In 1974, either before or after Shepard’s return from England, the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles commissioned from him a new adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1588–89), to feature in Edward Parone’s New Theatre for Now series.1 In due course the Taper declined to stage the finished script, Man Fly: A Play, with Music, in 2 Acts,2 but ended up producing Angel City instead during its 1976–77 anniversary season. The script nevertheless invites comparison with John Whiting’s The Devils (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1961), the Taper’s very first and highly successful 1966 production,3 based on Aldous Huxley’s seventeenth-century tale of witchcraft and demonic possession, The Devils of Loudun, and resonating with Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953). Insofar as Shepard’s protagonist manifests his boundless aspiration by wagering his soul in return for the mind-altering (and highly profitable) capacity to speak in tongues, the adaptation also anticipates Tongues (1978), the collaboration with Joseph Chaikin resulting in part from the desire to have him direct Man Fly when the Taper abandoned the project.4 To date Man Fly remains unproduced and unpublished. As late as 1986 Shepard was still enthusing about a possible film version of Marlowe’s play, taken as he is by its “incredible language” marked by a strong musical quality.5 During Shepard’s stay in England, though, Faustus’s dissatisfaction with the sciences of his day must have struck a sensitive chord in the playwright who was then suffering from a lack of inspiration.6 Going by his other plays featuring artist figures struggling with the muses, from Melodrama Play (1967) via Angel City (1976) to True West (1980), that fearful condition even amounts to a chronic one. Small wonder Shepard turned the doctor of divinity disappointed by traditional academic disciplines into a writer. His acknowledged models are Whitman, Kerouac (B45), and Faulkner (B2), but his tale contains echoes of Kiowa lore, Hemingway (“The Snows of Kilimanjaro”), and the pessimistic late Twain (“The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg”).
At first sight Man Fly appears a fairly faithful adaptation of Doctor Faustus. The three-part structure is firmly in place – from the contract with the devil, to the evidence of the powers gained, and the subsequent damnation. So is the subtle fabric of images and motifs (the circle, the four elements, time, animal transformations, and so on), even individual lines, at times literally transposed. Separate scenes can easily be recognized, major incidents and passages retrieved: the apparent equivocation as to who is ordering whom or made the worst deal, the boons bargained for and the price settled, the signing and reading of the deed, the later renewal of the pledge, the probing for answers to the scholastic questions of the day, and the growing desperation running through it all. All the same, as the already mentioned models and intertextual echoes indicate, Shepard grounded the dramatic events of Marlowe’s play in American soil at the time of writing. Hence he did away with the undefined “worldly” stage of early modernity, switching effortlessly between Rome and Germany, internal and external conflict. Instead he aimed for a “semi-realistic” (B1) setting, whose liminality still corresponds to the tense coexistence of the emblematic and illusionistic representational modes of early modernity.7 Because the events are situated in the US, the dramatic method of Man Fly also differs from the contrastive one Shepard used in his adaptation of Middleton and Rowley’s Changeling (1622). The Bodyguard (1973, 1978) indeed shifts the scene from Spain to Greece, England, and France, surroundings in which the eponymous American anti-hero stands out. Even so, Man Fly prolongs the earlier adaptation’s exploration of national identity, triggered by Shepard’s stay in England (1971–74) and equally evident in Blue Bitch (1973) and Geography of a Horse Dreamer (1974).
Man Fly is set at the foot of the snowcapped Rocky Mountains, where the Great Plains prairie crosses over from North Dakota into Wyoming, going by the contradictory provenance of the script’s hero from Grey Bull, ND (B24). From lowly origins Skeetz was raised to the rank of doctor of letters and poet laureate but now he is “on the skids” (B7). Nomen est omen. Longing to become “conjurer laureate” (1.3.33), he calls upon Lucifer, king of the underworld, a familiar enough metaphorical designation for gangland. Through Lucifer’s intermediaries (Jet, Scooter, and “top dog” [B4] Mustafo), Skeetz forfeits body and soul in return for twenty-four years of “constant ecstasy” (B16). With the mob’s secret information and Mustafo’s assistance, he blackmails a Reverend Green and replaces him at the head of his powerful Pentecostal congregation. Thus Skeetz is transformed into a gifted southern-style country preacher and nation-wide media star, business magnate, and minion of the president rolled into one. No emperors in sight on the American horizon, except naked ones, which in our televisual age means virtual ones, too. At the end of Skeetz’s term payment is due, and irrevocably so. Neither his belated withdrawal into the anonymity of provincial America, signaled by some small talk with his barber, nor the urgings of his former poet friends, Billy Lee and Jackson Hooker, can prevent that.
Billy Lee and Jackson Hooker stand in for Marlowe’s Good Angels, materializing whenever Faustus hesitates on the path of evil or despairs of his salvation. That these angels are portrayed as street punks conversing in idiomatic American English steps up the local color and the dramatic interest of the morality’s allegorical characters. As in The Tooth of Crime (1972), the conflict had better not appear a foregone conclusion. With his baseball cap and glove, Billy Lee comes across as an All-American kid. But the rhythmic sound of leather slapped onto leather grants him punch and an inflammable coolness. Jackson Hooker as a child caused his mother’s death by stealing her drugs to shoot up. This looks very much like Marlowe’s systematic inversions of good and evil: of the saint’s life (conversion, temptation, miracles, and holy death), the Ars Moriendi tradition (its contempt of the world), ritual exorcism (in Faustus’s anagrammatizing of God’s name), and Christ’s Atonement (the blood shed for the sake of evil rather than redemption). At the same time, good and evil, still after Marlowe, are deliberately and tragicomically fused, as in Skeetz’s preacherly persona of Anti-Christ or the presentation of his evil castigations as blessings-in-disguise (B50). By invoking God (much as Faustus does), the apostate chooses evil without letting go of good. As an irked Lucifer and Mustafo put it, for too long he has been “riding the middle rail” (B5) and playing both ends against it (B54). Mustafo knows his classics, for didn’t T. S. Eliot argue that Marlowe’s blasphemy necessarily implied a lingering belief,8 causing what J. B. Steane later dubbed the play’s fascinating “instability,” its unresolved “to-and-fro motion”?9 Unfortunately, Shepard belabors Billy Lee and Jackson Hooker’s dramatic function of swaying Skeetz, thereby reintroducing some of the doctrinal morality’s obviousness. Jet and Scooter, whose names convey the agility they require as turncoat apprentices and underlings of the devil, at least profess not to know whose side they are on (B8). This leaves the audience in suspense, too. All the same, their doubts about Skeetz’s blackmailing scheme and newly gained powers make them easily eliminated challengers, abandoned on the prairie, if not killed by Green’s bodyguard, Olson.
