Tuesday, September 4, 2012

BLOG # 47: More on Sam Shepard’s Heartless NY Times Review. “The man who became to drama what the Kleenex was to the handkerchief…”



I first encountered Sam Shepard in 1970. Some guy I was mad about – probably my first husband - and I went down to the Astor Place Theatre to see Shepard’s Forensic and the Navigators.  I had no idea what it was about, but its total madness drove me wild with delight.  Clive Barnes wrote of that production:
            
Despite my worst instincts, I cannot prevent myself from mildly loving the plays of Sam Shepard…  Mr. Shepard is perhaps the first person to write good disposable plays. He may well go down in history as the man who became to drama what Kleenex was to the handkerchief.

Barnes went on to recommend that’ people go and see for themselves what this young upstart      was up to.’ But Kleenex, indeed! If we were going to make a comparison today, we could say perhaps   that Shepard is to American drama what Jasper Johns is to the American flag.             
Whatever Shepard is trying to get at it, he intrigues us with a simultaneous layering of equally outrageous story-telling and action. Atrocities of a highly political nature are all but concealed in an infinite repertoire of often absurdly rendered personal crimes. And he succeeds in making this phantasmagoria seem almost natural by embedding it in the details of everyday reality.
             Of course, he changes things around, but he always links the horrors of the past to the brutality of the present.  In Fool for Love, an old man – long defunct – sits in the corner spying on and in some way controlling the vicious quarrels and prurient antics of a young couple, both of whom may possibly be his grandchildren. Buried Child makes unacknowledged infanticide the cornerstone of daily misery for the whole family. When, finally, the youngest living member flees into the night he sees all of his forebears pushing up against the windshield until they become“…faces I’d never seen before but still recognized.” Lie of the Mind presents mirror families; the attempted murder of a young, beautiful woman, fought over by two violent men who end up in a Mexican standoff. A third, less testosterone- infused, barely manages to slither out between them to claim the lovely lady. Directly impinging on the action of the protagonists is a host of mothers, fathers, a sister and a dead grandfather - who looms even more gargantuan in memory than the living - with alcohol supplying a constant source of negative energy.  And then there’s, True West, an audience favorite, which embodies all manner of fratricidal tendencies, not only the familial variety but also the ‘brotherly hate’ that poisons the American way of doing business and conducting all manner of public and private affairs.
             By making his points elliptically, always a little fuzzy or absurd, he keeps us amused but also forces us to ‘figure out’ what he’s talking about. A major example of this technique is the dead child in Buried Child – the play which won Shepard a Pulitzer Prize.           
When I saw it back in 1979, I had no idea what he was actually getting at, but it was fun to watch and I sensed there was a deep something-or-other going on. To minds more scholarly and mature than mine was at that time, it was obvious that the dead and hidden child was real, but it also represented a ‘collective past of unacknowledged and helpless victims’ and the ruckus on-stage could be, with a little shuffling of characters, any American family dealing with its poisoned roots. How and why the child died is spelled out in a way, but it seems that incest themes in Shepard might be a way of describing too much closeness from one’s forebears and lovers – a closeness that is like dynamite and creates explosions. And I’ve always had a hunch that Shepard is also making an oblique reference in this play to the murder of the Native Americans and the stealing of their land. In any case, he is showing how atrocities from both our personal and collective history collide with present day reality.      
             All in all, Shepard’s writing encompasses the horror and humor that many of us experience growing up and living in America. But like Jasper Johns’ flags, Shepard’s plays ring many changes on the American dream, because unfortunately, that’s exactly what it is – a dream.  And serious plays, like serious art, at least tweak and often turn our dreams into nightmares – because at the bottom of it all we need someone to show us the truth, unvarnished at least, if not harsh and ugly.
             And on that note, in my experience, no play of Shepard’s, has been harsher or uglier than Heartless. But I find it the most truthful and dead-on, literally, in its themes. In fact, as I mentioned in an earlier blog entry, it is like a Greek myth, only the ‘hero’, Roscoe, played by Gary Cole, is a total anti-hero. He doesn’t have the charisma, suavity, good looks, youthfulness or humor that we associate with Shepard’s bevy of leading gents. And this is because Shepard wanted him like that – he’s an ‘everyman’. Not that every man is like this character, but he represents the majority of a certain male breed, very prevalent in America, which up to this point has promoted itself as a bastion of equality in relations between men and women.
             In the late ‘sixties and early ‘seventies, while America was having its way with Vietnam, at least at home it was successfully challenging religious beliefs and societal prejudices in order to win legislation that allowed women to claim sovereignty over their own bodies.  Steady gains have been made in the area of women’s rights for decades, in just the same way as racism has been so diminished that we were able to elect an African-American president. But now, suddenly, there is a tremendous push to erase all this good work, as if these were just words on a blackboard.
             How is it possible that after all this time, the freedom of women over their bodies is being called into question? How can it be, here in the new millennium, that an American male politician –regardless of the party to which he belongs - can get away with saying openly that a fetus conceived from rape shows that the women’s body gave consent?? How can he do this without being immediately scuttled by his party? It’s as if the fundamental human status of women’s equality to men had been spirited away in the dark by little male gnomes.
             Or are there little female gnomes, as well?
Since we’re talking about a year in which there is an election campaign, these questions all lead to THE BIG QUESTION: how in the year 2012, in a country where we have one vote for each person (let’s leave out the issue of poll tampering for the moment) and women are at least half the population – how come these politicians who hold such inhuman, atavistic, and misogynistic views aren’t afraid of alienating the majority of the female population?? What makes them think they can still get the votes they need in spite of their highly public obsession with women’s private parts? (In an economy where many middle class families are already hitting the poverty level – you’d think women would be thinking smaller, not bigger, families.) This aim, ready, fire at women’s sovereignty over their own bodies is the $64,000 – or is it the $1,000,000,000,000 question - in America today. And Shepard has the guts, intelligence and heart to explore it in Heartless.
             From where I’m sitting, this is an issue that the NY Times failed to address in its revue – and it’s an unforgivable oversight, considering the immense danger of America electing a government next November that will marginalize women. Could a playwright find an issue more relevant than this one to explore right now? Even if a critic disagreed wholeheartedly with the argument put forth in the play – not to even mention it in a review? Really. More coming on Shepard and Heartless in a few days.

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