Artifacts: The Early Plays Reconsidered

Abstract

‘The Hopis say the top of the head has a door and if you keep that door open all kinda’ wonders come to ya’, says Billy, the old prospector in Operation Sidewinder (1970).¹ In the Prologue to The Mad Dog Blues (1971), in which Kosmo and Yahoodi introduce themselves (even more than Slim and Shadow in Back Bog Beast Bait or the brothers in True West, they seem to be a split portrait of Sam Shepard), Kosmo says, ‘intuitive decisions based on a leaking-roof brain. Lots of dashing images’.² When Hoss in The Tooth of Crime (1972) says, ‘Everything just happened. Just fell like cards. 1 never made a choice’,³ is he talking about his endangered celebrity or the creative process? ‘He has a revelation. Or rather, a revelation presents itself. Stabs at him’, says Louis in the long monologue in Suicide in B^b (1976) in which he presents his theory of how and why Niles disappeared.⁴ As late as 1982, Shepard, still surprised at the process of making Tongues and Savage/Love, could write to Joseph Chaikin, ‘It never occurred to me before that you could begin with an actual subject and work around it like we did’. Much earlier (1973), he had written to Chaikin from London, ‘I don’t understand how I work really’.⁵

My work is not written in granite & it goes out into the air and dissolves forever.

Sam Shepard to Daniel Nagrin, 12 December 1978