to our everyday expectations, but to hidden forces of personality or to meanings that the personality illustrates, often quite obscurely. Still, while Shepard naturally backs away from the stereotype, his “not necessarily” allows him some leeway to explore traditional patterns of action that may stimulate him. At least we can find him elaborating plots in which appears, however disguised, a “traditional formula”—i.e., a style of action that embodies some constant of human behavior. In one play he actually reworks an ancient mythic theme that he reveals in his title, Icarus's Mother (1965). Icarus's mother is of course the earth. Shepard's Icarus is an airplane pilot, and he seems to some young picnickers—some of the time on the beach—to be interested in them. And they in him, apparently through the clandestine smoke signals sent up by several men, and more unmistakably by two girls who, having taken down their panties to urinate on the beach, make sexy gestures in his direction. His plane finally roars into the sea with a tremendous luminous explosion that outdoes the formal fireworks display expected by the young people. Since “fireworks going off all around” is a standard idiom for experiencing orgasm, we can understand that the pilot is entering, or reentering, the mother in a climactic death (we can't help remember the older meaning of dying as sexual climax). Thus the action alludes to the best-known Greek story of mother-son incest, a subject to which we will return.

The Icarus myth is latent in another death of a high flier, Henry Hackamore, in Seduced. Likewise there are traces of Everyman in Henry's hanging on to his riches, and their supposed power, at death's door. Shot dead but apparently immortal, Henry, as it were, flies untouchable in the skies, so strong an embodiment of popular aspirations that even his murderer helplessly surrenders to the vision. Here Icarus flies on, a symbol of man's dreams of going up in, and having power over, the world. Immortality is conferred by popular imagination.

If in Seduced it is people in general who exercise the creative imagination, the traditional possessors of that gift, the artists, draw Shepard's attention more than once. The myth of the artist is a recurrent theme of his. In Angel City the artist is overcome by Hollywood values. In Geography of a Horse Dreamer he is exploited by money-making agencies but rescued by cowboy brothers (an American embodiment of the classical deus ex machina) and taken to safety in Wyoming (another American myth: safety and purity in the big-sky country). The Tooth of Crime (1972) embodies a much deeper vision: a young artist, a popular singer, defeats an old established one in personal combat. Though this battle seems wholly contemporary (and could indeed dramatize Shepard's own fantasy of rising to the top of the world of popular music and drama), it is especially interesting because it actually employs an ancient mythical pattern. The archetypal version occurs in the introductory story of Frazer's Golden Bough: an older order, represented by a priest or ruler, is upset by a new, more vigorous one as the young aspirant fights and kills the old incumbent. The very form of the battle between Shepard's two singers—they conduct a verbal duel technically known as the flyting—goes back to the practice of ancient epics in all cultures. For this flyting Shepard invents a strikingly weird language which reminds us a little of the gang “slanguage” in Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange.

When he again takes up the problem of the artist four years later—in [Suicide in B-Flat] (1976)—Shepard turns to a more difficult problem than that of the struggle between rivals and generations: the integrity of the artist in the development of his own career, and in his relationship with a public and critics who are almost hostilely on his trail, trying to pin him down, come to grips with him, “detect” him, as it were. Shepard manages this theme with great originality. At the beginning he startlingly flings us into what looks like another version of the detective myth: Louis and Pablo, two detectives, are investigating the apparent death of a musician which may be a murder, a suicide, or a planned disappearance. Though they differ and even quarrel, they are full of the clichés of loyalty, justice, and a job to be stuck to until finished. Then, in a sort of play-within-the-play manner, the central figure Niles, the musician who may be killer or suicide or neither, is brought on to enact (as a sort of play for the temporarily blacked-out detective group) the prior events that led to the detectives' investigation. We see Niles, directed and aided by a young woman, undergoing several ritual “deaths” that signify his turning away from earlier phases of his career as a musician: the need to cut off the old, grow, try the new. The arrows that she shoots into him leave him unharmed but also strike and “kill” the detectives: the critics are done in by the changes that leave them unable to understand the changing and growing artist. But they recover and still seek to “arrest” him—i.e., stop and control him. The young woman—his “soul”?, his spirit of independence?—cries that he is in a “trap” and flees, and he is handcuffed to the detectives. This artist, we assume, is finally a “prisoner” of public and critics, or at least in some essential way not free of them. But this bald summary of the contents of the action hardly does justice to the extraordinarily original use of the detective myth in this new version of a recurrent theme of his—the myth of the artist.

