Shepard I: The Rise of Myth/The Fall of Community

Abstract

Of all the American dramatists who emerged in the modernist renaissance of the sixties, Shepard is the one who has clearly lasted and gone from strength to strength. The power of his text, the sheer linguistic impact of the spoken word makes his plays enduring even on those occasions when the dramatic action is erratic or has no outcome. He is a child of modernist revolt in an age of mass culture, but also a captive to American myth which has given him a strange freedom. While never fully breaking with naturalist convention, Shepard can project the dramatic illusion of vastness, a poetics of space that has no limit, dream-visions which cannot be explained away. The frontiers of territory become the frontiers of mind. Shepard is not a playwright of the city but of the country which lurks on the edges of wilderness or the fringes of the desert. There is in his ludic urging a nostalgia for the play of childhood, but that nostalgia is not pastoral. It is a mythic search for an elusive space quested by those who seek release from the traps of a civilisation choking on its monstrous technologies. Shepard thus strikes a common chord, the desired regress to a lost world of innocence echoed in the fully modern cadences of an overpowering myth. His tragicomedy simultaneously admits the contrary notions of such an impulse, its comic folly and its tragic consequences.