Shepard, Sam
▶ Watch on YouTubeCoverage note: full (about nineteen minutes; YouTube auto-generated captions without punctuation, speakers and quoted passages are not always labelled, so attributions are cautious and play titles are not given beyond *True West*)
Core ideas
Image against self. The portrait opens with Shepard's idea that we are "seduced into believing one is what you make yourself to believe you are": one invents a character as a child (a rock-and-roll star), and if people like it, "that's who you are". He is troubled that we now prefer the image to the human being: "we'd rather watch you on television than talk to you". A speech from one of his plays, a long litany of small-town American things the speaker loves, shows a character defending his home against outsiders with sudden threats, and Shepard says he could never become European: "I belong here", tied to a culture one cannot leave.
The father, the family, World War II. Shepard says he realised he had been avoiding the territory of the family, especially his father, an alcoholic and a former bomber pilot, "a danger" he feared. Passages read from his work evoke a night when the father comes home drunk, kicks in a door and drives away; a memory of 1943 in which the father dreams of bombs falling on Italy while the narrator, "born without a clue", sleeps in a dresser drawer; and a later visit to the father living alone in the desert, with a coffee can of cigarette butts. Shepard connects this to a generation of men "devastated in some basic way" after the heroic victory, with women trying to heal them and booze as the medicine. In a recurring image a man sees his face change into his father's and his ancestors': "if you don't honor your ancestors... you're committing a kind of suicide".
Outlaws, women, exile. Friends describe him as an outlaw most comfortable outside the system, private, independent, elusive (a "hug" or only "a nod"), who writes well about "testosterone mania", about men who all want to be criminals but want to get away with it, and about women as mysterious, powerful, knowing more than the men; a scene between a man and woman about Mexico and cockfights, and another between brothers about leaving California, evoke the border, the West and the impossibility of a home. Shepard says aloneness and community are a constant balance in his work, and cites Beckett: it is "all about exile". He cannot live in New York (a theatre/arena, not a home), drives across the country rather than fly, and a Swedish interviewer says she dreamed of the American West from movies, preferring the landscape to Gary Cooper.
Excerpts
“« we prefer the image to the human being we'd rather watch you on television than talk to you »”
“« if you don't honor your ancestors in in the real sense you uh you're committing a kind of suicide »”
“« i grew up in this this world war ii uh world where the women were continually trying to heal up the men »”