Shepard is one of the most stimulating figures in the off-and-off-off-Broadway theater; in Red Cross, he conjures up a day in the estival life of a young couple in a forest cabin. She wakes up with a vision of her head splitting open someday on a ski slope; while she goes off to do the shopping, he entertains the maid who comes in from town with tales of his crab lice that have, he claims, bothered him for years. He also gives her a swimming lesson on top of two parallel beds. When his wife (or companion) returns, she has itchy privates and he, suddenly, a cracked-open skull. The transference of ailments is rather perfunctory and little more than a disembodied coup de théâtre. But the scene with the maid is spectacular dementia…. This is a surreal ontogeny (or phylogeny) in reverse, a weirdly alive regression throbbing and thrashing about on the stage….

At times an inspired, prophetic hallucination takes over. It is an infection caught from an absurd world; transmuted, it makes the theater break out in a rash of genius.