ROSS WETZSTEON
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Of course the conflict takes place both between and within indi–
viduals. Again and again in his work-culminating in the brothers
in
True West-
two characters do battle over the turf of the soul, and
the shifts of identity, the shifts of power between them, so confusing
to the narrative mind, make perfect sense when regarded not as con–
flicts between characters but as contradictions of the spirit.
In the last few years, the Shepard hero has begun to realize that
his adventure, his trip, his quest, eventually and inevitably leads
him back to the family - to the place from which he originally
escaped. The odyssey, as we've known since the Greeks, is a circle.
Curse
of
the Starving Class,
Shepard's greatest play, the American
Cherry Orchard,
is superficially a melodrama-when we learn that the
deed to the house belongs to the man twirling his mustache, we can
almost see the pot coming to a boil. But on a deeper level, it is the
greatest "family play" since
Long Day's Journey
-
the besotted and
bankrupt father still dreaming the American dream of redemption
tomorrow, the mother in search of a tawdry respectability, the chil–
dren cursed by their sterile inheritance. The play's dominating
images - an empty refrigerator, a lamb infested with maggots–
resonate with the mysterious familiarity of religious rituals. But the
poignancy and power of the play come from Shepard's recognition
that the trip forward ultimately becomes a trip backward , that his
hero's quest for spiritual liberation must circle back to its beginnings .
He has no choice but to confront his past, to accept his blood and
strive to transcend it-he has no choice, yet paradoxically his free–
dom lies in this very recognition .
"I have American scars on my brain," Shepard has written. But
it was only in England - where he lived in the years just before writ–
ing his family plays- that he "found out what it really means to be
an American. The more distant you are from it, the more the impli–
cations of what you grew up with start to emerge . You can't escape,
that's the whole thing, you can't. You finally find yourself in a situa–
tion where, like that's the way it is - you can't get out of it. But
there's always that impulse toward another kind of world ...."
Shepard returns to the family in
Buried Child,
and again directly
confronts the terrifying contradiction at its core - the fact that it
simultaneously defines our being and denies our existence. Vince
returns home after a long absence: no one recognizes him - not even
his father - and yet he is finally acknowledged as the heir. In a plot
that is Greek in its implacability and hayseed in its comedy, his
inheritance includes "the dark secret" - the murdered baby buried in