As a preliminary Jet is subject to some torture – a spell is cast on his foot, causing Skeetz’s own to ache sympathetically. This situation recalls the angry horse-courser’s pulling loose Faustus’s leg because his horse turned into a “bottle of hay” when driven into the pond (4.1). Mustafo’s impatience at Skeetz’s “treading water” (B16) before committing his soul also resonates with this scene, presenting another foolish bargain. Earlier, Jet has a sexual fantasy of magically possessing some Radcliffe students during “a seminar on extra-sensory phenomena” (B17), which harks back to Robin’s lewd visions at the prospect of becoming Wagner’s apprentice. On the whole, though, Shepard did without the comic interludes composed by Marlowe’s collaborator(s). This may indicate that the adaptor primarily went by the 1604 quarto because in the 1616 text these interludes have been expanded. Still, Shepard preserved their function of cutting down Skeetz’s achievements, as in Jet and Scooter’s double-edged excitement at hitting the road to “Indianapolis! Boise, Idaho!” (B16), a far cry from Faustus’s flight across Europe (past Trier, Paris, Naples, and Venice). The comic reduction of miracles to magical tricks, show, and artifice is made explicit in Skeetz’s mocking provocation of Green (B37), becoming a parodic “temptation” of Christ in the desert. But this reduction is already subsumed by Skeetz’s double identity as priest and poet, besides a vocabulary reminiscent of Marlowe’s, with its allusions to fading fashions, art, and performance.
Except for the script’s centerpiece, an overpowering faith-healing, and the procession of poets offering Skeetz a final sanctuary, the diverse “entertainments” were also discarded. In Marlowe’s play these insets are either meant to distract Faustus from his despair (the hot whore, courtesans, and Helen, the procession of the Seven Deadly Sins) or ought to prove his prowess and establish his fame and reputation (getting grapes in winter for the pregnant Duchess of Vanholt, conjuring Alexander and his paramour). In the adaptation their metatheatrical role has been maintained in the onstage observers framing the action proper (Jet and Scooter overhearing Skeetz’s opening monologue [B3] or watching his being visited by Billy Lee and Jackson Hooker [B17–18], much as in the 1616 text the devils are watching Faustus’s damnation). The insets’ removal, however, does make for a tighter, more homogeneous play, offering less relief from the protagonist’s tragicomic rise and fall, even if the “unity” and “comic synthesis” of the original play have been defended.10 As a corollary, the presence of women is reduced to practically nothing. The token exception is the beautiful and smartly dressed Foxey, initially serving as Green’s “jailbait” (B32) and rubbing Skeetz’s aching foot, a menial role that foreshadows Meg’s in A Lie of the Mind. This exception is made to confirm the rule once Skeetz turns against Foxey, too, for trying to prevent his revenge on Olson, Jet, and Scooter. In the end she is made to assume her “true” shape when transformed into a snarling demon dog (with mask) pursuing Reverend Green on all fours.
Jackson Hooker’s disguise as an Old Lady, “tempting” Skeetz to do “good” by accepting her bag of “savings” so as to foil her cousins’ vulture-like greed, accords with the Renaissance cross-dressing practice and Marlowe’s inversions. Yet the near absence of female characters in Man Fly also prolongs Marlowe’s patriarchal bias. As Sarah Munson Deats has demonstrated, Doctor Faustus reduces women either to mothers or prostitutes. The one category represents in-law feminine values, the other outlaw ones, but neither has any substantial part or number of lines. Appearances notwithstanding, sensuous pleasure as well as mercy, compassion, repentance, and community constantly take a backseat to the masculine values of fame, power, and wealth. Consequently, this allegedly religious rebel upholds the Christian Patriarchy, which gendered and ranked these values accordingly. In Jungian psychological terms, Deats concludes, Faustus simply fails to achieve individuation by integrating his female anima.11 The result is a “demonic” imbalance, constantly threatening his self, as the onslaught of Angels and the images of dismemberment reveal, a Dionysian “sparagmos” commensurate to Faustus’s sin of male lust.
In pursuing this imagery, Shepard first alludes to Samson’s symbolically disempowering haircut in the barber scene following the climactic faith-healing like a post-orgiastic low. The deadliness (also signaled by the empty stage and the funerary white sheet) is barely ruffled by the terse snipping of the scissors and the subdued chat, close to dreamy self-reflection. Toward the end the playwright then literalizes the dismemberment, like the 1616 text did. Upon closer inspection Jackson Hooker’s bag of “savings” contains a severed arm with the titular inscription, “Man Fly.” The bloody horror agrees with the modern crime setting (take the horse head in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 Godfather) as well as the genre of revenge tragedy (witness the cut-off finger in The Changeling). Besides resuming the moment of the original pledge, the severed arm confuses Skeetz as to whether he is still alive or dead already, having a vision or being one, the ghost of his former self (B55–56). It is as if the play’s events so far had been one prolonged dream. This impression is enhanced by the “smokey-blue quality” of the lighting, cut through by the follow spots marking the devils’ apparitions (B1) or isolating the severed arm (B55, B57). In his opening soliloquy Skeetz already suspected his prospective power and knowledge would be pretense, a perceptive trick, black magic. Unless his rise and fall should be considered an unwitting demonstration of his writerly capacities, a hard-to-beat dramatic act of reinvention, ending in catastrophe when the play-within (Skeetz’s adventures with the devil) encroaches upon and short-circuits with the frame (the writer who imagined them). After all, Skeetz measures time in “paragraphs” (B3).
