ROSS WETZSTEON
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significant motivation, of cause and effect-moments of human
destiny strung out like beads on a string. This is what we mean,
perhaps, when we say we 'understand' a work of literary art. Yet
each decade brings us the conviction that this order is no longer
present to the serious writer. ...The episodic, the obscurely
related, the collection of images , moods: connections in fiction and
also in drama have become like those of poetry. Tone and style hold
the work together, create whatever emotional effect it will have on
us ." Jacques Levy, who directed several early Shepard productions ,
put it more simply: "Sam is more interested in
doing
something to
audiences than in saying something to them." Shepard's plays are
not about what takes place on the stage, in short, but about what
takes place in the audience. For if you leave the theatre not
understanding the events, you also leave-and this is Shepard's
great achievement-feeling the emotions they aroused.
Shepard has thus challenged the conventions of theatre as
provocatively as Brecht or Beckett (this will seem hyperbolic only to
those who haven't seen the profound impact his style has had on the
younger playwrights of our noncommercial theatre - and his char–
acteristically American anti-intellectualism explains why he has
done so without an accompanying theoretical superstructure. To put
it obliquely: as Shepard wrote in
La Turista,
symptoms are "things
that show on the outside what the inside might be up to" - and it is
his genius to provide us not with the symptoms but with the disease,
not with the outside but with the inside. To put it more theoretically:
Shepard's theatre creates a new vision of space (emotional rather
than physical), a new vision of time (immediate rather than
continuous), a new vision of character (spontaneous rather than
coherent), and a new vision of story (consciousness rather than
behavior).
In one of the rare comments on his own work, he wrote in the
introduction to
Angel City:
"Instead of the idea of a 'whole character'
with logical motives behind his behavior which the actor submerges
himself into, he should consider instead a fractured whole with bits
and pieces of character flying off the central theme. In other words,
more in terms of collage construction or jazz improvisation."
Difficult? On the contrary, seeing his plays is precisely as easy
as listening to music - and it's no wonder, not only because so many
of his characters are musicians, but because he once wanted to be a
rock star. "My work is not written in granite," he says. "It's like
playing a piece of music.
It
goes out in the air and dissolves forever."
Difficult? On the contrary, we respond to his plays not by
