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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