254
PARTISAN REVIEW
seventies, "vibrations" the poet Michael McClure has called them,
abstract collages consisting largely of lyrical monologues, stunning
stage imagery, and a sense of paranoid despair, but devoid of
conventional characters or stories. The second group includes
parables of the ways the artist must pursue his emotional identity
and spiritual freedom even if it results in isolation and betrayal, the
ways the poet-visionary is simultaneously essential and intolerable to
his society. Finally, there are Shepard's two great "family plays,"
Curse
rif
the Starving Class
and
Buried Child,
in which the hero, after his
visionary quest, returns home to discover whether his new found
knowledge can redeem his past-and that of his country. (Dividing
Shepard's work into superficial categories like "the cowboy plays" or
"the rock plays," as most critics do, mistakes subject matter for
thematic obsession - a crucial distinction
In
understanding
Shepard's vision of theatre.)
The difficulty most theatregoers had with the first group of
plays, the abstract collages, was that they didn't seem to be "about"
anything- that is, unlike most plays, they weren't about their
characters (who didn't seem recognizable, who didn't have that
bundle of traits which we add together and label personality), and
they weren't about their stories (which seemed random,
disconnected, even non-existent) . But once one realized that these
plays were about pure emotional, psychological, or spiritual
states - presented directly to the audience, conveyed in image and
tone rather than packaged in "character" and "story" - they became
as lucid as dreams. As critic Michael Smith once wrote of Shepard's
work: "It's like real life. You can't tell what's going on ."
Shepard himself, usually reluctant to discuss his work , has
occasionally alluded to this process . In 1974, he told a
Theatre
Quarterly
interviewer: "The fantastic thing about theatre is that it can
make something be seen that's invisible, and that's where my interest
in theatre is - that you can be watching this thing happening with
actors and costumes and light and set and language, and even plot,
and something emerges from beyond that, and that's the image part
that I'm looking for, that's the sort of added dimension." And in
Angel
City,
when the producer asks the screenwriter to doctor his script, the
screenwriter replies that it doesn't need a new character or a new
story angle, but something else, something magical, some "force ."
And it is precisely this force, this "added dimension," that
distinguishes Shepard's plays .
"Incident after incident," Elizabeth Hardwick has written of
Shepard's work, "each growing out of the other, united in a chain of
