Sam Shepard

Elusive and reclusive, he is combination playwright, rock star, and movie idol. Sam Shepard has moved - and confounded - millions with some of the most dynamic theater America has seen since the heyday of O'Neill, Odets, and Arthur Miller. This biographical-critical book is about Sam Shepard's plays. Although it does not claim a literal connection between the work and the life, it does suggest that Shepard's plays remain the truest source for discovery of his humanistic views and the important roles his family and friends have played in his life. Following an introduction and short biography of the early days, both in Duarte, California, and in the heady atmosphere of Greenwich Village in the early sixties, the book goes on to a consideration of Shepard's plays, succinctly drawing on biographical data to provide a comprehensive and transitional approach to his achievement. Recurring themes and images are shown to reverberate through the plays, signifying a stream of consciousness that reveals more than it seemingly tells. Among the plays discussed are La Turista, Mad Dog Blues, Geography of a Horse Dreamer, Curse of the Starving Class, True West, Fool for Love, A Lie of the Mind, and his latest work States of Shock. Through Martin Tucker's close reading of Shepard's plays we come to see the curve of the playwright's career, from the more complex to the more concrete; from the experimental to the conventional, but more finely shaded. Shepard has called himself the "ultimate foe of terminal stasis": this book helps to explain why.