Shepard is drawn both to a myth of decline and death and to the myth of recovery and survival. In La Turista and Angel City the movement is all downhill. In The Curse of the Starving Class (1977) the father is “reborn,” but apparently too late. As in Chekhov's Cherry Orchard, to which Shepard's play has been compared, the farm is taken over by a new order, but Shepard's incoming regime is that of strange Pinteresque racketeers rather than that of a hard working, upward-bound ex-serf. When we find the note of ring out the old, ring in the new in Shepard, we are always aware of the ambiguity. The troubling, weird, and shocking events that are Shepard's staples prevent any triteness in images of recovery, and they may even obscure his sense of cycles in human experience, of a kind of regeneration that may follow decay, or a peace that may follow conflict or disaster. In Operation Sidewinder the Indian ritual suggests a drawing upon the forces of nature for an enduring order in contrast with our technological one. In Mad Dog Blues (1971) and The Unseen Hand (1970) various characters settle into an apparently satisfying ordinary existence, the former after fantastic trials in a no-man's land, the latter after rebellion against an Orwellian “Nogoland.”

Shepard's ability to imagine either downfall or rebirth appears very clearly in his attraction to the myth of the curse on the house. In this, as elsewhere, we see Shepard, for all of the exciting and disturbing uniqueness of his surfaces, drawn to recognizable themes with a long history: in the West the curse on the house appears, as we need hardly say, in the Greek myths of the House of Thebes and the House of Mycenae. In The Curse of the Starving Class the key word is in the title, and it occurs several times in the dialogue, once in reference to the sad state of the family. The physical messiness of the place is a dim reminder of Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in which house means both family line and dwelling place. The skinning of the lamb is a parody of the crucifixion of the Lamb of God, but in this version of the myth of salvation, the death has no redemptive value, and the spiritual hunger is unsatisfied.

In The Buried Child the curse on the house is made concrete in the self-centeredness, in the various animosities, and especially in the distant murder that symbolize the human failure of the family. If the dead infant was, as one critic suggests, the product of an incestuous union, we have specific echoes of the Oedipus story: the same wrongdoing long ago, and the purgative effect of bringing it to light. A new spirit, however, appears to enter through a visitor from an outer world—a suggestion of another mythical pattern. Since the visitor is a member of the family, we tend to think of the return of the prodigal son. Over all these events there hangs Shepard's recurrent sense of the cyclical: the old order passes (the grandfather dies), and the new takes over. Perhaps Vince's future is an ironic illusion, but it is possible that the hope and promise are genuine. Surely regeneration is implied by the vegetable that Tilden brings in, by the new sunlight, and by the announcement that green goods are again growing like mad in the long-barren area. These events are of course symbolic rather than realistic: if we cannot explain them by literal cause and effect, we can understand them as signs of a new vitality and of available sustenance. The fertility myth may not completely possess Shepard's imagination, but it has a hold on it.

IV

When we say “house,” we think of generational continuities, the influence of the past, the presence of forebears and their actions in the living. But if you can't have a house without a family, you can have a family without a house, that is, a domestic drama conceived only in terms of the present. In an early one-act play, Fourteen Hundred Thousand (1967), Shepard dealt with some limited husband-wife tensions. Then in the 70s there were two plays we have just looked at—The Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child: Shepard was, as it were, discovering a theme in which he found growing congeniality. For in the 80s three major plays are rooted in intense intrafamily conflicts and passions—True West (1980), A Fool for Love (1983) and A Lie of the Mind (1986).

