SOURCE: Smith, Susan Harris. “Trying to Like Sam Shepard: Or, the Emperor's New Dungarees.” Contemporary Theatre Review 8, no. 3 (1998): 31-40.

When Eric Bentley tackled the problem of Eugene O'Neill's prominence, popularity and decline in his testy essay, “Trying to Like O'Neill”, in 1952, he began with a curse: “It would be nice to like O'Neill. He is the leading American playwright; damn him, damn all; and in damning all is a big responsibility. It is tempting to damn all the rest and make of O'Neill an exception. He is an exception in so many ways”. Commending O'Neill for his reticence, self-respect and independence from commercial pressure, Bentley wrote, “In a theatre, which chiefly attracts idiots and crooks he was a model of good sense and honor” (331).

Bentley attributed O'Neill's fall from grace, first, to press puffery, which had made him a popular, national celebrity and, second, to O'Neill's own vaulting ambition to take on the big question of America. Celebrity, Bentley argued, altered O'Neill's focus as a playwright and resulted in a diminution of his talent. Of O'Neill's celebrity, Bentley complained that “in 1946, he was raised to the American peerage: his picture was on the cover of Time magazine. The national playwright was interviewed by the national press. It was his chance to talk rot and be liked for it” (1952: 331).

Bentley was even harsher about O'Neill's ambition, his desire to be eloquent, to be profound, to create a Big Work, to make America into Athens. O'Neill suffered, as Bentley so sharply put it, from “cultural gas” (342). For Bentley, as O'Neill moved away from “the humbler forms of American life” and a realistic and melodramatic mode to the “rotten fruit of unreality”, “obvious and unimaginative symbolism” and “grandiloquent lugubriousness” (334), he was heralded by what Bentley termed “the Broadway intelligentsia”, the “subintelligentsia in the theatre world”, “the realm of false culture”. According to Bentley, the willingly gullible public, brow-beaten by “propaganda and publicity”, acclaimed O'Neill “for strengthening the pavement of hell”. Author and audience needed each other to be mutually convinced that they were both concerned with “the crying questions of our time […] a writer like O'Neill does not give them the optimism of an ‘American century’, but he provides profundities galore, and technical innovations, and (as he himself says) Mystery” (341).

In conclusion, Bentley absolved O'Neill of his complicity with the odd rationale that O'Neill was “seduced” (341). “If one does not like O'Neill”, Bentley suggested, “it is not really he that one dislikes: it is our age—of which like the rest of us he is more the victim than the master” (345). So, to recapitulate, as Bentley saw it, O'Neill's decline could be attributed to four factors: the celebrity factor, the Big American topic factor, the move away from realism to unreality and victimization by the age.

We have been convened to look at Sam Shepard's current problematic situation and, because I come not as a specialist in Sam Shepard, but as a historian of modern American drama, I want to take the long view, that is from a historical perspective stretching back to the late nineteenth century and offer some reasons, first, for Shepard's early acclaim and, second, for his repositioning which, as I suggest in my title, may be deserved. I should note that I am not the first to compare Eugene O'Neill and Sam Shepard: Henry Schvey recently analysed the two as being nationally prominent and as sharing thematic concerns, but I make different uses of the comparison. I will argue that just as O'Neill's reputation mutated, so, too, Sam Shepard now is caught in the convergence of a number of factors, no one of which could account for his diminished reputation but which, taken together, contextualize him differently than he was in previous decades and which, I contend, actually are part of the historical patterning of American drama about which I want to make three points.

First, American drama, of course, does not exist. What has been called “American” drama is a narrow body of English language texts marked by a perpetually shifting conflation of American essentialism, amplified by Frederick Jackson Turner's “frontier thesis”, fixed on moral, progressive and didactic purposes, concerned with domestic and nativist subjects, focused on masculine protagonists, and dependent on largely realistic dramaturgy. With the exception of the realistic dramaturgy (which I will get to later), most of Sam Shepard's work places him precisely in this realm of “American” drama.

