While the one-act play is perhaps becoming a forgotten art—often considered neither profitable nor practical to produce in the commercial sphere—it would be a huge mistake to regard the plays in this collection as lesser than Sam Shepard’s more famous full-length plays. Indeed, simply because the action isn’t broken by an interval, it is perhaps a misnomer to call plays like Ages of the Moon or The Unseen Hand “one-act” plays at all. Many of the plays here will make as fulfilling an evening of theater as any may wish, for even within the shortest time span Mr. Shepard’s work, unlike that of any other writer, pulls you deep into its struggle. And we get caught inside it because it’s our struggle: the pointless, endless, grimly fascinating struggle of a man wrestling his blanket in a bad dream on a ship long ago sunk beneath the dark water.
He wrestles with himself and his unknowable forebears and his unfulfillable obligations just as God wrestles with the devil, and the great conundrum rumbles: Where is the peace? And whereas every student learns that conflict is the heart of drama, and most of us regard this as conflict between different characters, Mr. Shepard presents us with characters eternally conflicted before they even step into the ring.
His characters struggle alone; they struggle with others who are mirror images of themselves, or with others who appear to be their exact opposite only to switch places halfway through, become each other, and then continue to struggle. And the more you try to separate them, his plays suggest, the more tissue gets torn. Even as his most peaceful or contemplative characters list their reasons for being happy we sense their confusion, their active delusion, their flight from the unsayable injustice of living and all its attendant responsibilities. Always drawn with great compassion, this is the profound moving image Shepard sucks us down into again and again. Yet, as befits a truly great dramatist, he never takes us the same way around twice—which is just one of the startling aspects of what makes this collection such a particular pleasure.
Just as the first European settlers fled to America only to find all their sins anew, it’s arguable that Mr. Shepard’s plays bear the scorch marks of European drama more than those of any of the other great American playwrights. For me, colossal European playwrights of the modernist era spring to mind when one considers his work: an iron drive like Beckett’s; the restlessness of Strindberg; a dream world as disconcerting as Pinter’s. His plays never seem to present anything as prosaic as the usual staples of much “serious” drama: i.e., common morality or politics. His sinners are real in this striking regard: they have no concept of sin—only failure. Thus Shepard is set apart from Eugene O’Neill whose characters’ hyperawareness of their sins means they pick at them like running sores; set apart from Arthur Miller whose John Milton–esque organ blasts of moral outrage shake the theater to the ground; set apart from Tennessee Williams whose characters enter beaten from the wings their battles for principle already fought and lost; set apart from David Mamet who peels back the bare surface of human veneer to reveal the meaningless roar of the jungle. And Mr. Shepard stands apart mainly because he is as much a poet as a playwright.
By this I mean that his logic is not the logic of academic wrangling or emotional equilibrium. His is the logic of music. Every human being, from the baby in the womb to the dying patient responds to the mystery of music. It chimes precisely with human emotion immeasurably more than language ever could. It is instant and undeniable. Likewise the singular experience of many of Mr. Shepard’s plays is as indescribable as music, and often just as potent, pleasing, and unsettling.
I remember once asking a jazz musician to describe what he meant by “jazz.” He said that the only way he could express it in words was to imagine his music like a butterfly that was always flying free of the net. I think this description can be applied to Mr. Shepard’s plays. His work is so delightful because it is supremely unpredictable. This can be said of very few writers.
And I might contend that this most European-seeming of American playwrights, ironically, elevates the myth of the American West to its theatrical zenith precisely because his existentialism feels so European. Yes, his plays are set in the cinematically beautiful American prairie, but his West is so barren a man might die of loneliness. The European settlers’ God has died, a god in whose name they sought to destroy the paganism of the nomadic Native American, which might have actually saved them.
Yet it is never just what Mr. Shepard’s plays say in any literal fashion that make them so compelling, it is also how they go about it. A fundamental twisting of form is what gives poetry its power. And when a real poet works in the theater, combining his musical longing with the pain of a man who has broken his leg, lain in a ditch for a week, dragged himself to a quack to have it broken again, then walked on it for years until the pain can no longer be expressed—just borne with the intimacy of an absence in the marrow of the soul—you are approaching the quintessential power of Mr. Shepard’s work.
Beneath his plays, I always feel history waiting to roll us all into its silent tomb. There is no echo in there. You can shout as much as you like. Nothing comes back. His plays haunt you because these are the death songs of the American pioneers who went into a wilderness and built a world and destroyed a world and nobody stopped them and now they’re left scrambling for meaning.
For instance, there is a beautiful play here called Short Life of Trouble in which Sam Shepard and Bob Dylan are talking and taping their conversation while they work on an undisclosed project. (This may reflect a real conversation: Dylan and Shepard have co-written songs, and also collaborated on the 1978 movie Renaldo and Clara.) Whether or not Mr. Shepard wants to present it as such, we are watching a conversation between two religious icons in the pantheon of American culture. One is a folk hero who went electric, broke the dam between the personal and the political, woke the Beatles up to a new horizon of freedom in songwriting and shook up the Western world. The other is the playwright under consideration; a writer moreover who has the film star looks and acting talent that have propelled him all the way to the Academy Awards in classic movies like Days of Heaven and The Right Stuff. And who are they discussing? Their American icons: James Dean, Hank Williams, and Woody Guthrie. Yet all are discussed within the shadow of the circumstances of their deaths.
Their heroes are lost to history and unknowable. And now that they are mythic, neither Sam nor Bob can locate precisely where their greatness lay. What was it that touched these men, they wonder? Were they angels? Is there a God? While Bob takes a break, Sam tries to play the conversation back on his tape recorder but all he can hear is music. Already, even their conversation is lost, just as future conversations will fail to assail the greatness of these present icons. No mirror may reflect another. All that appears is a vague infinity. And old photos only reveal the blank stares of ghosts.
But let me stress I can only suggest what a play such as Short Life of Trouble, or what any of the plays in this volume “mean.” Like all of Sam Shepard’s work these plays sing to the soul rather than speak to the mind. This takes a rare, rare, gift and perhaps rarer tenacity to endure it, especially when one considers the deliciously dark vein of humor always wryly present.
Speaking as a playwright, I can’t write one-act plays or even short plays. I am too literal and conservative. I need a beginning, middle, and end, otherwise I have no idea where I am. The idea of writing plays which just start, do exactly what they do, and stop when they are finished—meaning they may be just a few pages long, or just half an hour long, terrifies me. I suppose writing any play must terrify Mr. Shepard on some level, because it terrifies every playwright I know—especially as one gets older. But whereas I avoid that pain as much as I can, only tackling the bigger beasts in the hope that bigger game might sustain me, luckily for us Sam Shepard just faces the terror head on.
He has the fortitude to write a play no matter where it leads, even if, on the surface, it seems just a short way along the road. And I assume he does it because he has to. And I assume he has to because he was made that way. And the stunning writing in this collection only proves he bears that responsibility with grace and courage. So all I can do is salute Mr. Shepard and wave you travelers along on your way with him. As with all great art, it’s a road to another world.
—CONOR MCPHERSON
MAY 2012