Critical studies of Sam Shepard’s plays frequently acknowledge the importance of the Off-Off-Broadway movement of the 1960s in providing the context and the impetus for Shepard to begin his career as a playwright. This semi-underground theatre scene, which found its home in the cafés, churches, lofts, and basements of New York’s Greenwich Village and East Village districts, was an intrinsic part of the counter-cultural mood of the period. These alternative venues operated by a kind of do-it-yourself spirit of invention and improvisation, and initially their only funding source for plays was the money collected by passing a hat around the audience at the end of each show. The free admission policy maintained by all the key venues until the turn of the decade meant that playwrights and directors were relieved of commercial pressures and conventions: thus, for many in the movement, there was a conscious rejection of existing theatrical forms, and an attempt to forge an alternative theatre which was at once more community-based and more genuinely experimental.
It was in this context that Shepard first developed as a playwright. In 1964, his first two plays, Cowboys and The Rock Garden, premiered at Theatre Genesis, an Off-Off-Broadway venue based at St. Mark’s in the Bowery, an episcopalian church in the East Village at 2nd Avenue and 10th Street. He continued to be based there until 1971, when Shepard and his young family left New York to start a new life in England (just as Off-Off-Broadway itself, in changing economic circumstances, was mutating into something less spontaneous and more institutionalized, simply in order to survive). That seven-year period was for Shepard the most prolific of his entire career, as he responded to the movement’s seemingly insatiable demand for new material by turning out eighteen one-act plays and three two-act plays (to number only those which were actually produced). Shepard had plays presented at all of the key Off-Off-Broadway venues – itself a distinction shared by only one other writer, H. M. Koutoukas – and eventually at more “legitimate” theatres such as the subscription-funded American Place. He also collaborated in numerous ways with actors, directors, and other writers whom he encountered on the alternative circuit. This was, as Shepard himself wrote in 1985, “a playwright’s heaven . . . The only impulse was to make living, vital theatre which spoke to the moment.”1
Unquestionably, then, Shepard’s work would never have developed and grown as it did in these crucial early years of his career without the opportunities and stimuli provided by the Off-Off-Broadway context. And yet studies of his plays – including my own book, The Theatre of Sam Shepard – generally provide very little understanding of the circles Shepard was working in at this time, and their impact on his writing. The primary reason for such oversights is, undoubtedly, the fact that Off-Off-Broadway itself has been largely neglected as a subject for historical research and critical analysis, and this is nowhere more true than in the case of Theatre Genesis. Despite being widely recognized as one of the most significant and prolific Off-Off-Broadway venues, alongside the Caffe Cino, Café La MaMa, and the Judson Poets’ Theatre, Genesis is by far the most under-documented of this foursome. Where the other three have all at one time or another since the 1960s been subjected to exhibitions, retrospective journalism, and some (albeit cursory) academic analysis, Genesis has been all but forgotten. In this chapter, I have sought to rectify this situation somewhat. Having already attempted, in The Theatre of Sam Shepard, a detailed textual analysis of Shepard’s early plays, my goal here is to complement that work by providing some more clues as to the context in which they were written.2 Drawing on the wider research which I have been conducting into the Off-Off-Broadway movement, and on original interviews with several of Shepard’s colleagues, I have sought to sketch out some of the key features of the work of Theatre Genesis, in order that the development of his writing within that environment, and indeed after leaving it, can be better appreciated.
Before continuing, it is perhaps necessary to stress just how important a role Theatre Genesis played in Shepard’s early career. A small, black-box-style studio theatre in a converted upstairs hall at St. Mark’s, the venue produced not only that first double bill of Cowboys and The Rock Garden, but also the premieres of Chicago (1965), Forensic and the Navigators (1967), and The Mad Dog Blues (1971). Although Shepard distributed his output widely among different theatres throughout the 1960s, only Ellen Stewart’s Café La MaMa could equal this figure of premiering five of his plays – including, most notably, Melodrama Play (1967) and The Unseen Hand (1969). Significantly, though, even those Shepard plays appearing outside Theatre Genesis itself more often than not featured Genesis regulars among the key members of the cast and crew: The Unseen Hand, for instance, premiered with Lee Kissman and Beeson Carroll in the key roles of Blue Morphan and Willie the Space Freak. Kissman had been acting at Genesis ever since he originated the role of the Boy in The Rock Garden, and had also appeared in Chicago, Forensic and the Navigators, Up to Thursday (Playwrights Unit, 1964), and Red Cross (Judson Poets’ Theatre, 1966). He also went on to star as the gun-toting revolutionary Geez in Shaved Splits at La MaMa in 1970, in a production directed by Genesis-based actor–director Bill Hart. Beeson Carroll, having also appeared in Forensic, went on to feature in The Mad Dog Blues and Back Bog Beast Bait – a 1971 production at Wynn Handman’s American Place Theatre staffed almost entirely by Genesis regulars and directed by Shepard’s fellow Genesis playwright, Tony Barsha. Such cross-referencing could go on and on. Even Shepard’s two-act extravaganza Operation Sidewinder, produced with the full resources of Lincoln Center behind it in 1970, starred Barbara Eda Young as Honey, the female lead: Young, who had effectively trained herself as an actress through five years of regular work at Theatre Genesis, was here making her début in “legitimate” professional theatre.
It is a mark of Shepard’s dependence on and trust for his Genesis colleagues that he insisted on their prominent presence in so many of his plays, wherever they were being presented. For him, Theatre Genesis was a creative home in many more ways than the merely physical. Shepard was an integral member of the community of like-minded playwrights, directors, and actors which developed at St. Mark’s during this period – a community spirit perhaps most clearly demonstrated when Shepard married Genesis actress O-Lan Johnson in the church in 1969, in a double wedding with actor–playwright Walter Hadler and his stage-manager bride, Georgia. When one begins to examine Shepard’s early work alongside the plays of his Genesis colleagues, all kinds of common interests and affinities become apparent – just as an analysis of the early work of the predominantly gay group of playwrights working regularly at Caffe Cino also reveals many common thematic threads and theatrical methods. The Off-Off-Broadway movement was, in effect, a loose assembly of artistic communities, each related to but also distinct from the others.
Theatre Genesis was the last of the four key Off-Off-Broadway venues to appear on the scene. Caffe Cino, Judson Poets’ Theatre, and La MaMa had presented their first full productions in 1960, 1961, and 1962 respectively, but Genesis did not inaugurate its own work until that first double bill of Shepard plays in October 1964. By that time, the emergence of small-scale, noncommercial theatre all over lower Manhattan was a recognized phenomenon, and Genesis set itself up in direct response to the wealth of new playwriting talent that had begun to appear. From its inception, Genesis had a more self-conscious, programmatic approach to the nurturing of its writers than did any of the other venues. Rather than simply providing a stage and a time slot, as did Cino and La MaMa, artistic director Ralph Cook had very clear objectives in mind for Theatre Genesis; as was reflected in his very choice of title (“artistic director” was an industry term never adopted by or applicable to Joe Cino, Ellen Stewart, or Judson’s Al Carmines, in their more ad hoc programming practices). The performance space itself was also more “theatre-like” than those elsewhere on the scene: rather than mounting plays on a platform stage in a café, as at Cino and La MaMa, or in the undisguised meeting rooms of a church, as with the Poets’ Theatre at Judson Memorial Church, Genesis prided itself on its dedicated studio space. Tiny as it was (no more than about thirty by thirty-five feet), this so-called “black cube” nevertheless lent itself to many different experiments in stage and audience configuration.
The relatively “professional” appearance of Genesis’s work was not, however, matched by any sense of careerist self-promotion on the part of Cook and his colleagues. Indeed, of all the key Off-Off venues, Genesis showed the least inclination, during the 1960s, to push its work toward transfers to commercial, Off-Broadway productions. A major part of the reason for the venue’s relative obscurity in documentations of this period surely lies in its very lack of interest in showing itself off to the wider world. Rather, Cook’s concern was for the theatre to serve not its own interests, but the needs of its immediate community in the Bowery. Just as the Judson Poets’ Theatre saw itself as part of the church’s ministry to its local area, so Theatre Genesis was first and foremost a part of St. Mark’s mission to its parish. However, where Judson was surrounded by the relatively affluent and artistically sophisticated community of Washington Square and the wider Greenwich Village area, St. Mark’s was located in a run-down area riddled with social problems from homelessness to drug and alcohol abuse. Thus, from the outset, Genesis subscribed less to the “art for art’s sake” ethos of Judson Poets’ Theatre than to a sense of social and political mission which became integral to the work produced there.