Doris Auerbach is typical of the majority of critics when she identifies Sam Shepard as a writer whose patronymic is “mythmaker,” because his subject is America, the dream betrayed, even though she also locates him in Off and Off-Off Broadway, that is, in an unrestrained, non-commercial theatre. Of his commitment to language, she says that “he came into the foreground of the American theatre scene when the written aspects of drama were being downplayed in favor of ritual, performance, and the non-verbal. He brought the word back into the theatre. […] The heart of the theatrical experience for Shepard is language” (1982: 5). Expansive and experimental though Shepard's language practices are, I would contend that his thematic concerns are narrow. I do agree with Auerbach who characterizes Shepard's subject matter as “simply this—America” (1). “He portrays a man's world—brutal and cold, where adversaries struggle endlessly for domination and power over each other. The female characters are of no help to the protagonists, for they are mere macho fantasies of familiar female stereotypes, castrating mothers, and devouring sex goddesses, who offer no hope for transcendence” (6).

Sam Shepard's plays, for all their experimental novelty, still fit tidily into the thematic mainstream of American literature. The topic of the estranged intellectual's return to a rural home is a common trope for many writers over the past century, from Willa Cather to Thomas Wolfe. Take, for instance, a Hamlin Garland short story, in Main-Travelled Roads (1891), a collection of stories about the harsh life of the American farmer in Wisconsin and Iowa. In “Up the Coulé” a successful actor and playwright returns to the threatened family farm and his angry brother for whom the farm is a prison. Shades of Buried Child!

Second, not only does Shepard write within the received autochthonic American literary tradition, he also fills drama's need for a figurehead. The historical narratives of American drama show it to have been in a metaphorically bi-polar and self-contradictory state of either perpetual emergence and adolescence or infancy and death needing either resuscitation or salvation. The infantile and morbid states have been common tropes for critics from the beginning of the large-scale institutionalizing, anthologizing, and professionalizing of drama as an academic discipline, which began around 1886. A few examples must suffice to demonstrate the pervasiveness of this metaphorical approach. In 1886, drama was dead and ought to stay that way as far as William Dean Howells was concerned but for Brander Matthews in 1888, the drama was only on the verge of dying. The drama was dawning for John Corbin in 1907, in infancy for Walter Eaton in 1908, insurgent for Thomas Dickinson in 1917, in adolescence for Edward Goodman in 1910, just developing for William Archer in 1920, in decline for George Jean Nathan in 1921, moribund for Virgil Geddes in 1931, on the brink of death for Louis Kronenberger in 1935, dying for Samuel Barron in 1935, dying for Paul Green in 1943, at ebb for Eric Bentley in The Kenyon Review in the spring of 1945 but fully dead for Eric Bentley in Partisan Review in the same spring. The critics, sensitive to the shortcomings of the contemporary playwrights who were always being compared unflatteringly to their European counterparts, anxiously scanned the horizon for the saviour who must be emerging to redeem American drama from its provincialism, crudeness and lack of poetry.

For Barrett Clark, as for most modern critics, December 20, 1920, marked the moment at which a respectable American drama was born. On that day, Eugene O'Neill's Beyond the Horizon, which would win the Pulitzer Prize the following year, opened at a special matinee at the Morosco Theatre. Travis Bogard, O'Neill's chronicler, observes that “it was a signal, the first important view of the American drama” (1972: 117). So great was the impact of O'Neill on the American theatre and so anxious were the critics to locate one purely American playwright of whom they could be proud, that the waters parted for O'Neill almost from the start of his career. In 1924, Arthur Hobson Quinn, dizzy with relief, wrote of O'Neill that “he is too great a dramatist to be classified or to be placed in a school of playwrights. He, like Napoleon, is himself an ancestor” (7). Given that this judgment was made on the basis of The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape, expressionist plays heavily indebted to the European movement about which O'Neill learned through Kenneth Macgowan, and on Beyond the Horizon and Anna Christie, domestic dramas which owe much to O'Neill's extensive interest in Ibsen, Quinn's isolating claim is an index of the critics' urgent desire to identify a native and nativist playwright.

