Abstract
These lines from a poem beginning with the words ‘3:30 a.m.’ in Sam Shepard’s Motel Chronicles, evoke the mental dislocation of waking up at night in an unfamiliar room. The motel room and the disoriented effect are also integral to Fool for Love and A Lie of the Mind. Although Shepard has always made effective use of scenic metaphors, these two plays offer particularly intriguing examples of a correlation between the fait théâtral — that is, any physical object that is visible to the audience — and the mental states of the characters as they relate to the meaning of the play as a whole.
is it a motel room
or someone’s house
is it the body of me alive
or dead1
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Notes
Sam Shepard, Motel Chronicles (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1982), pp. 20–21.
Sam Shepard, A Lie of the Mind (New York: First Plume Printing, 1987), p. 79. All quotations are from this edition; page numbers are given in the text.
Sam Shepard, Fool for Love and Other Plays (New York: Bantam, 1984), p. 53. All quotations are from this edition; page numbers are given in the text.
Roland Barthes, On Racine (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), p. 4.
Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), p. 43.
Sam Shepard, ‘The Sex of Fishes’ in Hawk Moon (New York: PAJ Publications, 1981), p. 77.
Sam Shepard, True West in Sam Shepard, Seven Plays (New York: Bantam, 1981), p. 3.
Ron Mottram, ‘Exhaustion of the American Soul: Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind’ in Sam Shepard: A Casebook, ed. Kimball King (New York: Garland, 1988), pp. 101–5.
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© 1993 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Londré, F.H. (1993). A Motel of the Mind: Fool for Love and A Lie of the Mind. In: Wilcox, L. (eds) Rereading Shepard. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22509-5_14
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