In relation to Sam Shepard’s work, these factors might at first seem oddly unrelated. Shepard clearly has succeeded in promoting himself and his work to wider audiences, and he does not normally spring to mind as one of America’s more “politically engaged” dramatists. Certainly he had little time for the more purist, isolationist elements of Ralph Cook’s approach, and – unlike most of the other Genesis-based playwrights – was not shy about pursuing productions at other venues in order to raise his public profile. Following the production of Cowboys and The Rock Garden, which were hailed by Village Voice critic Michael Smith as “a pair of provocative and generally original plays,” Shepard quickly succeeded in securing productions at Edward Albee’s new-writing workshop, the Playwrights Unit (Up to Thursday in November 1964, and 4-H Club in September 1965), at La MaMa (Dog and Rocking Chair, February 1965), at Caffe Cino (Icarus’s Mother, November 1965), and at Judson (Red Cross, January 1966).3 Thus, in a little over a year since his first plays were staged, the 23-year-old Shepard had covered all of the important bases then available to him. In December 1965, in the first feature article about the emerging scene to appear in the New York Times, Elenore Lester named him as “the generally acknowledged ‘genius’ of the Off-Off-Broadway circuit,” thereby ensuring that Shepard would henceforth be regarded with rivalry and a certain resentment by many of his fellow Off-Off playwrights.4 Yet if Shepard’s career instincts placed him somewhat at odds with the Theatre Genesis ethos (at this time only the Cino-based Lanford Wilson was pursuing production options with the same gusto), the style and attitude of his playwriting was, nonetheless, closely consistent with Ralph Cook’s developing artistic vision. Indeed, when Icarus’s Mother opened to generally unenthusiastic responses at Caffe Cino in 1965, some saw its failure as indicative of the absence of Theatre Genesis regulars in the cast or crew. “The acting styles and everything were all wrong,” Barbara Young remembers: “I thought ‘that’s not Sam! This is the wrong production!’”5
If Shepard’s plays seemed to “belong” most at Genesis, it was in large part because of his personal affinity with Ralph Cook. A native of California and a former bit-part actor in Hollywood Westerns, Cook had what actor–playwright Walter Hadler describes as “a kind of cowboy mind,” which clearly appealed to Shepard: “Sam had grown up in California, and they hit it off.”6 Cook had been born in 1928, and was a good deal older than the playwrights he nurtured, but as such became something of a mentor and even father-figure for many of them (much as Ellen Stewart became “la mama”). Certainly Shepard – who had recently run away from a troubled family background – viewed him in this manner during his early career. The two men had met at the Village Gate nightclub, where Cook was head waiter and Shepard a busboy. Having recently been appointed “lay minister to the arts” at St. Mark’s, Cook was looking for new playwrights to produce there, and Shepard’s plays proved ideal for his purposes because they seemed so fresh and raw. This was a young man, relatively uneducated in theatre or literature, who was finding his way intuitively as a writer, and Cook seems to have perceived a kind of authenticity in this. Shepard’s was, in effect, the voice of a kid off the local streets, and as such Cowboys and The Rock Garden seemed ideal to launch a theatre program whose purpose was, in part, “to help reopen communications between church and community.”7
Although Cook regarded himself as an atheist, he had been attracted to St. Mark’s in the first place because of the outreach work which Michael Allen, the newly elected pastor of the church, had initiated. Faced with a decline in numbers in the church’s primarily white, middle-class congregation, Allen had made it his priority to establish social programs for the local community, which was a largely blue-collar, multi-ethnic mix of whites, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Ukrainians. When Cook had asked Allen if he could run an acting workshop for local youths, and possibly establish a theatre program, Allen had enthusiastically agreed. However, the first production presented at St. Mark’s, in July 1964, was a pre-packaged, touring production of Study in Color, a play by Malcolm Boyd designed for presentation in churches. Cook had hated it, and had resolved in future to present only those plays which he thought both artistically valid and socially relevant in some way. Cowboys and The Rock Garden fit this bill, and became the first Genesis production proper, primarily because of their honesty and directness. The first play, which was apparently a fairly direct translation to the stage of the playful street antics of Shepard and his friend Charles Mingus III (who used to wander lower Manhattan as a kind of anarchic double act, adopting comic voices and dodging traffic), was seen as capturing both the energy and disaffection of the area’s large, and largely disenfranchised, youth population, brought up on 1950s platitudes and television serials. “Their basic mood is exhaustion bordering on despair,” Voice critic Michael Smith wrote of the play’s two young male characters, “but from it they rouse themselves into bursts of wild energy, alternately joyous and desperate, in which they impersonate Wild West heroes surrounded by marauding Indians and relish in memory the sensate details of breakfast.”8
If Cowboys depicted a couple of young people trying to create roles for themselves, The Rock Garden summarized what they were fleeing from. In a triptych of simple domestic scenes, Shepard depicted the banality and tedium of life in an archetypal, middle-American family home – complete with white picket fence. (“The writing is beautifully controlled,” Smith noted, “and conveys the overpowering boredom of the situation without being boring for a moment.”) In the crucial, climactic moment, the Boy at the centre of this family effects a kind of personal revolt against its repressive mediocrity by launching into an impassioned, vividly detailed monologue on the joys of rough sex, which prompts his father – in a superbly understated final image – to fall off his chair. It was this speech which brought immediate notoriety to the production and the new theatre, which was condemned for promoting obscenities in a church building. Yet Pastor Allen himself, in a move indicative of his ministry’s priorities, publicly spoke back in support of the play, pointing out that it was more “Christian” to use offensive language in pursuit of truth than to use decent language in defense of conventionalized lies. The Rock Garden, Allen recalls in retrospect, “was really an attack on the pornography of American life,” and for him represented exactly the kind of social and spiritual conscience which St. Mark’s stood for. “One day Sam and I were talking,” Allen notes: “I said to him, ‘one day you will be recognized as America’s greatest Christian playwright.’ He responded that he hoped that would be true.”9
This first production at Theatre Genesis was staffed almost entirely by a core group which Allen had gathered from amongst his friends and associates at the Village Gate – including actors Lee Kissman, Kevin O’Connor, and Stephanie Gordon (daughter of the nightclub’s hostess). As a result of the success and notoriety of the Shepard bill, however, the theatre quickly began to attract the interest of others, and particularly of other would-be playwrights, who began submitting scripts by the dozen. Ralph Cook’s selection policy for new plays was, however, considerably more rigorous than that adopted at venues such as Caffe Cino and Café La MaMa, where a new production had to be mounted every week or two so as not to drive away regular customers. Cook’s insistence on producing new work only when he thought a play had something worthwhile to say meant that Theatre Genesis had a much more erratic schedule, often going two or even three months without a new production. The regularly pumping heart of the Genesis operation was, instead, the weekly Monday night playreading workshop, in which participating actors would read scripts submitted by aspiring writers. Those plays which caught Cook’s attention in this context might go on to be mounted as full productions.
Through his selections, Cook gradually began to develop at Genesis a preference for what he called “a deeply subjective kind of realism” – a description which further underlined his affinity with Shepard’s work.10 By grounding his early plays in recognizable, everyday realities but distorting and abstracting these images through the application of a very personal, subjective vision, Shepard had begun to develop a kind of raw, neo-expressionist theatre which had clear antecedents in the European avant-garde work of Beckett, Genet, and Pinter, but which was also unmistakably American in tone and subject. Particularly important here was Shepard’s freely spontaneous, rhythmic use of theatrical language, which was immediately acknowledged by critics as his most distinctive gift, and which allowed his characters to give voice to vividly imagistic monologues which seemed to spring, uncensored, from the wilder regions of the mind. Shepard’s acknowledged influences here were the “beat” writing of Ginsberg and Kerouac, the action painting of Pollock, and the improvisational jazz of Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman, and Charles Mingus II (father of his friend), all of which were enthusiasms shared by Cook, which greatly influenced his own choices of material to direct. Meanwhile, the establishment of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project in 1965, as a sister organization to Theatre Genesis, proved to be another important factor in underlining the venue’s distinctive bent, with its readings becoming a lightning rod for young, beat-influenced poets who fell over themselves to have their work heard in the presence of regular attenders including Gregory Corso, Rick Sanders, and Allen Ginsberg himself. If Judson Memorial Church, through its theatre, dance, and gallery programs, had established itself as the home of cool, witty mixed-media work in the neo-Dadaist vein, St. Mark’s increasingly established an identity as the place where the writer’s voice could be expressed with uncensored passion and directness.