As America had by 1946 made of O'Neill the “banshee Shakespeare” in Bernard Shaw's apt phrasing, so Sam Shepard, the junk yard dog of motel parking lots, became himself a cultural commodity when, in 1985, he was placed on the long-vacant throne, the cover of Newsweek (Nov. 11, 1985). Only a few months after his coronation as figurehead, Shepard, in an article in Vogue magazine, disingenuously shrugged off the attention, if not the acclaim, noting that “I just look on those as publicity gimmicks. Journalism is so hard-up for heroes that it has to create them. It's an American tradition. We invent heroes all the time” (qtd. in Fay, 1985: 216).

My third point is that in his self-conscious public statements as well as in his plays not only does Shepard dramatize the American males' “angst”, he also clearly genders playwriting as a masculine enterprise. Literary history shows that those who created the idea of American drama, that is a nativist and indigenous body of plays, have needed not only figureheads, but also specifically male figureheads; hence William Dunlap was called the “Father” of American drama and Howard Bronson was named the “Dean”. If O'Neill was the saviour for modern American drama, Shepard has been the second coming.

The history of American drama reveals it to have been shadowed by explicit fears of being feminized. For instance, in 1915 Brander Matthews and others were energetically authorizing the writing of drama as masculine, scientific, vital and dynamic. At that moment, for the men who were creating the disciplinary field and the canon, the history of the drama in America necessitated this forceful strategy. As Herbert Brown detailed in a survey of the didactic sensibility in eighteenth-century American drama, “sentimentality reigned triumphant on the English stage from 1760 to 1800, the period of the beginnings of our native professional drama” (Brown, 1932: 47). That sentiment and moralizing were understood to “gratify feminine fancy” increased the sense of urgency for academics, such as Matthews who wanted to legitimate the writing of American drama as a masculine profession.

Matthews asserted that not only could women not handle “largeness in topic,” but also they were incapable of “strictness in treatment. […] And here we come close to the most obvious explanation for the dearth of female dramatists—in the relative incapacity of women to build a plan, to make a single whole compounded of many parts, and yet dominated in every detail by but one purpose” (1916: 120). After subordinating women to the ranks of “decorators” and elevating men to the scientific realm of “architects”, Matthews concluded that “women are likely to have only a definitely limited knowledge of life” and are also “deficient in the faculty of construction” (1916: 124).

George Pierce Baker was also active in gendering American playwriting as a masculine activity. Even though his most promising students were women, according to his biographer, Wisner Payne Kinne, about 1910 Baker “became impatient that the preponderant interest in what he cared so much about was feminine” (1968: 154). Most of his audience when he spoke publicly was female, specifically club women. In fact, Baker turned to a women's club, the MacDowell Club of New York, to fund a fellowship in playwriting at Harvard (Kinne, 1968: 155). That John Frederick Ballard, one of the first masters of arts, won the Craig Prize and had a Broadway success with Believe Me, Xantippe!, proved to Baker that he would be instrumental in producing male playwrights for the American theatre.

This historical context for the nativist gendering of American playwriting makes it clear why, given that ever since O'Neill's death the press had been sniffing about for his successor, those who needed a man at the helm of American drama embraced Sam Shepard with unrestrained eagerness. Consider the other potential candidates and their qualifications. Tennessee Williams's regionalism and homosexuality excluded him from consideration, Arthur Miller was a Jewish leftist, and neither were as prolific as Shepard, who, like Mozart who said that he wrote music as freely as he urinated, has stretched credibility with his volume of plays. I also should observe that though Megan Terry can match Sam Shepard for both volume and experimental inventiveness, she is discounted automatically because she is a woman.

When Shepard won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for Buried Child, he safely could be embraced and sanctified by the middle-class and middle-brow audience he vilified in his plays. Now, the “tall, dark stranger”, trumpeted by Jack Kroll in Newsweek in 1985 as “an American fantasy”, “America's cowboy laureate” with “million-dollar movie bankability”, the “fascinating, complex, even explosive” once-unwashed phenomenon who had burst onto the popular culture scene trailing clouds of prairie dust all the way from Paris appeared to be wearing O'Neill's neglected crown (Kroll: 68).