While one of these plays, True West, uses raw materials that are specifically American (the idea of the West and Hollywood's use of it), they are primarily addressing, not specifically regional or American matters, but an ancient universal theme—the modes of conflict between spouses, parents and children, and others in the realm of kinship. In this Shepard is being Aristotelian. Aristotle specifies that the best tragic plots are those that occur within families: “But when the tragic incident occurs between those who are near or dear to one another—if, for example, a brother kills, or intends to kill, a brother, a son his father, a mother her son, or any other deed of the kind is done—those are the situations to be looked for by the poet” (Poetics, XIV, 4, trans. S. H. Butcher). We should not overlook the double significance of Shepard's choice of such materials. For one thing it underscores a Shepard direction easily overlooked: away from local color, regional themes and styles, and national problems and toward basic human realities that transcend geographical boundaries and present times. Further the surface uniqueness of Shepard's theatrical method—disconcerting shifts, psychic shocks, baffling symbolism, nonrealistic plunges, and characters like those of D. H. Lawrence, of whom it has been said that they represent not traditional portraits of identifiable whole personalities but novel outbursts of unpatternable instinctive passions and drives—should not blind us to the recognizable centrality of the human modes and interactions that are his true business. If his people are strange in visible behavior and audible speech, they are central in psychological reality. To put it another way, he avoids clichés, but he hits upon traditional patterns of human conduct (or, in other words, archetypes without stereotypes).

A Fool for Love (1983) does happen to involve two generations: a love in the second in some sense duplicates a love in the first, or carries it on in a new dimension. But the stress is on the present rather than on influence or recurrency (as in plays about the house). In the past a married man had a long affair with another woman. On a visit to the second household, he once took along a young son, who thus met the daughter of the other woman. Half-brother and half-sister fell in love then, and the main burden of the play is the dramatization of the intense and enduring feeling between them—a feeling that survives long absences by the man, his other affairs, and much jealous quarreling and recriminating and even physical blows when the pair are periodically together (for the meeting that provides the action of the play, the man claims to have driven 2840 miles). They could be a common-life Romeo and Juliet who, without external bafflements to face, have lived on into young adulthood. But the big difference is that the affair is technically incestuous or close to it. Shepard is not only working in a traditional domain of intense passion, but he successfully creates a sense of mysterious bonding that, though it is not explicitly defined, makes the stormy but apparently unbreakable relationship seem inevitable. Unlike John Ford in his 'Tis Pity She's a Whore Shepard is not setting up rival moralities and exploring an issue, and neither character is case-making. There is no theoretical issue at all. Shepard is simply dramatizing the powerful feelings that are the central determinants of two lives. In dealing with an ancient theme, Shepard once again finds a fresh and original staging: the ghost of the father is present throughout, occasionally making interpretative comments: and the inner human tempests are weirdly set off by flashing headlights from without the building, shots, broken glass, and other disturbing effects.

Oddly enough the Romeo-and-Juliet analogy that one thinks of vaguely in reading A Fool for Love is also suggested by A Lie of the Mind (1986), which centers on a young couple and hostile families. On each side, however, we also see the intrafamilial conflicts and animosities that give the play an exceptional complexity of plot. But the more fundamental Shakespeare analogy is with Othello: Jake unjustifiably jealous of Beth (the Cassio is Jake's innocent brother Frankie; there is no Iago), so badly beats Beth up that he thinks he has killed her. He does not know the truth, since both stay with their families in different communities, isolated in the sense that no one seems to think of ordinary communication (mythical wastelands, as it were, where vagueness of outer identity perhaps intensifies inner realities). Othello's primitive action leads to his death; Jake's to a morose, testy withdrawal that is close to moral or spiritual death. Beth recovers from the beating but seems a strange inhabitant of another world—her form of mental death. The fabric of the play is woven of three strands of action: the life in Jake's family, the life in Beth's family, and the interplay of these two households, side by side on the stage, but mysteriously distant in the reality represented. Each family exists in a mode of disorder generated by Jake's wife-battering—a cohesion without coherence as they stick together in constant indeterminate disharmonies. Jake, moody, edgy, combative, in effect a cripple/invalid, is quarreled over by his mother Lorraine and his sister Sally; they really compete for the role of nurse, caretaker, baby-sitter, and intimate. There is a strong suggestion of incestuous feeling, such as A Fool for Love centered in; and since one of the female rivals is the man's mother, we feel the presence of the Oedipus story. In the other family Beth's brother Mike is so tirelessly and violently vengeful against Jake that it is difficult not to sense an incestuous feeling for his sister. Again we have ancient patterns of human behavior in modern dress.