A landmark production in helping to clarify the distinct approach of Theatre Genesis during this formative period was the April 1965 double bill of Shepard’s Chicago with Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s The Customs Collector in Baggy Pants. Unlike many other such bills which could be seen on the Off-Off-Broadway circuit (Shepard’s Red Cross, for example, was bizarrely paired up with Theo Barnes’s Japanese-inflected adaptation of Antigone at Judson Poets’), there was a consistency and clarity in the relationship between the two plays and their productions. Both the Shepard and the Ferlinghetti pieces are essentially rhythmically driven monologues (although Chicago also has a number of subsidiary characters), and both cleverly manipulate the use of direct address to the audience. As such, they mirror intriguingly the increasingly theatrical feel of the St. Mark’s poetry readings (Ferlinghetti, of course, was himself a celebrated poet, of the San Francisco beat school). “The reading of the poems became a kind of performance art,” explains Genesis playwright Murray Mednick:
there was a kind of presentational quality to the language which I think we [in Theatre Genesis] were very influenced by. We had a similar attitude toward language, which has to do with a feeling about the spoken word as an almost shamanistic act – incantatory, ritualistic – as opposed to the theatrical [dialogue] tradition . . . We had a very high estimation of the idea of the word itself coming through the medium of the actor.11
Fellow playwright Tony Barsha likewise notes that “incantation” became such an integral part of the Genesis approach that “it became a necessity” even in the most dialogue-based plays: “there came a moment when the monologue had to come in. It had to be a revelatory monologue, a scatalogical monologue, a monologue of entropy, whatever.”12 In short, such verbal flights became as “necessary” to the Genesis aesthetic as the solo improvisation was to jazz performance.
The basic structure of both Chicago and The Customs Collector is one of gradual intensification in the monologuist’s mood, from playfully ludicrous beginnings toward an eruption of near-hysterical anxiety by the end. In Ferlinghetti’s piece, this is achieved partly by the sheer breathlessness of the actor after delivering an increasingly frantic seven-page monologue which literally has not a single period or pause anywhere in the text.13 Chicago is more rhythmically complex, ebbing and flowing like the sea into which the inhabitants of Stu’s story finally walk, but the effect is all the more disquieting for that: Shepard’s use of humor is the more deft, and his attention to small, telling details the more precise, so it is in the steadily darkening accumulation of its comic–grotesque observations that the play’s impact lies. A smelly, over-populated train journey gives way to a beach scene, a wild orgy of sand and sperm, a frantic attempt to make smothering rugs, and finally a ritual drowning by suicide. Chicago, like much of Shepard’s early work, is difficult to make rational sense of, but through rhythm and image it conjures a vivid sense of a “subjectively real” trip to the dark side of the mind, to a nightmare world which Stu appears – finally – to crave escape from, as he leaps from the bathtub he has been confined in throughout the play and exhorts the audience to embrace life: “Breathing, ladies and gentlemen . . . it’s fantastic!”14 The ominous knocking of a policeman’s nightstick from behind the audience as the lights fade clearly implies that, whatever Stu fears, it is not so easily escaped.
Tellingly, the juxtaposition with Ferlinghetti’s play seemed to clarify something of the nature of Stu’s anxiety. The customs collector, characterizing the location as the ladies’ restroom on the “lifeboat full of flush toilets we call civilization” (79), and his listeners as “all the women I have ever loved and known” (85), asks – at first threateningly and finally desperately – for them to return to him the jewels they have stolen, “the twin gems” and “the great King of Diamonds” (81). The castration terror so obviously underlying this piece (and so beloved of the beat movement in general) throws into relief Stu’s obvious anxiety over Joy’s plans to go out of town on a job, and thus leave him alone in his (womb-like?) bathtub: despite his impish creativity, he seems impotently stranded there. Thus this double bill, taken together, clearly indicated a developing concern at Theatre Genesis with exploring the underside of a specifically masculine subjectivity – a concern which could at times, all too easily, spill over into a misogynistic depiction of women as the threatening “other,” but which could also, in the best instances, be deeply revealing and even cathartic in the honesty of its confrontation with repressed male fears.
This production was also, very importantly, distinguished by a very sparing approach to staging. The only set item in Chicago is that free-standing bathtub, while The Customs Collector – continuing the bathroom theme – requires only a short row of toilet-cubicle doors. Pared-down settings of this sort were common in the spatially and financially constrained Off-Off-Broadway theatres, but the black-box studio at Theatre Genesis allowed single set items like this to stand out against a uniform background with an unusual clarity of focus. Shepard and Cook had undoubtedly learned from their experiences with Cowboys and The Rock Garden: the former play had successfully used an almost bare stage, while the latter had been criticized for the unconvincing attempt to construct a “realistic” domestic environment using theatrical flats. Thus they were, with Chicago in particular, moving toward the use of a single, distilled theatrical image, a “found object” which would act as the visual anchor for the play’s flights of rhythmic, imagistic language. This was a method which Shepard was to use again and again in subsequent years (other notable “single images” including the trashed 1951 Chevrolet around which The Unseen Hand revolves, and the “evil-looking black chair” of The Tooth of Crime). As Murray Mednick points out, “[we found that] you could use a certain kind of visual symbology . . . to great effect in a small space. We were really interested in discovering iconographic usages: what would have the resonance of an icon, a newly discovered icon, so that you can communicate directly to the audience’s subconscious? That’s partly what Ralph meant by subjective realism.”
It should be noted, perhaps, that not all of the “realism” in the early days of Theatre Genesis was particularly “subjective.” Leonard Melfi’s Birdbath, for example, which proved particularly popular with audiences in 1965, was a fairly conventionally realistic depiction of a late-night encounter between two strangers, distinguished primarily by its blend of tenderness and underlying psychological tension. Melfi, however, moved on from Theatre Genesis after a series of productions that year, pursuing the greater chance of a commercial breakthrough offered by working at La MaMa. Meanwhile, other figures whose instincts fit better with the evolving Genesis approach began to find their way to the venue. Murray Mednick, for example, a poet before he was a playwright (and a member of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project), was first attracted to Theatre Genesis by Ferlinghetti’s name, to see the Chicago double bill. Greatly struck by the standard of the performances (and particularly that of former Living Theatre actor Warren Finnerty, who played both Ferlinghetti’s customs collector and the silent, threatening policeman in Chicago), Mednick shortly afterward submitted a short play of his own, The Box, for consideration at the Monday night playreadings. It was given a full production in December 1965. The following April, Genesis premiered The Pattern and The Trunk, two plays by Tony Barsha, another self-confessed beatnik who was living in a dingy apartment across the street. Prior to discovering Genesis, Barsha confesses, “I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing [with myself]. I was totally lost. Alienated youth!” For him and Mednick, Cook’s vision for the theatre came as a kind of salvation, giving them a focus for their energies they had previously lacked, and they became key members of the Genesis set-up, working there almost exclusively until the early 1970s.