Like giddy guests hurling rice at a wedding, the profligate critics showered Shepard with superlatives: “the new American hero” (Pete Hamill), “the most exciting talent in the movie world” (Marsha Norman), “the most talented of his generation” (Stanley Kauffmann), and “the quintessential American playwright” (Bonnie Marranca). The Partisan Review described him as one of the two greatest dramatists of the American theatre (the other being O'Neill). Robert Brustein called Shepard “America's leading playwright” (1983: 25). Perhaps even more noteworthy is the fact that The New York Review of Books, which rarely deigns to consider drama, let alone American drama, has published two articles on Shepard, one by Elizabeth Hardwick in 1968 and the other by Robert Mazzocco in 1985. More than merely a talented playwright who pleases drama and theatre critics, therefore, Sam Shepard is a cultural phenomenon who fulfills national expectations and roles that have a high place in our desiderata: he is a figure who seems to embody the emergent opposition to commercial theatre and bourgeois hegemony and yet is attractively packaged as a movie star.

Of Sam Shepard's complicity in the celebrity game, David Wyatt, in a recent issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly, notes that Shepard “wants to be a star” (1992: 352) and, as a consequence, has participated in a “bifurcation” of himself: the actor who has become a media-driven, common commodity and the writer who “continues to perfect his role as one of the country's leading cultural antagonists” (359). Though Wyatt does not make of Shepard the cultural victim that Bentley made of O'Neill, nonetheless, he describes Shepard as a “reluctant celebrity”, as if celebrity could be avoided in a post-Warholian world.

Not all critics have been adulatory and several would no doubt suggest that if Shepard's star seems to have dimmed it is because to begin with it was not very bright. For instance, Harold Clurman, in a consideration of the state of American theatre in 1978, worried that it was threatened by a star system, which was promoting “talented amateurs” like Shepard and Mamet who had not worked at their craft (20). Mimi Kramer, in the characteristically conservative The New Criterion, cast a cold eye on the “mysticism” surrounding Shepard: “Sam Shepard is not as good a playwright as everyone says”. However, even she admits that “on the other hand, he is a far better playwright than one might be led to suppose from the quality of his followers' thought” (53). Given that the title of this paper dresses Shepard in “the emperor's new dungarees”, I must confess to sharply conflicted responses to Shepard's work; on the one hand, I am repelled by the repetitious sexual violence and bored by the narrow thematics but, on the other, I am intrigued by his inventive dramaturgical strategies and richly poetic polyphony.

In the light of what I have just suggested about the gendered nativism of American drama, I offer four possible reasons for Shepard's current status. First, August Wilson's success notwithstanding, American drama continues to be predominantly white though it is no longer predominantly the province of men. The “where are the women playwrights?” question has been answered with the sharp and welcome rise of both feminist and pseudofeminist writers and, though none of these has displaced Shepard, the dominance of a single masculine voice as the voice of America perhaps has been modified. As well, feminist criticism strenuously has resisted and reassessed the Shepardian mystique and message (Bank, 1989; Hart, 1989; Schuler, 1990).

Second, though less forceful to date, are the contiguous, but growing moves to pluralism and multiculturalism in American drama which, with feminism, point to a paradigm shift away from the loner male in a state of angst on the existential prairie. This state of being, repeatedly associated with Sam Shepard, is no longer the quintessential American experience. The masculinist mythic approach characteristic of Shepard is now regarded by cultural critics as ideologically faulty essentializing in a multicultural nation increasingly absorbed in wide social issues, such as immigration, AIDS and urban violence.

Third, the academic shift from literary criticism to postmodern literary theory, in which intentionality has been removed from the creative process and in which an aesthetic appreciation of formal qualities is politically incorrect, has effected a critical and cultural repositioning of Shepard despite the fact that, through his notebooks and interviews, Shepard has proven himself to be a self-consciously creative and highly-intentioned writer. Obviously, this critical shift has altered the course of all critical analyses of drama. For instance, the cultural studies approach, increasingly advocated by theatre historians, if not yet by critics of drama, is devaluing reductionist, theme-driven readings of plays and such readings continue to dominate the Shepard industry.

