256
PARTISAN REVIEW
interpreting their plots or analyzing their characters or dissecting
their themes, but simply by experiencing their resonance.
On the surface, for example,
Icarus's Mother
seems to be about a
group of people on a beach picnic watching an airplane which sud–
denly crashes into the sea-a pointless anecdote . But the dominant
mood of tension, felt by the audience rather than stated by the
characters, transforms the play into a paranoid poem about the
threat of nuclear destruction. In
Chicago,
bathtub yodeling, fantasies
about fishing, and breathing exercises convey the anguish of a failed
love affair - never explicitly stated in the narration but suffusing
every moment of the apparently random text. The two acts of
La
Turista
each show a character treated by doctors , first Mexican witch
doctors, then American quacks. Again, the narrative level "doesn't
make sense" - it's only when you listen to the emotional tone of the
play that you realize it's dealing with the terrifying helplessness with
which one realizes one is dying, with which one sometimes wishes to
die , with which one, in fact, sometimes wishes to kill- and the
resonance of the title takes us from Mexico to Vietnam.
(Although Shepard was accused throughout the sixties of
inaccessibility, of privatism, of avoiding politics, of ignoring "the
major issues of his time," in addition to nuclear holocaust, sexual
warfare, and the fear of death, his work dealt with such themes as
murder, ambition, betrayal, suicide, incest, rape, madness, govern–
ment conspiracy, the corruption of democratic values, the role of
myth in sustaining culture, the disintegration of the family, the
instability of identity, and, most of all, with the pain of the
individual trying to live in a community - a catalogue of concerns
far broader in scope than any of the so-called committed writers of
his generation.)
The early plays were structured around monologues and
images rather than dialogue and narrative. On the surface,
Shepard's monologues seem at first to be nothing but pointless
ramblings - driving across the desert at night, drowning and turning
into a fish, skiing faster and faster until one's body begins to
disintegrate . But Shepard realizes that fantasies constitute a great
deal of our conscious life, and that they are thus as real as, and often
more revealing than, our behavior. When his characters embark on
their fantasy soliloquies - and Shepard's exquisite language is both
accurate and inventive, colloquial and poetic, earthy and lyrical–
they are not confusing us with unrealistic leaps of imagination but
directly revealing the reality of their consciousness . In this sense,
Shepard, far from being obscure, is the most purely naturalistic