If Shepard himself had been fairly promiscuous in touting his work around the Off-Off-Broadway scene during the first year or so of his career, he too was attracted back to Genesis by this gradual evolution of a community of like-minded writers and actors. Part of the appeal was no doubt the simple fact that the Genesis affiliates were unique among the various Off-Off-Broadway groupings in being predominantly and unapologetically heterosexual men. (“It was a bunch of guys, and their babes, and their drugs,” Barsha quips, at least half-seriously.) Shepard was not shy of gay company, but he was clearly most at home with “the Genesis boys,” as they became generally known. More significantly still, Genesis was increasingly providing Shepard with fresh ideas and inspiration on a creative level. If it had been his work which had initially helped define the theatre’s aesthetic, that debt was repaid plentifully. By 1966, Shepard’s initial outpouring of one-act plays was starting to dry up, and even his admirers had begun to accuse him of simply repeating the same “stylistic trick” of spontaneous game-playing and rhythmic monologues, rather than further developing his initially intriguing instinct for implicit social comment. “Some of his outpourings are so gratuitous as to be tiresome,” Michael Smith commented in his review of Red Cross: “style if simply repeated turns into empty formalism . . . It is time for [Shepard] to stop only exercising his technique and begin applying it to matters of more consequence.”15 As the context surrounding Shepard, both locally and nationally, began to change significantly in the latter part of the 1960s, he himself seems to have felt the need for a shift of emphasis.16 Interaction with his Theatre Genesis colleagues aided him significantly in his search for fresh directions, and the impact of two key productions with which he was not directly involved is particularly worth emphasizing here. Tom Sankey’s The Golden Screw (September 1966) and Murray Mednick and Tony Barsha’s The Hawk (October 1967) are still remembered as being among the definitive Theatre Genesis productions because, as the Caffe Cino-based playwright Robert Patrick stresses, “they were so perfectly realized, both of them: very good plays, brilliantly done. They stand out because they were so very typically Theatre Genesis. They were very political, very rebellious, very serious.”17
The Golden Screw seems quite flat to read on the page now, but at the time it was the first play to articulate the growing counter-cultural distrust of “the system” through the medium of musical theatre.18 The play’s structure was simple: a series of sketches depicting aspiring musicians being systematically “screwed over” by the record industry (which stands, implicitly, for capitalist America in general) is interspersed with a series of folk–rock songs in sub-Dylan mode, performed by Sankey himself and his band, the Inner Sanctum. The show ended with a quiet but pointed “fuck you,” breathed by Sankey into his microphone while staring straight at the audience (trite as that may now sound, its impact was electrifying at the time). The entire play, however, was felt to add up to something far greater than the sum of its various parts: “it is more than the first successful folk–rock musical,” commented the New York World Journal Tribune, “its implications are as chilling for the audience (who are the ultimate victims) as for the performers. The Golden Screw shows why the odds against a vital American pop are so great, and why even undergrounds become industrial. It is tightly wound into a series of stunning vignettes and the music provides jolting irony.”19 Sankey’s play proved so popular with audiences that in February 1967 it became the first Theatre Genesis show to move to a commercial, Off-Broadway run – albeit short-lived – and the songs were recorded as a soundtrack album (the ironies here go without saying). Given the impact of The Golden Screw, it is surely more than mere coincidence that, in May 1967, La MaMa premiered Shepard’s own first attempt at a play with live rock songs, Melodrama Play. Shepard had his own personal reasons for this innovation – joining a band himself being one of them.20 Yet the parallels between Melodrama Play and The Golden Screw are unavoidable; it too is an ironically satirical swipe at the recording industry and the way it enslaves its contractees to commercial pressures (literally, in this case), and it too plays on Bob Dylan’s recent, groundbreaking shift from acoustic folk to electric rock as a key reference point. An uneven, rather awkward piece of work, it proved considerably less successful than Sankey’s play with audiences and critics, but it nonetheless initiated Shepard’s significant shift toward experiments with live rock music in his plays of the late 1960s and early 1970s: the immediate impact on audiences of electrified instruments played in tiny sweatbox theatres became an integral element of his work during this period, even as his writing style altered to accommodate more driving, rock-style language rhythms.
Mednick and Barsha’s The Hawk provided equally significant inspiration for Shepard, but unlike The Golden Screw is a play which still rewards detailed textual scrutiny.21 One of the earliest successful attempts to develop and structure a serious play from collaborative improvisation, it signaled the extent to which the Theatre Genesis “gang” had acquired a coherent artistic trajectory, independent of (if complementary to) the work of either Cook or Shepard. During the summer of 1967, Mednick (as writer), Barsha (as director), and a group of eight Genesis actors (including Lee Kissman, Barbara Young, O-Lan Johnson, and Walter Hadler) sequestered themselves on a farm in Pennsylvania to work on developing improvisational acting techniques drawn from a variety of sources. However, this group differed from other such companies of the time in that, under Mednick and Barsha’s guidance, they prioritized the writerly questions of language and dramaturgical structure as much as they did actorly spontaneity. Gradually, a ritualistic narrative format developed for the piece, in which the Hawk, a heroin dealer, systematically murders a series of female junkies of varying social backgrounds, by deliberately overdosing them (issues such as violence against women and class difference are embedded in the fabric of the piece). Taking a short sequence of Mednick’s rhythmic poetry as a kind of repetitive refrain after the death of each victim, the group developed a strikingly solid shape for the piece reminiscent of the classic jazz structure in which variations on the same basic melody are interspersed with sections of free improvisation. In this case, the repeated text frames and focuses a sequence of improvised monologues in which the actors had a free hand to deliver certain plot and character information in whatever manner seemed to “fly” on a given night. Hailed as a near-perfect fusion of the distinct skills of writer, director, and actors, The Hawk stunned Genesis audiences and also went on to an Off-Broadway transfer. There it failed utterly and closed within days, simply because the show’s canny exploitation of the particular, stark dynamics of the Genesis space – intimate actor–audience relations, bare black stage featuring just three metal chairs, monologic address to the audience interspersed with highly physicalized action and mime – proved untranslatable to the existing commercial context. (The mainstream press were simply bewildered by the lack of set and the “vulgar” language.) Yet many who witnessed the Genesis original, such as critic Ruby Cohn, recall it as one of the single most impressive productions of the 1960s.
The Hawk’s success at Genesis was followed, just two months later in December 1967, by Shepard’s own first attempt at a script developed through collaborative improvisation. The five-strong cast of Forensic and the Navigators included three members of the Hawk collective (Kissman, Hadler, and Johnson). Working together with Ralph Cook as director, they expanded on a sketched-out treatment for the play which Shepard brought into rehearsal. For a writer whose approach prior to this had always been rigidly text-led, this was a significant departure (he had characteristically refused to alter a word of his scripts in rehearsal, believing – with Kerouac – that the first, most spontaneous draft is always the most “authentic”). The text of Forensic, written up after the fact, clearly indicates its Theatre Genesis origins: this is the first of Shepard’s texts to specify “black space” as the basic setting, and calls for a striking, almost ceremonial furniture lay-out featuring two swivel chairs at either end of a white-draped table bearing a peace pipe (157). Although this, like Melodrama Play, is one of Shepard’s less satisfying scripts (memorable chiefly for the hilarious Rice Krispies routine developed with O-Lan – written into the script as Oolan), his changing attitude toward the production process proved to be ongoing, as he began writing more elaborate theatrical effects into his scripts while allowing directors and casts more freedom to come up with their own answers to the resulting staging challenges.
Forensic and the Navigators, like Melodrama Play, had more pronounced social overtones than most of Shepard’s previous work; a factor also indicative of the broader Genesis influence. It deals in cartoon fashion with a plot to free prisoners from an oppressive regime, which is bungled when the regime’s enforcers arrive to exterminate them. These ideas are underdeveloped, but were taken up more effectively in subsequent plays. So too was another feature of Forensic which seems to have owed something to The Hawk. The lead characters, Forensic and Emmet, appear on one level to be two sides of the same divided consciousness, a blond cowboy-type and a dark-haired Indian-type (ego and shadow, yin and yang) who discuss “switching sensibilities” so as to disguise themselves and throw their hunters off the scent (158–59). This was Shepard’s first, sketchy attempt at exploring the doppelganger theme (although it had also been vaguely alluded to in Melodrama Play, via the brothers Drake and Duke Durgens), a central thread of his work which runs all the way through The Tooth of Crime (1972) and True West (1980) to Simpatico (1994). The Hawk, however, is the clearest encapsulation of the theme in a Theatre Genesis play, with the Hawk himself shadowed everywhere by his mysterious “Double,” who mirrors him visually, echoes his ritualistic “litany,” and abets him in his murders. According to Murray Mednick, ideas concerning double nature, split consciousness and mirrored personalities fascinated many of the Genesis regulars, who discussed at length concepts such as Jung’s ego and shadow dichotomy, Artaud’s notion of the theatre and its double, and classic variations on the double theme such as those in Dostoyevsky and Edgar Allan Poe’s story “William Wilson.” As Mednick remarks, “we knew we were quoting this stuff. And the audience knew that we knew. There was a shared pleasure in that.” Another prime example of this trend was Walter Hadler’s first play for Theatre Genesis, Solarium (June 1968), in which a dirty, raggedy figure played by Beeson Carroll persuades a smart figure in golfing clothes (Michael Brody, another Genesis regular) to keep an eye on his grandmother’s house while he goes off to visit the golf course himself. The twist, as Hadler himself summarizes it, is that “the guy gets trapped. It’s an interesting reversal, very eerie in a certain kind of way, because the women don’t notice the switch.” The obvious parallels between this scenario and later Shepard plays including True West (in which Lee, not Austin, gets to play golf with Saul) and Simpatico (in which the wealthy Carter winds up helplessly immured in the hovel-like home of the destitute Vinnie) are probably coincidental. Nevertheless, what is clear is that such ideas were common currency at Theatre Genesis during the later 1960s, and that Shepard’s subsequent, near-obsessive extrapolation of the double theme owes much to the seeds sown during his time there.