Fourth, at this moment Shepard's claim on popular attention has been displaced by David Mamet whose ear is tuned to the street, to a closely monitored, if severely limited and xenophobic realism. In his early work, Sam Shepard's dialogue revealed how effectively he listened to his musical imagination; he was a poet to Mamet's tape recorder. Recently, however, Shepard's experimental dramaturgy and exploratory language practices have crept from the cradle of the anti-illusionistic avant-garde to the grave's edge of realism. Given that Bentley deplored O'Neill's move away from realism to the “rotten fruit of unreality”, it is ironic that Shepard's own shift to increasingly realistic playwriting has not been welcomed by the critics. For instance, in his review of A Lie of the Mind for The New Republic, Robert Brustein, noting that Shepard's “most ambitious play to date” is also “the closest he has come to entering the mainstream of American drama”, regards this change as a narrowing of his talent and as reductively and repetitiously autobiographical (1986: 25). Complaining about the “bloated text” and the “domestic style”, Brustein remarks that “Shepard is moving inexorably toward the heart of American realism” and, unfortunately, opening the way for biographical speculation. In short, as far as Brustein is concerned, Shepard the public figure has revealed too much about himself to journalists and lost the “fantastic” and “demonic” power of eruptive and subversive subterraneanisms that were the compelling characteristics of Shepard the destabilizing playwright (26). Though not as harshly, Gerald Weales expressed doubts about A Lie of the Mind because of “the play's extended length and a sense of amorphousness that suggests authorial indifference rather than a desirable ambiguity” (1986: 522). Set against Shepard's early dazzlers, Buried Child, True West, Red Cross and The Tooth of Crime, A Lie of the Mind is, for Weales, “tepid by comparison” (523).

I would add that a related factor in the decline of Shepard's reputation is the increase in popularity of performance art, in which the primacy of visual modes displaces verbal ones. This revitalized theatrical mode has had consequences for Shepard's reputation because his imagistic disruptions or distortions of reality have been largely psychological and have been depicted more through language than by physical stagings.

Shepard's situation is unique and it is so because he is not a realist playwright. Narrow realism, the narcissistic solipsism of dramaturgy, has dominated modern American drama. Despite periodic, brief flirtations with experimental drama which exposes contradictions and the illusion of hegemony, American theatergoers more often pay their admission to return to the reassuring womb of realism. As an expression of assimilation and accommodation, contemporary dramatic realism is a hangover from American Progressivist notions of conciliatory communities and from dramatic practices, which promoted the illusion of a world that could be made workable.

Traditionally, there has been a privileging of realism in the American canon for two reasons: first, the “organic” approach to changes in drama as “progressive”, moving from weakness and simplicity to strength and sophistication, as in the move from melodrama to realism, which most literary critics herald as an “advance”. Second, since the early decades of this century, there was resistance to and suspicion of unrealistic drama as “un-American,” because unrealistic drama was associated with nihilism, Europeanism, Jewish intellectualism, radicalism and leftism. The disturbing and revelatory powers of new dramaturgical perspectives such as expressionism, symbolism, absurdism, which moved beyond a narrow empiricism and which portrayed both the internal and external worlds, truly exposed contradictions and at their best, as they are in some of Shepard's plays, moved beyond a monologistic reality to a dream discourse of poetic polyphony.

So, despite what the critics have seen as his drift towards realism, I would contend that Sam Shepard remains an experimentalist and that, though he fulfills the traditional American literary need for a masculine and autochthonic mythologizer, he continues to remain well outside the dominating discourse of realism. Unlike Bentley, I am not inclined to curse my subject for embracing celebrity and attempting profundities about America nor am I willing to cast him as a victim of the age and exonerate him of complicity in the cultural commodity game. I find it deeply ironic that whereas O'Neill was faulted for his move away from realism, Shepard is being targeted for his move to realism. In the end, I think the real issue here, as I have suggested, is not Sam Shepard, but the larger historical problem of generic tyranny.

Works Cited

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