As to Deats’s conclusion: Shepard didn’t exactly redress Marlowe’s patriarchal bias. It would be another eight years before Fool for Love (1983) would present an independent female character challenging her male counterpart. Neither did Shepard, in Man Fly any more than in Fool for Love or so many of his other works, solve the vexed question of individuation.12 On the contrary, Skeetz’s opening soliloquy states the problem straightaway (“Me again. Big whole man. Fractured into smithereens”) and expands it to America at large (“Pieces of Americana”) whose picture fails to cohere in his writings (B2). In its waverings and irregular tempo not unlike those of Faustus’s final moments, this soliloquy forms a frantic gloss on his line “O, I’ll leap up to my God. Who pulls me down? –” (5.2.77), which Shepard retained with minor changes (B59). As is well established by now, this line could have served as motto to the Renaissance emblem adorning the cover page of the 1604 Quarto of Marlowe’s play and showing a man with one winged arm raised toward heaven, the other unwinged and pulled down toward hell. Man Fly’s split level stage – facilitating the sudden, “magical” entrances and exits of the devils from above – mirrors (hence inverts) this emblematic picture. Below are Skeetz’s quarters, “a primitive structure of four poles,” meant to suggest “a Plains Indian burial site” (B1) with the corpse abandoned to the sun on a simple platform. This set-up clearly anticipates Silent Tongue (1992). There Awbonnie’s ghost or soul is prevented from soaring because Talbot Roe, the husband maddened by her loss, prevents her body from being dismembered and devoured by the birds. (Think, too, of Tamburlaine carrying about the balmed body of his dead queen, Zenocrate.) Among the southwestern tribe of the Kiowa, birds often function as protective and totemic spirits. Taboos exist against eating them, but being eaten is a way of sharing their avian powers.13
The funerary setting of Man Fly, like the severed arm, implies that Skeetz is dead already. Even without radically curtailing the comedy of Marlowe’s alleged collaborators, Shepard’s adaptation therefore possibly seals Skeetz’s fate from the very start. There and then he abandons the throne-like “old Western saddle set on a horse tree” (B1) serving as his writer’s seat and means of salvation. Faustus only “fliest the throne of His tribunal seat” (5.1.113) at the very end, after deciding to have intercourse with the “spirit” of Helen. This episode, which Shepard left out, has been said to make Faustus guilty of “demoniality” and the crime of bestiality it involves irrevocably to upset the tragicomic balance between salvation and damnation.14 Granted, the 1616 text also loads the dice against Faustus, but retrospectively. As Mephistopheles gloatingly boasts, “When thou took’st the book/ To view the Scriptures, then I turned the leaves/ And led thine eye” (5.2.99–101),15 which instills a bitter sense of Calvinist predestination. For his part, Mustafo underscores Skeetz’s flawed character by refusing to wonder at his not feeling suddenly “polluted” upon signing the deed (“you weren’t no angel up to now” [B25]). Coming from notorious liars, though, both statements may be false.
The ambiguous title of Shepard’s adaptation encapsulates the emblematic point of Doctor Faustus. Strictly speaking “Man Fly” is a literal translation of the Latin inscription Faustus hallucinates on his arm after he has signed the deed with his own blood: “‘Homo, fuge!’ Whither should I fly? / If unto God, he’ll throw thee down to hell. –” (2.1.77–78). This inscription in turn is Marlowe’s quotation of the New Testament phrase, “Fly, O man!,” with which Paul incites Timothy to abandon the pursuit of money, “the root of all evil,” in favor of “eternal life” (1 Timothy 6.10–12). Bevington and Rasmussen add the (reverse) implication from Psalms 139.7–8, that man cannot escape God’s omnipresence, neither in heaven nor hell.16 The verb “to fly,” then, connotes the fall and failed escape no less than the ascension (as in 5.2.91–95 and 5.2.108–9).
The adaptation’s title (glossed on B23) preserves the Latin original’s meaning. Yet it ingeniously adds the check to any misplaced human(ist) aspiration in a conceited attempt to replace God. Despite the magical powers granted him for twenty-four years, Faustus is still but a man (1.1.23; B54), ending up even less than one, as insignificant as a mayfly hectically living out its “restless course” of a mere twenty-four hours. Shewey’s systematically erroneous spelling of Shepard’s title in one word implies as much.17 After all, “Homo, fuge” equally brings to mind the stock phrase “tempus fugit,” referred to by Marlowe on several occasions (4.1.100–1; 5.2.74–75). When Faustus implores “Fair nature’s eye” to “make perpetual day” (5.2.70–71) and the horses of the night to slow down (5.2.74) (in Shepard’s rendition of the Latin phrase [B59]), Marlowe draws on ancient mythology by way of Ovid. His plea of ecstatic love from the Amores (1.13.40) is thereby recycled as a final though vain magic spell against human transience. Chronos, the god of time, used to be presented as a winged horse harnessed by the Hours into pulling the sun’s chariot. It is this heavenly chariot which Helios’ son, Phaeton, wrecked through reckless driving. Thus he became a warning against intolerable disruptions of the fixed chain of being, like the animal transformations from Marlowe’s play which Shepard also recovered in Man Fly.
Another classic exemplum of such disruptions is Icarus (Lucifer is a third one). In The Changeling Middleton and Rowley also allude to the mythical figure and, when adapting that Renaissance play, Shepard followed his model in Slade’s desire for his socially superior mistress and his love of piloting and the mountains.18 That he only dies by drowning in the 1978 revision of The Bodyguard may well be ascribed to Shepard’s working on Doctor Faustus in the intervening years. Surely there exists a remarkable parallel between the image of the blood-drenched sky above the Rocky Mountains during the finale of Man Fly and the close-up of Katrin’s red “blood on the harsh blue water” ending the revised Bodyguard. True, the former image derives from Faustus’s heavenly vision of Christ’s Atonement (5.2.78–79) and the rebel’s fiery retribution (since the mountains begin to glow as hell is discovered [B59]), whereas the latter image hails from the imprecation with which De Flores is sent back to his Beatrice, “the pilot / [who] Will guide you to the Mare Mortuum.” But this is no objection. During the Renaissance the Dead Sea stood for the bottomless pit of hell in which the salt prevented one from ever sinking.19 That meant appropriate enough punishment for highfliers of any kind. Similarly, Skeetz gets into “hot water” with Lucifer for invoking God’s name (B53–54) and his final despair is an “endless sea” (B58).
Icarus of course features in Marlowe’s very opening Chorus: “[. . .] swoll’n with cunning of a self-conceit, / His waxen wings did mount above his reach,/ And melting heavens conspired his overthrow” (20–22). From Una Ellis-Fermor (1927) through Harry Levin (1952)20 to Marjorie Garber (1975),21 the overreaching figure of Icarus has played an emblematic role in critical interpretations of Marlowe’s work. As such, Icarus embodies the dialectic between aspiration and limitation (Skeetz’s “alchemical transformation” from “demon dog” to “angel cowboy” and back [B2]). The “cunning” (erudition, skill, deceit) in the above quote indeed conflates Daedalus with Icarus. The one made the confining maze and the wings, besides issuing the parental warning not to abuse them. The other fitted these wings to transgress boundaries, whether those between man and God (the Father) or man and beast (bird and minotaur in Ovid’s tale). These interactions between man and beast Garber, like Deats (and Shepard on B58), construes as an individuation problem: the difficulty of civilized man to contain the subhuman within. But it is Camille Paglia who restricted the meaning of “man” when considering the Greek tragic pattern of hubristic self-assertion and downfall as a “male” drama.22 Conditioned as they are by the natural menstrual cycle, women, says Paglia, never delude themselves into believing that much in free will. This is one meaning of Faustus’s and Skeetz’s necessary subjection to the inexorable cosmic rhythms in their final soliloquies. Paglia’s insight also adds meaning to the drying up of the characters’ blood during their deeds’ signing. Mustafo knows it signifies the body is growing “wise” to the men’s misguided aspiration (B22). So does Skeetz (B23), even if the mind’s impotent reaction to what the body cannot help but “hunger” for, constitutes an equal “curse” (B58).