The sense of group cohesion and mission at Genesis had in fact become so pronounced by the later sixties that the original, open-door policy for new playwrights was replaced by an exclusive commitment to the work of the resident group. Between April 1967 and April 1971 – when Adrienne Kennedy’s A Lesson in Dead Language appeared, the month after Shepard’s final Genesis show, The Mad Dog Blues – only Hadler (seven plays), Mednick (three plays and two collaborative projects), Barsha (two plays and two collaborations), Lee Kissman (one play), Joel Oppenheimer (director of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project; one play), and Shepard himself (two plays) had new work produced there.22 Meanwhile, all but two of the eight new Shepard plays produced elsewhere also had Genesis regulars in key production positions (the exceptions being Melodrama Play and The Holy Ghostly, both directed by Tom O’Horgan using his own permanent troupe). “We were kind of a group, kind of an alliance,” Mednick explains: “we had a search in common: we all seemed to be looking for something submerged in the American language that could be half-unearthed.” Genesis plays during this period typically foregrounded aspects of specifically American iconography and mythology, whether through more or less oblique references to the nation’s history, or through the manipulation of imagery from contemporary popular culture – from cowboys to Coke bottles. It is no coincidence, therefore, that Shepard’s work between 1967 and 1972 uses such imagery more consistently and insistently than at any other period in his career. As a group, Walter Hadler notes, the Genesis writers had discovered that
we in some ways had similar [life] experiences, and we had a certain kind of affection for the country’s history. Not nationalism. But we were interested in exploring the mythic elements in that history, rather than sneering at them. Most other groups working at the time had an attitude about anything American being lesser or by its own definition something uninteresting, uncultured. But we were allowed the luxury of investigating our own psychic . . . horror? pleasure? madness? Whatever: we were trying to get that into the plays. And that was the great gift from Ralph to us.
The group’s fascination with exploring different dimensions of the American psyche, and – in particular – the nature of American violence, was easy to caricature, not least because their work was at times perceived as merely indulging a butch, cowboy-style masculinity. Indeed, onstage and off, the reverence in which the group held the memory of Jackson Pollock seemed at times to involve mimicking the kind of alcohol-fueled macho posturing for which Pollock was notorious. Village Voice critic Arthur Sainer admired much of the work produced at Theatre Genesis, but describes it as typically consisting of characters “slamming doors and screaming and shooting up and killing each other.”23 Similarly, Cino playwright William Hoffman, while stressing that “I loved their work,” nevertheless refers to the shows at Genesis as “ballscratchers, testosterone plays.”24
This side of the work is perhaps most clearly indicated by the rather unsettling frequency with which working firearms were on show at St. Mark’s. Tony Barsha recalls how, for his January 1967 play Smash, “I wanted a nice sound of a gun,” and tracked down a supplier which rented weapons to movie companies: “I got a .38 or a .32 with a blank round in it, and used it in this one play, but then everyone started writing plays with guns in them and renting these guns.” Shepard’s first such piece was Melodrama Play, in which Peter shoots Dana in the head at point blank range, and by 1970, with Shaved Splits, he had Geez blasting sub-machine-gun rounds out of a window. The array of gleaming, phallic weaponry which Becky Lou unpacks at the beginning of The Tooth of Crime (1972; written shortly after leaving New York for England) is now the best-known manifestation of a gun fetishism which emerged as one of the more questionable features of the Theatre Genesis “aesthetic.” “Each play had more guns in it,” Barsha remembers, “until finally Walter Hadler did a play, The Water Works at Lincoln [1969], with an entire arsenal of shotgun, automatic rifle, magnums and rifles.” At a pivotal moment in this piece, a group of redneck hunters turned their weapons on the audience – using the stage pretense that they were a lake full of ducks -and opened fire with blanks. This was perhaps the most extreme example of what Barsha calls the Genesis instinct “to go after the audience, to sort of grab hold of your spine and shake you.” In this instance, though, with terrified spectators literally diving under the seats, many felt that Hadler had gone too far. “It was at a point where that was enough,” Barbara Young remarks: “that’s enough of showing you have balls!”
In fairness to Hadler, though, it should be pointed out that – within the context of The Water Works at Lincoln – the shotgun sequence actually makes perfect sense.25 Far from being gratuitously excessive, the play is a deeply serious, often curiously muted reflection on the American landscape which – like numerous Genesis plays of the period – combines a kind of Beckettian existential bleakness with abstract but nonetheless biting social–political metaphors. Two long-haired, working-class revolutionary types find themselves in a private park estate somewhere in the midwest, where the gates close at 5.15PM prompt, and helicopter gunships with searchlights open fire on whichever members of the public are left inside. Within this estate, between dodging salvos of gunfire, this distinctly repellent, un-heroic duo encounter various bizarre figures including the gang of rednecks who decide to subject them to a kangaroo court trial and a lynching. Hadler, who freely admits to coming from a “hick” background, seems here to be confronting the dearth of role types available to working-class whites in America: whether revolutionary or reactionary, all seem trapped within this park where nature is neatly manicured and always somebody else’s property. The weaponry, considered in this context, has a metatheatrical shock value which relates directly to the concerns of the play: by having his actors turn their shotguns on the audience, he can be seen as confronting his spectators not just with blank rounds but with their own fear of potential redneck violence, of a specifically American “return of the repressed.”
There is a clue here to the pivotal concerns of much of the work at Theatre Genesis during the late 1960s: the group’s social–political instincts and their interests in American mythology, machismo, and violence frequently fused together into agitated and yet poignant, “subjectively realistic” representations of the world as perceived by disenfranchised, working-class (or simply “underclass”) males. If other parts of the Off-Off-Broadway movement were vitally important in terms of allowing the more open, uninhibited expression of gay and female voices on stage (thereby laying significant foundations for the development of explicitly gay-oriented and feminist theatre groups in the 1970s), Genesis was equally revolutionary at this time in its unapologetic promotion of a still-more-unfashionable “white trash” perspective. As such, though, their work was often uncomfortable precisely because it flew in the face of received wisdom. As Jim Goad recently underlined in his extraordinary book The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks and White Trash Became America’s Scapegoats (1997), the mainstream American media and the liberal intelligentsia alike have tended mercilessly to caricature working-class whites as “cartoon people,” as “rifle-totin’, booger-eatin’, beer-bellied swine flesh. Skeeter-bitten, ball-tuggin’, homo-hatin’, pig-fuckin’, daughter-gropin’ slugs.”26 The history of poor whites, which has included indentured servitude and other forms of severe exploitation preventing “self-realization,” has often been ignored or forgotten. “These days, we hardly ever see the redneck as anything but a caricature,” Goad points out: “The trailer park has become the media’s cultural toilet, the only acceptable place to dump one’s racist inclinations,” and as a result “a whole vein of human experience, of potential literature, is dismissed as a joke.”27
Theatre Genesis, however, chose to mine that “vein” in developing some of its most important material, and Sam Shepard was no exception to the rule. Although his plays were generally considered both funnier and less politically confrontational than those of Mednick or Hadler (who was well-read in the work of Marx, Lenin, and Kim Il Sung), his turn toward depicting the ephemera of American pop culture in the later 1960s was nevertheless indicative of his own attempt to confront and explore a cultural background which he had previously avoided facing. “He’s white trash,” Tony Barsha remarks bluntly: “that’s what he comes from. He was just doing what came naturally, from his gut.” Likewise, Shepard’s embracing of the emotional force of rock-and-roll was – in his own words – a rejection of the “urban sophistication” of jazz, and an attempt to get “back to a raw gut kind of American shitkicker thing.”28 It is in this period that his characters begin wearing cowboy boots (all the better for kicking with), and existing in a blurred region somewhere between the worlds of the Hollywood Western and the Southern Californian landscapes familiar from his youth – be they the “trailer park towns” of the Los Angeles hinterlands or the desert lying beyond.
