(2017-07-31) Sam Shepard The Actor Who Could Do Everything

The actor who could do everything

Because we don't exactly live in a Renaissance era, it is difficult for us to imagine what it's like to have Renaissance people (Renaissance Man) in our midst. By these, we mean artists who achieve prominence, or even command, in more than one field. So how to explain someone like Sam Shepard, who was both a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and an Oscar-nominated actor -- not to mention a novelist and short story writer -- in an age unaccustomed to such masterly jack-of-all-tradesmanship? (He just died.)

The idiosyncratic humor and eccentric characterizations of those early plays were still found in "Curse of the Starving Class" (1978), the Pulitzer-winning "Buried Child" (1978), "True West," (1980) "Fool for Love" (1983) and "A Lie of the Mind"(1985).

The Pathfinder

“I just dropped out of nowhere,” Sam Shepard said of his arrival in New York, at nineteen, in the fall of 1963. “It was absolute luck that I happened to be there when the whole Off-Off Broadway movement was starting.” Shepard, a refugee from his father’s farm in California, had spent eight months as an actor travelling the country by bus with a Christian theatre troupe

He got a job busing tables at the Village Gate, and began to write in earnest. “I had a sense that a voice existed that needed expression, that there was a voice that wasn’t being voiced,” he said. “There were so many voices that I didn’t know where to start. I felt kind of like a weird stenographer. . . . There were definitely things there, and I was just putting them down. I was fascinated by how they structured themselves.” Ralph Cook, the Village Gate’s headwaiter, who was a former bit-part actor in Hollywood Westerns and a fellow-Californian, provided him an entry into the downtown scene through a new space he was starting on the Bowery

“For me, there was nothing fun about the sixties,” he said. “Terrible suffering. . . . Things coming apart at the seams.”

In his writing, he gravitated toward rock’s maverick energy; he listed Little Richard among his literary influences, along with Jackson Pollock and Cajun fiddles.

Rhythm led Shepard to character. “When you write a play, you work out like a musician on a piece of music,” he wrote. “You find all the rhythms and the melody and the harmonies and take them as they come.”

In those years, by his own admission, Shepard was “dead set against revisions because I couldn’t stand rewriting.”

Despite his disdain for the uptown theatre scene, his increasingly ambitious plays required larger casts, bigger budgets, better production values, and greater narrative finesse than his downtown habitat encouraged.

Afterward, I was shown responses from the bewildered Lincoln Center subscription audience: “Terrible, terrible, terrible,”

not long afterward, to get off the Village streets and off drugs, Shepard moved to London with his wife and their young son, Jesse Mojo. From leafy Hampstead, he raced greyhounds, wrote plays, and took stock of the homeland from which he felt alienated

After returning to the United States, in 1974, however, Shepard made facing himself and his emotional inheritance the central project of his adulthood

Taken together, these unmoored souls form a kind of tribe of the living dead, deracinated men trying to escape a sense of shame that they only vaguely understand

“What a bunch of bullshit this is!” Sam Rogers said, drunk and disorderly at the Greer Garson Theatre in New Mexico, where he saw the play.

Shepard’s characters are not so much warped as unborn; clueless and rudderless, they can’t find their way.

Taken together, these four plays constitute a sort of empire of the damned, whose inhabitants are caught in desperate but impossible retreat from their legacy of self-destruction.

His characters are doomed by their unconscious, which they can’t or won’t examine. In fact, they’ll do anything for an unexamined life.