The talk of menstruation in Curse of the Starving Class certainly gives that play’s title a gendered inflection. When Weston irritatedly wonders, “What happens when I’m gone, you all sit around and talk about your periods?”,23 he reaffirms the gender law of feminine domesticity, Ella’s obligation to provide food, cook, and do the laundry, which “deprives” her of the right to run off with Taylor. Weston’s drinking escapades and B. Traven’s radical disappearance are meant to contrast with the women’s failure to escape for good: Emma is first thrown off her horse and dragged through the mud, then killed when the car in which she wanted to flee explodes; nothing will come of Ella’s trip to Europe. Going by Weston’s soaring tale of the eagle and the cat, his hungry masculine flight has equally disastrous consequences (which may be why its victims, Ella and Wesley, finish it together). Even so, in Paglia’s analysis, sky-cults, of which the monologue in Curse and the Icarian myth suffusing Man Fly partake, are typically male forms of resistance against female earth-cults. They are no less than a cultural displacement of the natural creative focus of the belly to the head, from which emanated patriarchal abstractions like logic and language.
Shepard’s “True Dylan” (1987) expresses similar ideas in the context of its reflection upon artistic creativity and the mythical status it grants some. Not without some sexual innuendo and simplification, it ventures that “By nature” (66) the female rhythm is a horizontal and the male rhythm a vertical movement.24 Throughout “True Dylan” the former rhythm is symbolically present in the “distant rhythmic splashing of waves” (59). The latter rhythm makes Dylan think of a “flying horse” (62), which provides a second, belated answer to the mock interview’s programmatic opening question: whether the musician ever thinks of angels. His first answer is good whiskey, Weston’s way of getting high. Dylan’s recollection of his motorcycle accident offers a third response, insofar as its terms are clearly meant to recall Icarus’ infringement upon the parental or social edict (68). In keeping with Jung’s animus/anima theory, but in contrast to Freud’s binary construction of gender, Dylan and Shepard ultimately agree that the male and female rhythms inevitably co-inhabit single men and women, “Like God and the Devil. [. . .] Like you feel the lie and the truth. At the same time, sometimes. Both, together” (66). The artist’s challenge, therefore, the playwright told Kevin Sessums, is to remain smack in the middle of these contradictions, without taking sides.25 For this reason, artists ought to be neither recorders of reality nor plain fantasists but mythmakers, since myths are lies that speak the truth,26 fantasies as powerful as reality. For this reason, too, Sessums has likened Shepard’s plays to images of Pegasus, “sweaty animals with nostrils and flanks,” yet “able to sprout wings and take off.”27 Pegasus stands for “a hooved spirituality,” if also for poetic creativity, since the impact of his powerful hooves causes the muse’s spring to flow.
One of Shepard’s earliest dramatic reflections upon creativity is already couched in the gendered mythic–symbolic terms pertaining to Man Fly. According to Albert Wilhelm, Icarus’s Mother (1965) foregrounds the primordial struggle for (the son’s, the present’s) creative expression in the face of opposition (by the father-figure, the past) and the inaccessibility of the inspiring figure (the mother-figure).28 Doris Auerbach has broadened that play’s scope by attributing the American dream’s decay to the female figures’ being prevented from sustaining nurturing families in a patriarchal world.29 Additional evidence for these critics’ thesis is offered by Daniel Petrie’s movie, Resurrection (1980), apart from its showing the close fit between Shepard’s writing and acting stints. The attraction of Calvin Carpenter (played by Shepard) to the healer Edna Mae McCauley (Ellen Burstyn), who saved his life, indeed angers his preacher father. Because she denies the allegedly divine source of her gift, Calvin is deluded into taking her for the Anti-Christ and tries to assassinate her during a motorcycle sequence with which the one in “True Dylan” resonates.
Like “True Dylan,”Icarus’s Mother, and Resurrection, Man Fly ties artistic creativity to the conflict between genders and generations. The connection is really a staple in Shepard’s work since The Rock Garden (1964). Skeetz certainly blames his (divine) “Father” for his personal insignificance (B16), which compounds the evidence for a double reading of the word “fly” in Shepard’s title, and for the symbolic meaning of Skeetz’s living quarters as funerary grounds. At last he hopes to turn the page (“Bury the poet” [B16]), engender himself (“My birthday is tonight” [B16]), and achieve fame. Foxey, more like a Good than a Bad Angel but in keeping with Marlowe’s inversions, rekindles the poet’s flame in Skeetz by voicing her rather patriotic regrets at the prospect of further corrupting America. A simple remark about the prairie’s bracing smell opens up the yawning “everlasting space” within him and without (B35). For all that, Skeetz has staked his salvation on a life of crime. The choice automatically entails a rejection of the feminine, so he puts Foxey in her place, reminding her she is a spirit, no muse (B34). In the process true creativity is forsaken and salvation, too.
As a result, Man Fly approaches the generic category of “sit-trag,” a term Toby Zinman coined to designate the perverted religious hunger, its systematic structural and thematic abrogation in Shepard’s artist/saviors, from Cowboy Mouth (1971) to States of Shock (1991).30 Skeetz’s fate (like that of Faustus, as Fred Tromly has argued) indeed resembles that of Tantalus no less than Icarus. Magic “tantalizes” him with a fulfillment ever outstripped by his “hunger” (B10, B14), not to mention his thirsting for one drop of Christ’s blood. Skeetz’s Icarian downfall appears perhaps unusually conclusive for Shepard’s work and sit-tragedy, but then the character’s Tantalian torment (going by the 1616 text) is meant to go on obsessively, in a hell conceived along pagan rather than orthodox Christian lines.31 Sartre’s No Exit (1944) dramatized a secular hereafter in similar terms, not to mention the life this side of the grave Beckett envisaged in Waiting for Godot (1953). Zinman has adduced plenty of causes for the perverted spiritual impulse in Shepard’s work: from religion’s failure to deliver and our skeptic secular times, to a corrupt system and ineffectual messianic figures too weak to sustain faith rather than overweening like Icarus.32 Her etiology for the strained dialogue between self and soul which Shepard’s plays, including Man Fly, externalize, runs the entire gamut. Almost, for on the evidence of Man Fly the neglect of feminine values should be added.