The Holy Ghostly, which premiered in January 1970, takes place in the latter setting, and – even given its more fantastical elements involving Native American folklore – is particularly revealing in terms of Shepard’s attempts to confront his own background. In his most clearly autobiographical piece since The Rock Garden, he here dispenses with that play’s lower-middle-class domesticity, dominated as it is by a matriarchal female, and deals primarily with a solitary father-figure, Pop, who takes pride in his “dirt farmer” heritage, and cherishes the rough, “ornery” language which he associates with it (this dichotomy of the mother-figure as a more civilizing, bourgeois influence and the spectre of the “old man” as a white trash desert rat recurs, most tellingly, as a central element of True West). Pop, who turns out to be “Stanley Hewitt Moss the sixth,” just as Shepard’s father was Samuel Shepard Rogers the sixth, tries to make his son, Ice (formerly Stanley Hewitt Moss the seventh), feel guilty for changing his name and abandoning his roots, by appealing to memories such as the two of them as “blood brothers,” going “out in that jeep late at night and flash[ing] the headlights on them jackrabbits. Blastin’ them damn jackrabbits all up against the cactus” (184). Pop also reminds Ice at length of the family’s past struggles: using details based directly on the Rogers family background (many of which he recycles, in different ways, in Buried Child), Shepard presents Pop as the son of a struggling dairy farmer who wound up selling Hershey bars door to door, and as a survivor of the Great Depression who had to go to work young as a shophand to help support his entire family (185). Ice remains unmoved by all this, even describing Pop as “the oppressor’s cherry” for refusing to see the way he has allowed himself to be exploited: “we don’t see things eye to eye on certain political opinions,” Pop acknowledges (187). And yet there is a sense that, on one level, the whole play is driven by Shepard’s own need to come to terms with, and perhaps exorcize, the unsettling pride in brute masculinity (as a means of survival?) which his redneck father apparently drummed into him from birth: “Machismo may be an evil force,” Shepard remarked in 1986, “but what in fact is it? . . . I know what this thing is about because I was a victim of it, it was a part of my life, my old man tried to force on me a notion of what it was to be a ‘man.’”29
If The Holy Ghostly’s emphasis on inherited masculinity makes it a particularly important precursor of Shepard’s later, family plays, other work of the late sixties confronts questions of lower-class marginalization even more directly. The Unseen Hand (1969), arguably Shepard’s most complete and effective piece of this period, concerns itself centrally with the limitations faced by the socially excluded. Its location is the town of Azusa, which lies adjacent to Duarte, where Shepard spent his adolescence, and was clearly chosen for its too-cute town slogan: “Everything from A to Z in the USA.” Within the context of a play, the phrase implies aspirations to presenting a kind of latter day Our Town universality. Azusa, though, as Shepard himself made clear in a 1973 article on the play, is a million miles from Thornton Wilder’s unmistakably middle-class, small-town paradise:
These towns are obsessions of mine because of their accidentalness . . . People who couldn’t make it in the big city just drove away from it. They got so far and just quit the road. Maybe some just ran out of gas. Anyhow, they began to nest in these little valleys. Lots of them lived in trailer camps . . . It was a temporary society that became permanent. Everybody still had the itch to get on to something better for themselves but found themselves stuck. It was a car culture for the young. For the old it was just a dead end.30
These ideas are summed up superbly in the iconographic opening image of The Unseen Hand, which presents a wrecked 1951 Chevrolet convertible, surrounded by garbage, lying adjacent to a busy highway (which Shepard takes pains to describe as being indicated via a combination of constant taped sound and a looped, sweeping headlight effect across the stage). Here we find Blue Morphan, an old man for whom this is clearly his own, private “dead end,” talking endlessly to himself in a “slightly drunk,” drawling monologue which evokes a world of railroad crossings, teenage hot-rod drivers, and Bob’s Big Boys. The sheer length of this speech suggests an attempt to focus in on the image of Blue’s socially marginalized aloneness as a kind of existential condition, in the Beckettian sense. It also functions to ground the rest of the play in Blue’s subjective reality – indicating the possibility that the bizarre and impossible events which follow are simply a projection of his imagination. That idea is reinforced by the fact that the play ends in the same way, with another muted, rambling monologue: now, however, it is Blue’s smarter, neater brother Sycamore who is marooned in the car, a change which suggests yet another “sensibility switch” like the one in Hadler’s Solarium.
Whether or not the play is merely Blue/Sycamore’s “projection,” all its characters clearly function as variants on the ruling theme of white trash dislocation and disenfranchisement. Willie the Space Freak, for example, whose strange arrival first interrupts Blue’s reverie, is ostensibly a refugee from a sci-fi movie, exiled from “Nogoland,” on a planet in another galaxy. At the same time, though, his redneck credentials are established soon after entering when he notes, quite incidentally while sitting in the Chevy, that “we used to shoot deer and strap them over the hood” (7).31 Subsequently, there is a clear sense that Willie’s detailed descriptions of Nogoland stand as a bizarre metaphor for the United States: “the Silent Ones of the High Commission” run things from “the Capitol” in “the northeastern sector,” while “huge refineries and industrial compounds” fill the middle of the country (22). Nogoland, Willie makes clear, is kept working by a race of prisoners – of whom he is one – who have been genetically modified from “fierce baboons”: the Silent Ones “wanted an animal to develop that was slightly subhuman,” and thus developed the Unseen Hand, a brand on the prisoners’ foreheads which “curtail[s] our natural reasoning processes . . . Whenever our thoughts transcend those of the magicians, the Hand squeezes down and forces our minds to contract into non-preoccupation” (8).
All of this can be seen as alluding playfully to Jim Goad’s stereotype of subhuman poor white trash – “gap-toothed, inbred, uncivilized, violent and hopelessly DUMB.”32 Yet Shepard also flips the idea on its head through Willie’s insistence that the prisoners are actually “super-human entities with capacities for thoughts and feelings far beyond that of our captors” (8). These are, Willie tells Blue, “people, like you or me, with a strange history and stranger powers,” powers which “could work for the good of mankind if allowed to unfold into their natural creativity.” Under the oppression of the Hand, however, the prisoners “will surely work for evil, or worse, they will turn [their power] on themselves and commit a horrible mass suicide” (17). Willie’s clearest example of such evil is “the Lagoon Baboon,” a flesh-eating monster inhabiting “the Southland,” which can perhaps be read as an oblique reference to the stereotypically bigoted poor whites of the American deep South.
However, the most vivid depiction which the play offers of the “Unseen Hand” controlling and warping its victims’ minds comes in the form of an earthling – the nameless “Kid.” Appearing dressed in a high school cheerleading outfit with his pants humiliatingly pushed down around his ankles, he bellows through a megaphone at his offstage oppressors who “think you’re all so fuckin’ bitchin’ just ’cause your daddies are rich! Just ’cause your old man gives you a fuckin’ Corvette for Christmas and a credit card!” (14). The Kid’s resentment at the disadvantages created by his relative poverty threatens to erupt into violence (“we’re gonna burn your fuckin’ grandstand to the ground”), and it seems telling that Shepard developed on this kind of class-based high school gang rivalry as the background in which Hoss, in The Tooth of Crime, first discovered his potential as a “cold killer”: “This was a class war. These were rich white kids from Arcadia who got T-Birds and deuce coups for Xmas from Mommy and Daddy . . . Soon as I saw that I flipped out. I found my strength. I started kickin’ shit, man.”33 The Kid, however, on hearing of Willie and Blue’s plans for freeing the Nogoland prisoners, becomes not a street thug but a revolutionary ringleader, and launches into a lengthy and detailed disquisition on tactics for a guerrilla-led terrorist uprising (25–26). Then, in another typically abrupt, disorienting character turnabout, Shepard presents the Kid as being helplessly enslaved to the values and trivial pleasures of an ultra-conservative, small-town America. The polar opposite choices in Hadler’s Water Works, of resorting to either revolutionary or reactionary violence, are thus rolled into one schizophrenic ball of contradictions. “I’ll kill you all!” the Kid screams at his erstwhile companions in conspiracy:
I’ll kill you! This is my home! Don’t make fun of my home. I was born and raised here and I’ll die here! I love it! That’s something you can’t understand! I love Azusa! I love the foothills and the drive-in movies and the bowling alleys and the football games and the drag races and the girls and the donut shop . . . and the Safeway Shopping Center and the freeway and the pool hall and the Bank of America . . . [etc.]