The action takes a new turn when Jake's younger brother Frankie, determined to find out the truth about Beth, sets out on a mythic action, the quest, and actually reaches Beth's family home. But he is accidentally shot in the leg by Beth's father Baylor, and he mysteriously becomes a permanent patient-inmate in Beth's house, untreated, the infected wound making him constantly weaker and sicker. Beth is attracted to him, but he resists valiantly and pleads the cause of her husband, whom Beth seems not to remember. Then Jake follows Frankie in the quest for Beth, finds the place, apparently worn out, is captured by Beth's brother Mike, and is so beaten up physically and mentally by Mike that he becomes virtually a beast on all fours. Mike lets him into the house only to give a Mike-dictated apology to Beth. She does not recognize him and turns again to ailing Frankie. Thus the life-in-death termini of jealous Othello and sweet Desdemona. And Beth's parents and Jake's mother and sister drift off into striking irrelevancies for which Shepard has an extraordinary flair. They are, as it were, checking out of the myth and perhaps achieving a peace, all passion spent.

The intrafamilial tensions that turn partly on semiunderground psychological attractions have one other manifestation. We have seen Jake's mother wanting virtually to move in with him as nurse and caretaker and thus to achieve an intimacy perhaps beyond her own understanding of it. The Oedipus outline is filled in a little more with a flashback in which Sally describes to her mother Lorraine the death of their husband-and-father down in Mexico years ago. Jake and his father had got into a mad relentless competition of drinking in bars and racing from one to another on public streets. The father had staggered, fallen, been run over by a truck, and killed. Sally says outright that her brother had “killed” her father. Since this happened on a public highway, we have a literal replay, with variations in detail, of the Oedipus-Laius confrontation in which Oedipus murdered Laius. And later Oedipus-Jake is desired by Jocasta-Lorraine. While portraying family strife, Shepard virtually reenacts a great myth of forbidden, but persisting, relationships.

We cannot help wondering whether A Lie of the Mind (where lie could mean both set and falsehood) is a more overt treatment of a theme that had been lingering in Shepard's imagination. In one action the later play reminds us of a much earlier one—The Holy Ghostly (1970)—in which a father and son meet in a desert. The son is supposed to be helping his father against ghosts, but they quarrel, in a manner a little reminiscent of Goneril/Regan against Lear. The son shoots the father, but the singular thing is that the father is already dead. It could be a soft-pedaled version of the patricide that occurs, albeit only in a later report, in A Lie of the Mind.

V

Though True West preceded A Fool for Love and A Lie of the Mind, I deal with it last because it is very rich in traditional and mythic materials and uniquely combines these with some uproarious farcical effects. Shepard remarkably brings together the family theme, the myth of the artist that has attracted him periodically, and some rollicking fun.

The recurrent family theme takes a special form: the rivalry and antagonism of two brothers. Holed up temporarily in his mother's home in southern California, Austin is trying to complete a film script that has been tentatively accepted by a cliché-bound Hollywood mogul, Saul Kimmer. Austin's brother Lee drops in from his desert hangout and abrasively and contentiously asserts himself as a rival film-concocter, a connoisseur of the “true West.” He brazenly takes over Saul Kimmer, sells Saul his plot idea, and thus gets Austin's offering rejected. The pattern becomes clear: Shepard is doing the Cain-vs.-Abel myth, with Saul Kimmer as a wonderfully vulgar version of the God who evaluates the brothers' offerings. Things take an unbiblical turn when the brothers get drunk and trash their mother's house (she is a delightful ironic observer who, instead of going to pieces in the mélee, quietly opts for a motel). Shepard innovates by merging or at least alternating the Cain and Abel types. Lee's nasty truculence suggests Cain, and Austin's mild self-possession, Abel. But drink turns the apparently unflappable Austin into an agile aggressor; he wraps some telephone wire around Lee's neck and extorts various promises from him. Lee, the winner with God Saul, is not killed, but we do not know what will happen in the hostilities that appear to lie ahead. Nothing is prefabricated.

Shepard extraordinarily unites the Cain-Abel myth with his recurrent subject, the myth of the artist; and in this fourth treatment of it he really approaches it from three directions. There is some reminiscence of the Angel City formulation: the corruption of the artist by Hollywood, personified in Saul's mechanical money-making formulae of judgment. When Lee first boasts about his original “true West” ideas for a script, he seems to be, perhaps, a speaker for Shepard's own originality. But Saul's approval of Lee's ideas tells us that they are only the conventional in another key. The war is not between disinterested and profitable art, but between two money-making competitors, with different formulae.