For a good understanding of the adaptation it is important to realize that the lost promise Foxey signals is also that of the equivocal “natural” sublime – silencing her (B39) makes the silence of “Ancient America” resound all the heavier (B29). The prairie to which Foxey pays tribute stands in for the desert, the unstable trope encountered elsewhere in Shepard’s work,33 as he reminds us by Scooter’s confusion of these settings (B29–30). Here the prairie is of course dominated by the Rocky Mountains. Their majesty is commensurate with Skeetz’s Wordsworthian ego when he has just signed away his soul and is still feeling “on top of the world” (B25). Lest it be forgotten that his superhuman grandeur is a vicarious emotion, the Mountains’ later heartlessness (B60) expressly mirrors Lucifer’s in the anticlimactic coda (during which he kicks the severed arm, the only thing remaining of Skeetz). According to the same principle, this natural scenery has served a legitimizing function within a nationalist rhetoric, which Shepard is said to invoke rather nostalgically and uncritically, “like the purple-mountain majesty of the nationalist lyric, ‘God Bless America.’”34 This seems much to the point in an American adaptation of a British classic written after a three-year stay abroad. Skeetz still comes across as an expatriate of sorts, aspiring to “full-blown citizen[ship] in [Mustafo’s] native state” (B21). However, the bleeding Rocky Mountains ending Man Fly project both America’s Manifest Destiny and the loss of redemption, whether in the Christian or national context. From Mustafo’s mobster perspective, Christ is dead, and so is the frontier (B27), despite the notion’s lingering Tantalian appeal.
A crucial index of this double demise is the emergence of a criminally figured postmodern sublime, marked by urbanization, commodification, and technology. Not that Man Fly ever moves to the city – whether Las Vegas (Operation Sidewinder [1970], Seduced [1978]), L.A., or Houston (Angel City [1976], Paris, Texas [1984]) – the desert’s metaphorical counterpart and the locus classicus of the crime genre, for whose bright lights Jet and Scooter pine.35 Nor does Lucifer exactly plan to cover all of America with concrete, as Bottoms has it.36 But the phone booth along the abondoned highway where Skeetz awaits a call from Reverend Green already intuits the invisible power-lines, the communications network cross-cutting natural space, to which Mustafo promises a gateway: “the secret machinery [. . .] that makes things tick. The force behind the hidden police [. . .]” (B2). Skeetz’s control over the media is the pay-off, allowing the alchemist’s sublimation of lead into gold, if also entailing the commodification of his self. The dialectic of expansion and humbling to which the sublime (like Zinman’s “sit-trag”) subjects the self rehearses the Icarian attempt at overcoming boundaries and the subsequent fall. The spectacle of nature’s (and God’s) boundlessness may have been displaced by that of human(ist) power and wealth (which Timothy warned against), but the logic of infinitizing profit and economic performativity and the mise-en-abîme of power (“the force behind the hidden police”) spell an endless deferral, a Tantalian lack of closure.
Considering the rhetorical means by which Skeetz works his magic (as opposed to the prairie’s silence), success is even less guaranteed. In this regard Man Fly reenacts Doctor Faustus’s substantiation of the amply thematized (Icarian/Tantalian) sublime dialectic on the theatrical, tropological, and discursive levels. To Palmer, Faustus’s study toward the end embraces the entire cosmos and shrinks to cramping dimensions, time opens out onto eternal damnation as it runs out, the poetry takes wing until a heavy caesura arrests the flight.37 Just so, for Garber the magic circle (by extension the stage at large) protects and traps the conjurer. Spoken language proves capable of calling forth devils (by its blasphemous character), but also threatens the apparitions of Helen and Alexander (5.1.25), whose own inability to speak comes across as an extra flaw. Faustus’s written deed allows him to burst his human confines yet binds him to his word till death ensues. Marlowe’s flexible iambic pentameter, at last, reembodies the central tension – with its occasional “aspiring foot” or extra syllable disrupting the internal rhyme or meter. In the final analysis, Garber believes the playwright to transcend the play’s antitheses in the act of (re)creating them.38 Despite Eliot’s somewhat disrespectful comparison of Marlowe’s blank verse with an early derivative of “that astonishing industrial product coal-tar,”39 its expressiveness gainsays for Garber the inexpressibility topos, so that Marlowe ultimately forges a rhetorical sublime.
To all appearances, Shepard proves Marlowe’s equal in Skeetz’s mesmerizing faith-healing, even if it is framed by a grotesque canvassing song. The audience’s mood thus set, the subsequent séance justifies with a twist Eliot’s claim that the Renaissance dramatist’s savage style and mighty line occasionally skirt farce, caricature, and “huffe-snuffe bombast.”40 Nonetheless the scene is supposed to work its magic. Begun in the dark with the radio song before lights flood the televised Hollywood Bowl over which a crucified Christ towers, the staging mimes the speech’s internal movement from darkness to enlightenment. Offering an alternative to Faustus’s literal travels through Europe, Skeetz teletransports his audience by emotional, rhetorical, and technological means. Rallying the faithful by opposition to his detractors, this Anti-Christ invokes pity for his own pseudo-victimization, that of the two deaf-and-dumb girls about to be cured, and the mother who suffered from their fate. At the same time he arrogates the divine power to command the elements and, like an impudent, sharply dressed patriarch, pounds his listeners into a trance. The incremental repetition and cumulative buildup of his words brook no resistance, as they boom across the theatre’s PA system in the evangelical priest’s typical call-and-answer fashion.
At last the girls recover their speech, a “miracle” capped by Skeetz’s bleeding hands and feet (B46). The single high-pitched note the girls utter to the accompaniment of a screaming saxophone is the foil to Skeetz’s demonic eloquence, their respective lack and excess de-humanizing and de-personalizing both. If the color backdrop of the Rocky Mountains is supposed to be “photographic” (B1), that of the bleeding Christ on the cross, by taking after “the Dali painting” (B44), aims for surrealism. The whole set-up erupts into a dystopian scene in which people are weeping, writhing, and frenziedly falling to the ground as if seized by cataleptic fits. This violent madness is a far cry from Faustus’s controlled ritual incantation of the devil (1.3.8–23), the friars’ measured malediction (3.1.89–100), or the silent and decorous apparitions. The chaos rather exemplifies the crisis experience which baptism by the Holy Spirit in the Pentecostal belief is by definition.41 It also rehearses the apocalyptic disasters on which Shepard’s other artist/saviors stake redemption, unsuccessfully so.42 “[S]oft” organ music and a “mournful” choir are heard underneath the exhausted preacher’s more relaxed call upon his congregation’s generosity – financial counters or “gifts” in exchange for verbal ones. But no sooner is his extortionist sales pitch over than the pandemonium resumes, this time with people singing and dancing amidst the floating greenbacks.
There is a profound lyricism and rhythmicality to this set speech (supported by sax, organ, and choir singing), this orchestrated mania with its seemingly uncontrolled ebb and flow of energy levels. Surely these warrant the subtitle’s generic reference to music as much as the low-key saxophone accompanying Skeetz’s opening soliloquy and facilitating the transitions between scenes, or the pounding, menacing music enhancing the devils’ interventions. If in the earlier The Tooth of Crime (1972) Shepard recycled the registers of rock-and-roll, sci-fi, cars, and boxing to build his verbal riffs, he here draws on black gospel music, besides the Pentecostalists’ glossolalia, holy dancing, and “joyful noise unto the Lord.” Together these make for a spectacularity strangely at odds with the puritan antitheatrical prejudice documented by Jonas Barish,43 which ought to be further exacerbated by the venality.44 In Marlowe’s play no less than in a late capitalist society, time is money – the term during which Faustus can amass wealth. The timing of Skeetz’s faith-healing is all the more important then: to mesmerize the audience and avoid antagonizing it when calling upon its generosity.