(27)
Shepard, like Hadler, presents all this without attempting to offer any kind of answer to the serious questions underlying his deceptively playful scenario. Willie conjures Blue’s brothers Sycamore and Cisco out of the past and rejuvenates Blue himself, thus creating a trio of Wild West cowboy outlaws whom he hopes will help him take on the Silent Ones: “if you came into Nogoland blazing your six-guns they wouldn’t have any idea how to deal with you” (8). There seems to be an ironic appeal here to the Hollywood image of the cowboy rebel as working-class hero (a theme particularly apparent in the poignant 1963 Kirk Douglas movie Lonely Are the Brave, which Shepard was later to reference explicitly in True West). Yet this is clearly not a serious solution on Shepard’s part to the social ills he has alluded to. Likewise, when Willie finally claims to have freed the Nogo prisoners, after exorcistically reciting the Kid’s entire “I love Azusa” speech backwards, this is nothing more than a fantasy climax to the narrative. A hail of coloured ping-pong balls falls from the sky to signify the prisoners’ liberation in a surreal coup de théâtre typical of the Genesis climax (similar stunts conclude The Water Works at Lincoln, Forensic and the Navigators, and Mednick’s The Hunter [1968], to name but three). Yet the unalterable “reality” of the social situation is subtly acknowledged in the play’s closing moments, as the brothers decide to absorb themselves into the economic system rather than attempting to take it on as outlaws: “we could sit it out . . . I could get me an office job . . . Settle down with a nice little pension . . . Get me a car maybe” (31). With Sycamore alone in the Chevy at the end, as Blue was at the outset, it is clear that little has changed.
Shepard, then, shared with his Theatre Genesis colleagues both an interest in obliquely addressing socio-political problems through his plays in this period, and a deep-rooted skepticism toward the conventionally touted solutions. “It was bullshit,” Mednick remarks bluntly of the revolutionary rhetoric popular in the late 1960s: “I think we knew that the chances of it happening were slim to none.” Hadler agrees, stressing that “part of our heritage as Americans was to distrust Europe – its philosophies and hysterias and its various forms of government.” Marxist notions of revolution thus cut little ice with the Genesis group, who tended to look at the very idea of overthrowing the bourgeoisie as inherently bourgeois. Shepard’s own skepticism toward top-down political change is neatly summarized in The Unseen Hand by Blue, in his (fictional) description of recent political history: “then they change the government from capitalism to socialism because the government’s afraid of a full-blown insurrection. Then they have a revolution anyhow and things stay exactly like they was” (16).
The upshot of the Genesis group’s political diagnosis, then, was a kind of deep, existential fatalism. Beckett’s sense that there is “nothing to be done” to remedy the human condition tended to be fused with a sense of implacable, unalterable social injustice. This is visible again in Shepard’s wildly comic nightmare vision of revolution, Shaved Splits (1970), in which Geez, the redneck insurrectionist from East Los Angeles, finally acknowledges that, for all his efforts, he is trapped in “dead end city”: his vividly poetic description of the thrashing for life of a deer caught by a huntsman’s bullet summarizes his own sense of helplessness. (In Geez’s description, the subsequent skinning of the deer is clinical and bloodless and “very neat.”)34 Such bleak perspectives led to the Genesis playwrights being accused by some of nihilism.35 Yet for others – as Robert Pasolli pointed out in a Village Voice feature on the work of Shepard, Mednick, and Hadler – their “dark diagnoses” of “incurable ills” seemed distinctly more plausible than “the implied prescriptions of many of their [contemporary playwriting] colleagues. [They] reflect our deep suspicion that what is wrong with our lives is so fundamental, yet so elusive, that we can do nothing to set it right.” For Pasolli, the appeal of Shepard’s work in particular lay in the underlying honesty of its vision: “[his] plays are autobiographical episodes abstracted through dramatic images of loss, fear and isolation.”36
The sad irony here is that, even as the “subjective realist” playwriting approach fostered by Ralph Cook was reaching its full fruition in plays such as those discussed, Cook himself was asking that the Genesis writers come up with something more prescriptive. A man with a previous history of mental problems, by 1970 he was again going “off the deep end” (to use Hadler’s pained phrase): one dimension of this was that, in the spirit of the times, he began demanding politically propagandist work from his playwrights rather than the personal, ambiguous visions previously encouraged. Acting as a group, Mednick, Hadler, and Shepard (with the tacit support of Barsha and the others) asked Cook to step down, and took on the directorship of Theatre Genesis as a triumvirate. The new regime, however, found itself plagued with problems, not least of which was the fact that – almost at the same time – St. Mark’s itself had seen a coup of its own, with Pastor Allen being forcibly removed from office by a revolt of the increasingly politicized congregation, which led to the installation of David Garcia as the new pastor. Garcia and his wife had extreme left-wing views, and helped make the church a working base for groups including the Black Panther Party and the Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers (both of which advocated armed insurrection). “He was OK,” Hadler recalls of Garcia as a person, “but it’s a little bit difficult to run an artistic institution out of a political, pre-digested view of how things should be.”
Against this backdrop, it is perhaps understandable that Shepard lost interest in exploring political issues even obliquely. His final play for Theatre Genesis, The Mad Dog Blues (1971), is essentially a fairly shallow jaunt through the detritus of American folklore, traditional and modern: “it was when Sam was writing the American myth,” Barsha remarks dismissively, “because he’d been reading I guess that he was the American myth writer . . . It was his bad period.” The Mad Dog Blues is interesting chiefly for its treatment of the tensions in the disintegrating central relationship between Kosmo and Yahoodi, which – aside from being yet another variation on the “double” theme – was a thinly disguised depiction of Shepard’s love–hate relationship with Murray Mednick. “We were like brothers,” Mednick recalls, and that bond is more than apparent in the play. Yet given that Mednick was struggling with heroin addiction at this time, and finding it harder to have his work published than Shepard, the latter’s depiction of Yahoodi as a “morbid little nihilistic junkie” (265), who is jealous of Kosmo’s success as a rock star, was perhaps too close to the bone for comfort.
The production of The Mad Dog Blues also caused tensions because a larger-than-usual proportion of the theatre’s operating budget was spent on an atypically elaborate set for it, with raked staging taking up most of the studio’s floor space. Barsha claims that, as a result, he was forced to take his own play, The Tragedy of Homer Stills, into a production at La MaMa, because Genesis did not have the money left to stage it. The rights and wrongs of such disputes are impossible to verify now, but what is clear is that the once-close Genesis alliance was starting to fall a part over money and programming priorities, now that three of the playwrights were themselves in charge. These problems were exacerbated by the increasing incestuousness of the relationships between company members, and the bitterness being generated as a result. When the American Place Theatre presented the almost entirely Genesis-staffed double bill of Shepard’s Cowboy Mouth and Back Bog Beast Bait in April 1971, just a month after The Mad Dog Blues had appeared, Shepard cast himself in the former play alongside its co-author Patti Smith, with whom he had been conducting a very public affair, while his wife O-Lan appeared in the latter piece. She was at that point involved with Robert Glaudini, director of Cowboy Mouth. O-Lan had been cast as Gris-Gris by Beast Bait director Tony Barsha despite the fact that Murray Mednick’s then-girlfriend had originally been given the role: Mednick had apparently attacked Shepard physically over this turnabout. “The whole thing was imploding,” Barsha puts it succinctly. It seems hardly surprising that, following the opening performance, Shepard disappeared without saying where he was going, and Cowboy Mouth had to be cancelled, leaving Beast Bait to run by itself. Shortly afterward, he and O-Lan reconciled their differences and left New York for England in an attempt to make a fresh start. Following their departure, in a bid to bring some much-needed structure to the Genesis organization, critic and playwright Michael Smith was drafted in to replace Shepard in the triumvirate. By 1974, however, both he and Mednick had had enough and quit, sensing that both the venue and the movement as a whole were beyond resuscitation. Walter Hadler was left to run what was left of Theatre Genesis until 1978, when it finally shut up shop following a damaging fire at St. Mark’s.
