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PARTISAN REVIEW
winners of horse races); often obliquely (the musicians in
Melodrama
Play, Cowboy Mouth, Tooth
oj
Crime,
and
Suicide in B Flat);
and twice
directly (the screenwriters in
Angel City
and
True West).
One of the
characteristic figures of the media century - from Franz Kafka to
Woody Allen - has been the artist who publicly exposes his deepest
feelings while at the same time ruthlessly concealing his private life.
As Shepard has said about his own early work: "I was very uptight
about making a whole public thing out of something that you do
privately. I felt that by having the play become public, it was almost
like giving it away or something."
Shepard's genius has been to see in this theme a metaphor for
contemporary life, to transform what could easily become an artist's
self-pity into an exploration of our paradoxical need for both individ–
uality and belonging. Unlike most twentieth-century writers,
Shepard retains a belief in the necessity, if not the possibility, of
heroism - and his hero's greatest challenge is to confront the psychic
traumas which result when our culture blurs the distinction between
the integrity of the self and the compromises of community .
Again and again in Shepard's plays, the characters are shaman
figures - cowboys , criminals, rock stars, screenwriters, or mythic
American figures themselves (Paul Bunyan, Mae West, Yahoodi)–
who embark on a search for emotional freedom and spiritual iden–
tity . (His plays are often referred to as "trips," in fact - not so much
the hallucinations of drugs as the quests of myth.) Striving to escape
the confinements of the flesh, the family, the culture, his heroes–
who frequently refer to themselves as "escape artists" - sometimes
reach a momentary ecstasy of self-fulfillment; more often, they are
forced to surrender their private vision to the service of public com–
merce. (In the later plays in particular, the hero's quest is increas–
ingly thwarted. When this hero is a mythic figure from America's
past-usually a cowboy-he is victimized by a civilization which
turns our history into cultural debris. When he is an artist, he is spir–
itually kidnapped, his gift corrupted, his soul poisoned . "You got the
genius," the gambler tells the dreamer in
Geography,
"somebody else
got the power.") In either case, the shaman figure allows Shepard to
explore the paradoxes at the core of his consciousness–
the contradictory desire for self and community, for separateness
and connection, for escape and family . (And the paradoxes contain
their
own
paradoxes - for self, separateness, and escape may dis–
orient as well as liberate; and community, connection, and family
may nourish as well as confine.)
