Remembering Sam Shepard
Sam Shepard was a titan of American theater whose darkly funny, sometimes surreal, and often frightening evocations of the fringes of American life formed the backbone of a storied career as a writer and actor. He died last Thursday at his home in Kentucky at the age of 73 of complications from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, according to a spokesman for the family. Shepard is best remembered for writing plays like the Pulitzer Prize-winning Buried Child, True West, and Fool for Love, as well as a film career that included acclaimed performances in The Right Stuff, Days of Heaven, Black Hawk Down, and dozens more.
Born in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, in 1943, Shepard worked on a ranch in his teenage years and attended high school in California, later dropping out of college to join a touring group called The Bishop’s Company Repertory Players. He quickly found himself in New York’s thriving Off-Off-Broadway scene in the early ’60s, when it was a hive of experimentation, psychedelia, and exciting young talent. He won several Obie Awards (given to non-Broadway theater in New York) and quickly distinguished himself as a major voice, writing screenplays for art films like Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point and collaborating with artists like Bob Dylan and Patti Smith (with whom he was romantically involved, a relationship he fictionalized in the play Cowboy Mouth).
In the ’70s, he created some of his best-remembered theatrical works, including the “Family Trilogy”—composed of Curse of the Starving Class (1977), Buried Child (1978), and True West (1980)—which is considered by many critics to be his greatest achievement. Curse followed the run-down Tate family, reckoning with alcoholism and the dilapidation of their farm. Buried Child was also set on a ruined farm, following a broken family confronting a dark incident in their past, while True West centered on rival siblings trying to write a screenplay together, reckoning with the authenticity of America’s past versus the Hollywood versions of it.
Buried Child, which won the Pulitzer, transformed Shepard’s career—he went from being an Off-Broadway favorite to a legend of American playwriting, one whose works are still revived in theaters around the world. His theatrical output remained prolific after the ’70s; in all, he wrote 44 plays, with some of his best-known later works including Fool For Love (1983), A Lie of the Mind (1985), Simpatico (1994), The God of Hell (2004), and Kicking a Dead Horse (2007). Shepard’s plays were often marked by small casts, an emphasis on unflinching dialogue, and a slightly absurd bent, with some element of unreality invading the otherwise grim decay of the post-industrial American West.
Read more at The Atlantic.