Shepard’s Reverend Green, a composite character, appears to be partly modeled on “Soul Survivor” Al Green, which may be one reason why the Taper Forum rejected the script or perhaps required further revisions, lest they be sued. Al Green was repudiated by his father for abandoning the religious music on which he was raised in favor of soul. Somehow compensating for the loss were his musical successes. His 1971 hit, “I’m So Tired of Being Alone,” turned him into a superstar and is alluded to in the horror of Shepard’s Reverend at being abandoned in the desert. After being “born again” – a revivalist experience the poet magician in Skeetz is addicted to (B2) – Al Green returned to traditional gospel. In the 1980s he kept bringing out award-winning albums while heading the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Memphis, Tennessee, a city with a large Pentecostal following.45 By exemplifying the spectacularization and commercialization of gospel Shepard’s Reverend Green and his proxy, Skeetz, definitely warrant the title’s injunction against money, the “reward of sin” (1.1.39–41). In light of the playwright’s other failed savior/artists, “televangelists” guilty of financial and sexual malpractices, like Jim Bakker and Jerry Falwell, are also targeted, even relatively honorable ones like Billy Graham. As a former friend of Eisenhower, Graham underwrote the 1960 presidential campaign of Nixon, portraying him in an unpublished article as “a Christian, moral leader.” This was of course before Watergate, a scandal that dominated the papers throughout Shepard’s stay in England, prior to his writing Man Fly. In 1973, Falwell, who went on to found the Moral Majority and help elect Ronald Reagan, was charged by the Securities and Exchanges Commission with “fraud and deceit.” This did not prevent him from replacing Jim Bakker as head of the PTL television network, when in 1987 he admitted to a sexual indiscretion.46 Such moral hypocrisy is obviously at issue in Skeetz’s call to “cure” the “sick” and the “poor,” the “dope fiend” and the “homosexual” (B47), as if all were equal evidence of perverted Christian values (health, wealth, and orthodox desire). In truth, the apocalyptic fervor of Graham’s speeches possessed its own macabre obscenity at the expense of the so-called doomed, which recalls the sadistic overtones in the 1616 version of Faustus’s damnation.
The fervor of revivalist preaching depends to a large extent on its belief in a one-to-one correspondence between the spoken word of God, the Gospel, and its referent.47 A case in point is the equation of the Eucharist’s wine and bread with Christ’s blood and body, the transubstantiation doctrine much debated in Marlowe’s days and infusing Doctor Faustus.48 True West also resonates with its symbolism.49 In fact, the (theo)logocentrism underlying Evangelism has appealed to Shepard for a long time. An unresolved tension between the written and the spoken permeates his work, one that finds nondramatic expression in the essay “Language, Visualization, and the Inner Library.”50 Similarly, Marlowe’s play reflects the shift from an oral to a written culture under the influence of the growing mercantilism and the invention of book printing. This partly explains why Mephistopheles can no longer be satisfied with Faustus’s oral promise but requires a written and signed contract forfeiting his soul. In a way, the contract offers a secular variant of the classic metaphors for the vanitas topos (skull [B58], hourglass, jewels, or flowers). By ever reminding Faustus of the term to his life, it gainsays Plato’s fear that writing would undo memory. What the contract cannot prevent is that Faustus’s soul, in the Aristotelian tradition still a divinely inspired organ of thought, now becomes a commodity in a secular economy of exchange, without any absolute value or “proper” being. (To Skeetz it “isn’t worth a two day bus ride” [B20].) By the same token it has become an abstract currency on a par with the signifiers of literary language. According to Graham Hammill, Marlowe’s inversions and play with emblems of power (Adrian’s silver belt, Bruno’s diadem) foreground the arbitrary link between signifiers and their signifieds, now making for insecurity and incredulity rather than an unwavering faith.51 Hence the horse-courser doubts Faustus’s words, though he speaks the truth, and Benvolio mocks Faustus’s capacity to conjure Alexander the Great and his paramour before the German Emperor, Charles V. Both episodes demonstrate the emergence of a split between believers and disbelievers, orthodoxy and heterodoxy.
In his first draft Shepard did without either episode, though Jet’s earlier mentioned doubts concerning the blackmailing scheme still resonate with the doubts voiced in Doctor Faustus. In the B-text Mustafo sends Skeetz off to hell with the rejoinder to “remember it’s from hunting pleasure that you fall” (B59). In mythical terms the poet – already modeled after Icarus and Tantalus – is further identified with Actaeon, who was transformed into a stag, no longer able to tell what he had seen after stumbling upon Diana’s grotto when she was bathing. In the Metamorphoses Actaeon’s story culminates in his dismemberment by his own hunting dogs. Shepard, who also relied on the myth in Fractured, anticipates and conflates Skeetz’s silencing and dismemberment in the severing of his arm, a synecdoche for his writings. Ovid’s tale meant to warn against a subject’s curiosity transgressing social boundaries, apart from gaining insight into the metaphorical or fraudulent nature of authority – Diana’s nakedness without the signs of power. Skeetz’s taste of power is all the more bitter for being fraudulent, like his rise from the ranks through his undeserved doctor’s title.
To Hammill Faustus’s transgression and its mercenary character allow for a reading in sodomitical terms of his relations with Mephistopheles, Helen, and the other devils in female disguise. This reading is independent of any actual intercourse but derives from Plutarch’s version of Actaeon’s story in which he is torn apart by his lovers. The anxieties over sodomy or the homosocial which Doctor Faustus registers are congruent with those Man Fly expresses about Foxey and the feminine. Both should be seen as “improper” to male entitlement or empowerment, except as means to an end. Foxey is exploited as “bait” (B32), dangled before Green’s eyes but ultimately denied him. (“She’d dissolve in your mouth before you got the taste” [B42].) This fits Marlowe’s extensive reliance on consumption imagery, the theology of communion perverted into gluttony and hunger, warranting the exemplarity of Tantalus for Skeetz and his victims. Jackson Hooker’s disguise as an “old” lady (because of the intervening years) defuses the potentially erotic tension (in contrast to Faustus’s enhancement of beauty by male standards [2.2.161–62; 5.1.106–9]). The hand kiss Skeetz receives inverts Judas’s traitor’s kiss. By violently wiping it away, the poet–preacher dismisses its redemptive power and potential homosocial connotations. For this reason Man Fly helps to arbitrate the debate about the alleged misogyny of Shepard’s male characters as the result of homophobia52 rather than homoeroticism.53 Skeetz’s sneer at the inappropriateness of Reverend Green’s “feelings” for his “slave” of a bodyguard (B38, not in the A-text) point in the same direction. Presumably, the poet’s wistful vision of several “bouncing Southern boys” (B58) is governed by Billy Lee’s recent departure and his enthusiasm for baseball. Even if Skeetz’s sending him off to avoid witnessing his damnation (like the scholars in Doctor Faustus) bespeaks emotional concern for his well-being.
