Abstract
During the 1970s and for most of the 80s, theatre scholars writing about Sam Shepard tended to agree on only two issues. One, that Shepard is one of the most talented and important playwrights of his generation; and two, that nobody had yet to arrive at a critical vocabulary to adequately discuss his work. Regarding the second of these points, Bonnie Marranca stated bluntly in 1981 that Shepard is ‘not an easy writer to write about’.1 In 1981, Christopher Bigsby put the case a little more eloquently, proposing that Shepard’s work is ‘simply not susceptible of analysis in conventional terms’.2 Richard Gilman and Ron Mottram each added their two cents, respectively classifying Shepard scholarship as ‘extremely limited’ in its ‘ready-made vocabulary’3 and plagued by a ‘common confusion’.4 Yet, while each of these scholars offered their own thoughts and observations on past Shepard scholarship, no cohesive sense of his work nor any common vocabulary developed. The critics ‘agreed to disagree’ as it were.
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Notes
Bonnie Marranca, ed., American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1981), unnumbered Preface.
Christopher Bigsby, ‘Sam Shepard: Word and Image’, in Critical Angles: European Views of Contemporary American Literature, ed. Marc Chenetier (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), p. 214.
Richard Gilman, Introduction to Seven Plays, by Sam Shepard (New York: Bantam, 1981), p. xi.
Ron Mottram, Inner Landscapes (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984), p. vii.
Ibid., p. xii.
See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
Jennifer Allen, ‘The Man on the High Horse: On the Trail of Sam Shepard’, Esquire, 10, no. 3 (November 1988), 148.
Ibid., p. 150.
John Glore, ‘The Canonization of Mojo Rootforce: Sam Shepard Live at the Pantheon’, Theatre (Yale), 12, no. 3 (Summer 1981), 57.
Robert W. Corrigan, The Theatre in Search of a Fix (New York: Dell, 1973), p. 94.
Frederic Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983), p. 119.
Ibid., p. 120.
It should be noted here that the use of the term ‘supperrealism’ throughout this essay is not intended to correspond to the terminology of the ‘Super-Realist’ school of painting, nor to Toby Silverman Zinman’s comparison of Shepard’s work to that school of painting in her essay: ‘Sam Shepard and Super-Realism’, Modern Drama 29, no. 3 (1986), 423–30. While I agree with Zinman’s comment that Shepard creates a dynamic on stage which is essentially one of performance rather than of fourth-wall realism, I do not agree that such a dynamic links him to the Super-Realists. On the contrary, I see the Super-Realists’ emphasis on surface and on photographic detachment to be a direct contradiction of Shepard’s emphasis (as I see it) on ‘superpresence’, that is, the heightened, immediate
It should be noted here that the use of the term ‘supperrealism’ throughout this essay is not intended to correspond to the terminology of the ‘Super-Realist’ school of painting, nor to Toby Silverman Zinman’s comparison of Shepard’s work to that school of painting in her essay: ‘Sam Shepard and Super-Realism’, Modern Drama 29, no. 3 (1986), 423–30. While I agree with Zinman’s comment that Shepard creates a dynamic on stage which is essentially one of performance rather than of fourth-wall realism, I do not agree that such a dynamic links him to the Super-Realists. On the contrary, I see the Super-Realists’ emphasis on surface and on photographic detachment to be a direct contradiction of Shepard’s emphasis (as I see it) on ‘superpresence’, that is, the heightened, immediate presence, of the live performance.
Gerald Weales, ‘American Theatre Watch 1977–1978’, The Georgia Review, 32 (Fall 1978), 523. Hereafter cited as Weales.
Sam Shepard, Curse of the Starving Class in Seven Plays (New York: Bantam, 1981), p. 135. All quotations are from this edition; page numbers are given in the text.
‘[T]he avant-garde sought to transcend representation in favour of presence and immediacy; it proclaimed the autonomy of the signifier, its liberation from the “tyranny of the signified”: postmodernists instead expose the tyranny of the signifier, the violence of its law’. Craig Owens, ‘The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism’, in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983), p. 59.
Sam Shepard, Buried Child, in Seven Plays (New York: Bantam Books, 1981), p. 80. All quotations are from this edition; page numbers are given in the text.
Sam Shepard, True West, in Seven Plays (New York: Bantam, 1981), p. 59.
Ross Wetzsteon, Introduction to Fool for Love and Other Plays, Sam Shepard (New York: Bantam, 1984), pp. 1–2.
Sam Shepard, Fool for Love and Other Plays (New York: Bantam, 1984), p. 20.
Mimi Kramer, ‘In search of the good Shepard’, The New Criterion, 2, no. 2 (October 1983), 56.
See David J. DeRose, ‘Theatre Review Fool for Love’, Theatre Journal, 36, no. 1 (March 1984), 100–101.
Most notable among feminist readings of these plays are: Rosemarie Bank, ‘Self as Other: Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love and A Lie of the Mind’, in Feminist Rereadings of Modern American Drama, ed. June Schlueter (London: Associated University Presses, 1989), 225–37.
Lynda Hart, ‘Sam Shepard’s Spectacle of Impossible Heterosexuality: ‘Fool for Love’, in Schlueter (Ibid.), 210–18.
Felicia Hardison Londré, ‘Sam Shepard Works Out: The Masculinization of America’, Studies in American Drama 1945-Present, 1, no. 2 (1987), 12–27.
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© 1993 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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DeRose, D.J. (1993). A Kind of Cavorting: Superpresence and Shepard’s Family Dramas. In: Wilcox, L. (eds) Rereading Shepard. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22509-5_9
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