Everything about Sam Shepard's "Operation Sidewinder" is important to our theatre. More than any recent major production, it is built upon exactly the style and the mentality energizing the youth movement in America today. It is conceived and written in the pop style, a sort of cross between pop art and McLuhanism. It is very cool. It incorporates this sense and look with those of pop art … and pop—in the same sense—music. It is very American in its feel, its concerns, its attitudes again a reflection of what's going on.

For all these things, Shepard's new play is important because it at last brings onto a stage what is so energetic in America today, giving the theatre a chance to be modern, to be relevant, to draw back those young audiences so long-lost (for good reason). It is important because its point of view, and the way that point of view must be presented, are very accessible to the theatre—they can make the theatre as new as a non-linear penny…. Everything is right about "Operation Sidewinder" except that it falls apart.

The title stands for a crucial symbol, "sidewinder" being the name of a rattlesnake found in the American Southwest and also the name of a computer in the play. Shepard, in true-blue McLuhan style, sees the computer not as an enemy but as the very heart of electric-zap communication, a kind of modern magic reality. I see it that way too, so we're cool so far.

We're not so cool when Shepard puts this idea through a couple of pages of comic strip, weaving it into American Indian ritualism….

This is a play intensely and mystically in love with America—a play that finds something very powerful and great in the pure artifacts of this country, whether they are in the past of our Indians or in the present of our computers.

[This] is a great and true idea but even then it is only a vague background to the play, which exists mainly just to exist. It is more than terribly disappointing to have found Shepard incapable of making everything fit….