Then Shepard explores the myth of the artist from a wholly different point of view. Lee has an idea, not a script, and he wants to pay the technician Austin to turn his rough plot into usable studio form. Austin refuses, Lee takes on the task himself, and what he really wrestles with is this: the relation between raw materials and artistic form, between the true West as he has seen or imagined it, and the representation of it in the verbal and dramatic medium. In part the problem is his own ineptness and impatience, but the underlying issue is the larger one dramatized in Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author: the disjunction between reality as experienced or perceived, and the transfiguration of it by the artistic medium that has its own conventions: the resistance of history to poetic incarnation. Lee is so frustrated by this problem that he bashes his typewriter—a splendid farcical expression of revenge for his defeat by an intractable problem of art.

The third phase of Shepard's myth of the artist has to do with the romantic sense of the artist as outsider, a Rimbaud in at least petty matters. Thus Lee prefers stealing to buying things, and he arrives at his mother's home with a stolen radio. He derides Austin for not achieving such symbolic proofs of creative independence. Nettled, Austin rambles through the neighborhood and returns with ten stolen toasters—a charming stage send-up of Genet anti-society-ism, especially when the toasters go into action and spray toast all over the place (a masterly scene in the Ayckbourn idiom).

Finally True West makes two allusions to a social myth—the myth of the rustic paradise, an innocent Arcadian refuge from the corruptions of the world. As the brothers get drunker, Austin begins to feel that he would like to join Lee in the desert for a simpler and better life. Lee argues that it simply wouldn't do for Austin: the out-of-town world is only for those who know it, not a never-never land for disillusioned urbanites. And finally Lee, anticipating his own return to the desert, makes a gesture at assembling supplies. As for dishes, he wants china, not plastic. Walden is best when you have the best from home. These are neat puncturings of an aspect of the romantic primitivism that emerged in the latter eighteenth century: the dream of the pure golden life in unspoiled nature.

Shepard not only employs a wide range of mythic materials in this play and does it with great originality, but he also innovates by treating traditional materials with rich comic and indeed farcical devices. To have certain recurrent issues and ideas bandied about by a pair of drunks is a beguiling way of avoiding scholastic solemnity without denying the significance of the issues.

Its range of theme and tone makes True West a good closer to this survey. I have been trying to place an original artist on some ground that will neither make his uniqueness solipsistic nor ascribe to him a style that too much narrows the broad range of his raw materials. His surfaces, strange events on stage, his surprises and apparent inconsecutiveness, his mysteries, his upsettings of standard theatrical expectations—all these are individual enough. But they are not singular: in them we can see a theatrical tradition—antirealist, symbolic, absurdist—that in one form or another has had almost a century of life. Still Shepard goes on to add some novelty to familiar new rules, the rules that deny traditional rules. So, in seeking to place him, we sometimes identify him as a wholly American voice, one that harps on specifically American frailties. This cuts him back too much. Of course he uses American scenes and ways, notably those of the West, as his foreground materials. In this he does only what every writer does—speaks through the ways of life that he himself knows best. But they are not what the plays are “about,” any more than southern novelists, using southern scenes and characters, are simply making statements about the South. The regional materials are agencies of a vision of realities not bound by geography. I have tried to identify the beyond-the-regional, beyond-the-national substance of Shepard's work by showing how his plots repeatedly embody materials of a mythic order—literally in the Icarus play, all but literally in the plays that present or imply oedipal relationships; and recognizably in the plot that turns on the troubles of the house, the war within the bonds of kinship, especially in the Cain-and-Abel rivalry, and in the various plays that present the ways and ideals of the artist—his relations with the economic world, with the raw materials to be transformed into art, with other artists, with himself. Such matters were once called “timeless” or “universal,” terms now too sonorous for an age deep in various skepticisms. But, call them what we will, they are realities beyond ordinary boundaries of space and time, and Shepard is drawn to them, deny them though he may seem to do by a singularly vivacious unexpectedness of the dramatic medium.