Introduction

Abstract

In his prodigious career, Sam Shepard has written over forty plays. He is winner of an Obie Award for ‘substantial achievement’ in the theatre; he received a Pulitzer Prize for Buried Child in 1979, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for A Lie of the Mind. His work spans more than two decades, from his early one act plays, emerging from the experimental theatre of New York in the sixties, to the more fully developed family plays of the seventies and eighties. Regardless of the period in which they were written, his plays share certain recognisable characteristics: they are startlingly imaginative, bizarrely disjunctive, linguistically creative, and imagistically provocative.