Equally important, however, is the extent to which Hammill’s reading emphasizes the discursive “impropriety” of Doctor Faustus, its refusal of closure. He thus disagrees with Garber, for whom Marlowe ultimately achieves complete “control over the realm of imagination and the world of the stage,”54 “terminating” as he does, after the Latin phrase in the epilogue, his dramatic travesty of Christ’s Atonement with “a new religion of the autonomous author,” the one Faustus failed to achieve within the play proper.55 Even Belsey’s analysis tends toward closure through the historical momentum by which the fragmented medieval subject dependent on the Church and God made room for the autonomous humanist self, relying on empirical experience. But, as seen, Skeetz and his implied author are post-humanist selves, irrevocably shattered. From the fundamentalist perspective, the rambunctious faith-healing of Man Fly forms the paradoxical epitome of “propriety,” in the sense of logocentric orthodoxy, embodied words sweeping the stage audience of the faithful off their feet in a dance of joy. Skeetz’s words may well have a similar exhilarating effect on the more susceptible among the theatre spectators. Broadcast as they are through the PA system, they make for a minimalist version of Richard Schechner’s environmentalism, a secular communion doubling the religious one. (This weakens Shepard’s disavowal of the director’s controversial environmental production of The Tooth of Crime.) However, to the average, more skeptical theatre audience the scene’s meretriciousness and staged character undermine its orthodoxy, as with Marlowe’s “miracles” (in Hammill’s interpretation, not in Tromly’s requiring the audience’s tantalization).56 The very excess of the faith-healing in Man Fly constitutes the scene’s impropriety, like the outrageous spectacles of The Tooth of Crime and States of Shock.57 Skeetz’s own “impropriety” resides in his not being what he seems (i.e., the theme of the white devil in Renaissance drama), in his not being at all. The point is made extensively: Skeetz comes from “nowhere” and ends up “nowhere” (B50), longs for the power to shift-shape into “empty space” (B2), “airs” his sermons (B52), is “nobody to serve” (B35), or judges his life a dream vision that has come to “nothing” (B59). All exemplify his ontological insufficiency.
In the last resort, there is of course another heterodox audience, Shepard’s incredulous readership at the Taper Forum withholding the play from production, exnominating it (like the feminine and homosocial in Doctor Faustus), and barring the community of theatregoers from attending it. That audience (Parone? Davidson?) prevented the play from achieving a tentative, provisional closure on stage, whether it judged Man Fly “unsatisfactory” by itself or as an adaptation of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. In the latter guise, its protagonist pretends to be no foreshadowing of Christ’s second and final coming, but its incarnation made virtually omnipresent to his audience through radio and television (B44). By now, however, we know Skeetz for the composite dramatic character he is, one recalling the historical figures of Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell, the literary one of Urbain Grandier in John Whiting’s Devils, and the mythical ones of Icarus, Tantalus, and Actaeon. This is an altogether different dance of signifiers, the interminable performativity of intertextuality on which Skeetz’s being and subjectivity depend, next to the performativity of written language tout court. “THERE’S NOTHING LASTING IN ME” (B12), he yells in despair. By being forgotten, the adaptation as a whole repeats the exemplary onslaught of time the Faustian type is made to suffer from, even if his inscription within the intertextual tradition has guaranteed his survival.
That Man Fly deserves to be salvaged from this forgetfulness, the present essay should have shown. Together with The Bodyguard, the script represents an independent generic category within Shepard’s work: that of the adaptation. Its limitation to Renaissance classics may prove an asset when assessing the playwright’s confrontations with the dramatic canon (comprising also figures like Ibsen and O’Neill). Because the upshot in both scripts has been a critical reappropriation of Shepard’s American roots, they certainly remain indispensable to gauging the impact of his four-year stay in England. Beyond that Man Fly throws further light on the gender problematic and prolongs the self-reflection upon his craft so prominent in the plays featuring artist figures, notably in the tension between the oral and the written.
The adaptation’s relevance to Shepard’s career and work also exceeds the links here established with Icarus’s Mother, Curse of the Starving Class, “True Dylan” or Resurrection. Traces of Doctor Faustus litter the plays written and produced shortly after Man Fly. Angel City (1976), which the Taper Forum ended up substituting for the Marlowe play during its anniversary season, in its title already recycles the Icarian flight symbolism, before dramatizing the artist’s failure at transcendence when corrupted by evil. The disaster movie Wheeler wants Rabbit to produce clearly partakes of the controlled chaos Skeetz stages during his Pentecostal meetings. In California the Pentecostal Holiness movement incidentally spread from Azusa Street in Los Angeles (featuring also in The Unseen Hand and Simpatico) thanks to the early twentieth-century ministerings of William Seymour.58 The Sad Lament of Pecos Bill on the Eve of Killing His Wife (Oct. 1976), an “operatic musical” commissioned by the Bay Area Playwrights’ Festival to celebrate the US bicentennial, again features a larger-than-life Faustian character, just like Henry Hackamore in Seduced (1978). The latter hero, based on Howard Hughes (movie mogul, pilot, aircraft-builder, and personal friend of Nixon), is forced at gunpoint to leave his inheritance to his bodyguard/secretary. The contract written with an intravenous needle dripping the business tycoon’s own blood comes straight out of Doctor Faustus. By signing away his life Hackamore seemingly provides a fitting conclusion to the Icarian pattern, but his legend survives Raoul’s bullets. In fact, by recasting the Faustus myth in a national mold, from Hollywood producers to the legendary Pecos Bill, Shepard warns against its survival through lingering nationalist pride, as exemplified in States of Shock, written on the occasion of the Gulf War. “This country was hatched on witches’ blood. It still goes on” (B3).
1 Stephen J. Bottoms, The Theatre of Sam Shepard: States of Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 288.
2 There exist two typescripts of Man Fly, both in Box 2, File 15, of the Shepard papers in the Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University. The first text, numbered through 42, carries the holograph inscription “1st Draft/Jan ’75.” The second sixty-one-page text carries no date, just the holograph specification “2nd Draft.” That it is crossed out possibly suggests that Shepard considered this a satisfactory second version. Besides integrating the typed and hand-written inserts to the first draft, this “revision” also contains some new material. This is the one referred to parenthetically in my text. References to Marlowe are to the A-text unless stated otherwise. Sincere thanks go to Sam Shepard and Judy Boals for permission to quote from the typescripts, and to the staff of Boston University’s Special Collection for perusal of the material.
