'
Ross Wetzsteon
SAM SHEPARD: ESCAPE ARTIST
Novelists, poets, painters, and composers are frequently
"discovered" years, decades, even centuries, after their deaths. But
with the single exception of Georg Buchner, no great playwright has
ever gone unrecognized in his own time. The reason for this, of
course, is that theatre is the most social of the arts - the playwright's
vision, no matter how "difficult" or "ahead of its time," must strike his
audience with a sense of immediacy.
In
seeming contradiction, one of the aspects of genius is to alter
the conventions of the art, and thus, in a sense, to create a new
audience. But the fact that this happens far more quickly in theatre
than in the other arts can be demonstrated by the work of Samuel
Beckett-when
Waitingfor Codot
opened in New York in 1956, it was
greeted with utter bewilderment by even our most astute critics, yet
within a decade even college freshmen realized it was a radically
simple play, that Beckett's apparent difficulty was less the result of
adding layers of complexity than of subtracting almost everything
we had thought of as essential to theatre.
Sam Shepard, whose first plays were produced before he was
twenty, has also radically expanded our theatrical consciousness,
and while for many years his plays seemed inaccessible to all but a
small Off-Off-Broadway coterie, gradua!ly he too created his own
audience. And recognition of his stature has begun to follow.
Although he has never had a Broadway production, in 1979 he won
the Pulitzer Prize for
Buried Child,
and his most recent play,
True
West,
finally makes it clear that Shepard, at the age of 37, is already,
with Eugene O'Neill, one of the two greatest playwrights in the
history of the American theatre.
To appreciate properly
True West-
Shepard's first play since
receiving the Pulitzer, and, not so ironically, a work dealing in part
with the corruption of artistic vision by mass culture - it is first
necessary to understand why his work was so long mistakenly
regarded as obscure.
Shepard's plays can be divided roughly into three categories.
First were the early plays, mostly one-acts, from 1963 to the mid-
