The strongest impressions I have now of these early plays are the specific times and places where they were written. The plays themselves seem to drift back to me as flimsy ghosts, in the same way a conversation with someone in the distant past is half-remembered. For me, these plays are inseparable from the experience of the time out of which they came. A series of impulsive chronicles representing a chaotic, subjective world. Basically, without apologizing, I can see now that I was learning how to write. I was breaking the ice with myself. Even though some of this work is slightly embarrassing to me now (twenty years later), it’s like objecting to a photograph that illuminates an aspect of the “real you” in a moment when you least expect the truth to be recorded. I can remember being dazed with writing, with the discovery of finding I actually had these worlds inside me. These voices. Shapes. Currents of language. Light. All the mysterious elements that cause anyone to make a journey.
I wrote all the time. Everywhere. When I wasn’t writing, I was thinking about it or continuing to “write” in my head. I’d have six or seven ideas for plays rolling at once. I couldn’t write fast enough to keep up the flow of material running through me. Needless to say, I wasn’t very good company. At that time, a major critic from the New York Times commented that I wrote “disposable plays,” and in some sense he was probably right. But nothing mattered to me then except to get the stuff down on paper. The judgment of it seemed too far after the fact to make any difference.
There was never a sense, in all this, of evolving a style or moving on to a bigger, longer, “more important” form. Each play had a distinct life of its own and seemed totally self-contained within its one-act structure. Partly, this had to do with the immediacy of the off-off-Broadway situation. Anybody could get his or her piece performed, almost any time. If there wasn’t a slot open at one of the cafe theaters or in the churches, you could at least pool together some actors and have a reading. You could go into full-scale rehearsals with nothing more than an idea or half a page of written text. It was a playwright’s heaven. Experimentation was the lifeblood not only of the playwright but also of actors, directors, and even of producers and critics. The concept of “audience” was diametrically opposed to the commercial marketplace. The only impulse was to make living, vital theater which spoke to the moment. And the moment, back then in the mid-sixties, was seething with a radical shift of the American psyche.
Today, I don’t see how these plays make any real sense unless they’re put into perspective with that time.
Sam Shepard
New York,
October 1985