3 Katharine M. Morsberger, “The Mark Taper Forum,” in John MacNicholas, (ed.), Twentieth-Century American Dramatist, Part 2: K–Z. DLB vol. VII (Detroit: Gale, 1981), 443.
4 Don Shewey, Sam Shepard, 2nd edn. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997), 101, 113–14.
5 Jonathan Cott, “The Rolling Stone Interview: Sam Shepard,” Rolling Stone, 18 December 1986–1 January 1987, 168, 170.
6 Ibid., 170.
7 Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985).
8 T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 133.
9 John Jump (ed.), Marlowe: Doctor Faustus (London: Macmillan, 1969), 177–87.
10 Robert Ornstein, “The Comic Synthesis in Doctor Faustus,” and Cleanth Brooks, “The Unity of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus,” in Jump, Marlowe: Doctor Faustus, 165–72 and 208–21. See also Fred B. Tromly, Playing with Desire: Christopher Marlowe and the Art of Tantalization (Toronto University Press, 1998), 19, 135.
11 Sarah Munson Deats, Sex, Gender, and Desire in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (Newark: Delaware University Press, 1997), 202–24.
12 Bottoms, Theatre of Sam Shepard, 94, 144–47, 227, 234.
13 Paul D. Streufert, “The Revolving Western: American Guilt and the Tragically Greek in Sam Shepard’s Silent Tongue,” American Drama, 8.2 (Spring 1999): 32.
14 W. W. Greg, “The Damnation of Faustus,” in Jump, Marlowe: Doctor Faustus, 71–88.
15 Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, ed., intro., and annot. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Manchester University Press, 1993). References to act, scene, and line numbers in parentheses within the text are to this edition.
16 Bevington and Rasmussen, Doctor Faustus, 142.
17 Shewey, Sam Shepard, 101, 104, 113, 156, 264.
18 Johan Callens, From Middleton and Rowley’s “Changeling” to Sam Shepard’s “Bodyguard”: A Contemporary Appropriation of a Renaissance Drama (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1997), 28, 112.
19 Ibid., 52–53, 55.
20 Tromly, Playing with Desire, 15.
21 Marjorie Garber, “‘Infinite Riches in a Little Room’: Closure and Enclosure in Marlowe,” in Alvin Kernan (ed.), Two Renaissance Mythmakers: Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 3–21.
22 Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 8–10.
23 Sam Shepard, Angel City, Curse of the Starving Class, and Other Plays (New York: Urizen Books, 1976), 87.
24 Sam Shepard, “True Dylan,” Esquire, July 1987, 59–68. Page references in parentheses within the text are to this edition.
26 Amy Lippman, “Rhythm and Truths: an Interview with Sam Shepard,” American Theatre, 1.1 (April 1984 [1983]): 9.
27 Sessums, “Sam Shepard,” 78.
28 Albert Wilhelm, “Icarus’s Mother: Creative Transformations of a Myth,” in Kimball King (ed.), Sam Shepard: A Casebook (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988), 21–30.
29 Doris Auerbach, “Who Was Icarus’s Mother? The Powerless Mother Figures in the Plays of Sam Shepard,” in King, Sam Shepard: A Casebook, 53–64.
30 Toby Silverman Zinman, “Shepard’s Sit-Trag: Salvation Subverted,” in Johan Callens (ed.), Sam Shepard: Between the Margin and the Centre. Contemporary Theatre Review 8.3 (1998): 41–54.
31 Tromly, Playing with Desire, 12, 20, 22, 25, 145–46.
32 Zinman, “Shepard’s Sit-Trag,” 51–53.
33 Leonard Wilcox, “The Desert and the City: Operation Sidewinder and Shepard’s Postmodern Allegory,” in Leonard Wilcox (ed.), Rereading Shepard: Contemporary Critical Essays on the Plays of Sam Shepard (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 42–57.
34 Rob Wilson, “The Postmodern Sublime: Local Definitions, Global Deformations of the US National Imaginary,” Amerikastudien/American Studies, 43.3 (1998): 521.
35 See Leonard Wilcox, “The Desert and the City,” 42–57, and “West’s The Day of the Locust and Shepard’s Angel City: Refiguring L.A. Noir,” Modern Drama, 36 (March 1993): 61–75.
36 Bottoms, Theatre of Sam Shepard, 143.
37 D. J. Palmer, “Magic and Poetry in Doctor Faustus,” in Jump, Marlowe: Doctor Faustus, 200–2.
38 Marjorie Garber, “‘Infinite Riches,’” 19–20 and “‘Here’s Nothing Writ’: Scribe, Script, and Circumscription in Marlowe’s Plays” (1984), in Richard Wilson (ed. and intro.), Christopher Marlowe (London: Longman, 1999), 40.
39 T. S. Eliot, Essays on Elizabethan Drama (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1960 [1956]), 57–58.
40 Ibid., 62–64.
41 Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris (eds.), Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 1296.
42 Zinman, “Shepard’s Sit-Trag,” 44–47.
43 See Jonas Barish, The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).
44 See Robert Sacré, Les negro spirituals et les gospel songs (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993), 39, and Wilson and Ferris, Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, 1012–14, 1296.
45 Sacré, Les negro spirituals, 113–14.
46 Wilson and Ferris, Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, 1317–19.
47 Ibid., 1272–73.
48 Garber, “‘Here’s Nothing Writ,’” 41–48.
49 See Zinman, “Shepard’s Sit-Trag,” 49, and Jeffrey D. Hoepper, “Cain, Canaanites, and Philistines in Sam Shepard’s True West,” Modern Drama, 36 (March 1993): 76–82.
50 Johan Callens, “Introduction,” Sam Shepard: Between the Margin and the Centre, 1–17.
51 See Graham Hammill, “Faustus’s Fortunes: Commodification, Exchange, and the Form of Literary Subjectivity,” English Literary History, 63 (1996): 309–36.
52 Alan Shepard, “The Ominous ‘Bulgarian’ Threat in Sam Shepard’s Plays,” Theatre Journal, 44 (1992): 59–66.
53 Florence Falk, “Men Without Women,” in Bonnie Marranca (ed.), American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1981), 90–103.
54 Garber, “‘Infinite Riches,’” 19.
55 Garber, “‘Here’s Nothing Writ,’” 30, 48.
56 Hammill, “Faustus’s Fortunes,” 320; Tromly, Playing with Desire, 142.
57 Callens, “Diverting the Integrated Spectacle of War: Sam Shepard’s States of Shock,” Text and Performance Quarterly, 20.3 (July 2000): 290–306.
58 Wilson and Ferris, Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, 1296.