The years which Shepard had spent based at Theatre Genesis proved influential on his subsequent career in numerous respects. For example, after he returned from England in 1974, to set up home in the San Francisco Bay area, St. Mark’s contacts such as poet–playwrights Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure (author of The Beard) were very important in helping him resettle. Indeed it was McClure who introduced Shepard to John Lion, artistic director of the Magic Theatre, with whom he struck up a relationship not dissimilar from that he had shared with Ralph Cook. Their association provided Shepard with a new theatrical home where he found, once again, the kind of creative environment conducive to developing new directions for his work. Between 1975 and 1983, Shepard wrote some of his most famous plays, including Buried Child, True West, and Fool for Love, all of which premiered at the Magic’s small theatre in San Francisco’s Fort Mason complex. During the same period, Shepard also spent several summers participating, as a playwriting teacher, in the Padua Hills Playwriting Festival near Los Angeles. The Festival, which had been established by Murray Mednick in a conscious attempt to provide the kind of mentoring role for young writers which Ralph Cook had provided for the Genesis group, proved very important in the development of a new generation of playwrights and theatre-makers, from John Steppling to David Henry Hwang. (Other Off-Off-Broadway veterans on the teaching staff included Maria Irene Fornes and Shepard himself.)
Ralph Cook’s influence appears also to have been felt by Shepard as he began to attempt directing his own plays during the 1970s and ’80s. Cook is remembered, by all who knew him, as a director whose approach to new writing was to avoid – as far as possible – imposing any vision of his own over that of the playwright. Indeed, he was so “hands off” as to sometimes give the impression that the playwrights were directing their plays through him. “That’s what they liked about him,” notes Tony Barsha: “It was almost like he didn’t know what he was doing, except that he knew exactly what he was doing . . . He had the right people around him, and they’d start giving him all these ideas, and he’d say, ‘Oh, we’ll take that, we’ll take that . . .’ Ralph was very good at that.” Shepard, who had always greatly appreciated Cook’s treatment of his work, apparently underestimated just how much skill was involved in such an approach: during his first attempt at directing one of his own plays (the London premiere of Geography of a Horse Dreamer in 1974), he took the hands-off approach so literally that, according to actor Bob Hoskins, he seemed to think that playing poker and visiting the greyhound racetrack would give his actors all the information necessary to perform the play as he saw it. He was, of course, proved wrong, and learned some difficult lessons as a result, but in developing as a director he continued to follow Cook’s lead, seeking to draw performances from his actors rather than imposing his own ideas for a play on them. “He absolutely gave you space,” Barbara Young remembers of Cook’s approach to actors: “If you were in trouble and you went to him, he’d say, ‘You can do it! That’s why you’re playing this part!’ I would be in tears, because I wanted him to give me the solution, but he’d force me to find the solution: he helped me to find myself as an actress.” Similarly, Shepard is praised by actors as a director who will not – in Ed Harris’s words – “let you off the hook,” but insists that they apply their own skills and intelligence to find the best way to approach their roles.37 “He does not even like to block a play,” notes James Gammon, who appeared in Shepard’s productions of A Lie of the Mind (1985) and Simpatico (1994): “I’ve never worked with a director who gave actors as much freedom as Sam.”38 Since 1983, Shepard has directed the premiere productions of almost all his new plays – two notable exceptions being States of Shock (1991) and The Tooth of Crime: Second Dance (1996), which were both handled by his old Theatre Genesis colleague, Bill Hart.
The most significant legacy of Shepard’s time at St. Mark’s, however, is surely there in his writing. Simply on the level of staging, for example, his plays continue to demonstrate a perennial fascination with the possibilities of placing simple set elements in relief against stark blackness, rather than “realistic” clutter: “The windows look out into black space,” read the opening stage directions to Simpatico: “No trees. No buildings. No landscape of any kind. Just black.”39 More importantly, Cook’s notion of pursuing “a deeply subjective kind of realism” appears to have provided Shepard with the grounding he needed to develop, in the 1970s, toward a style of dramaturgy which was at once more conventionally realistic than his previous work – in terms of depicting recognizable domestic environments – and yet still deeply subjectivized. Reality in Shepard’s work is never an unproblematic given, but a site contested by the warring perspectives of his different characters, many of whom appear – as in the “double” pairings of Lee and Austin in True West, or Eddie and May in Fool for Love – to represent different sides of the writer’s own consciousness.40
Perhaps most telling of all is Shepard’s continued insistence on mixing existential or metaphysical concerns, over the nature of human identity and being, together with socio-cultural concerns over the specific ills facing Americans, in distinctively American circumstances. That approach was, as has been noted, typical of the Theatre Genesis aesthetic as it developed during the later 1960s in particular. Moreover, it strikes me that a consideration of Shepard’s work in relation to this formative context is particularly beneficial in drawing attention to the often-neglected class dimensions of his plays. If the Genesis playwrights were driven, in part, by a concern with dramatizing the “dead ends” in which white, lower-class men in particular found themselves, that concern is equally apparent in much of Shepard’s later work. The “white trash” theme is unfashionable, which perhaps explains why it tends to be recognized more in parodies of Shepard’s work than in critical commentaries, but it is inescapably apparent, in one way or another, in most of his major plays. For example, the “two guys” pairings in both True West and Simpatico are partly defined by a sense of the artificial social barriers between them steadily breaking down. In the former play, Austin seems to fall prey to a kind of gnawing guilt at having attempted to deny his upbringing and assimilate himself into a comfortably bourgeois lifestyle, even as Lee confesses that his posturing pride in his lower-class status is simply a front for a deep-rooted sense of failure and helplessness: “I’m livin’ out there [on the desert] because I can’t make it here.”41 Shepard’s often-criticized remarks that there is “something very moving [about] American violence” need to be considered in relation to this underlying awareness of the way that social inequity breeds a sense of impotence. The violence with which he is concerned “has to do with humiliation. There’s some hidden, deep-rooted thing in the Anglo male American that has to do with inferiority, that has to do with not being a man . . . This sense of failure runs very deep.”42 This is a perspective which cultural commentators are only now starting to catch up with. In 1999, for example, feminist writer Susan Faludi published Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Modern Man, which strongly emphasizes a sense of the near-universal frustration felt by ordinary, working class men at their inability to realize the dreams of individual fulfillment which America promises.
This chapter has sought to draw attention to some of the key respects in which Sam Shepard’s early work helped to define the emerging aesthetic of Theatre Genesis, and in which his work, in turn, developed further as a result of the inspiration he received from the community of like-minded theatre-makers which evolved at St. Mark’s. As I have sought to show, a critical awareness of the work of Theatre Genesis during the 1960s can help to contextualize and cast fresh light on Shepard’s own plays, both at that time and in the decades since. There is, I would argue, much work still to be done in this area. In closing, though, I would stress that there is also much to be gained from studying the plays of Shepard’s Theatre Genesis colleagues in their own right. The comparative obscurity of the venue, taken together with Shepard’s personal insistence on promoting himself elsewhere simultaneously, helps to explain why his work is remembered and studied where the plays of Mednick, Barsha, Hadler, and others remain largely unpublished and forgotten. Yet without in any way taking away from Shepard’s achievements, I would argue that the work of his colleagues is worthy of standing comparison with the best of his plays from the 1960s and early ’70s. Indeed, Murray Mednick believes that – given the clear overlap of concerns and techniques developed by the Genesis playwrights – the growth of Shepard’s fame since that time has led to a certain distortion of critical perspective: “he’s taken too much of the credit . . . He’s become an icon, [but] there are some first class playwrights that have been neglected.” While professional jealousy may well play a part in Mednick’s sentiments, he nevertheless has a point. Among “companions to Sam Shepard,” that which you hold in your hands is only one of many that deserve further scrutiny.
1 Sam Shepard, “Introduction” to his The Unseen Hand and Other Plays (New York: Bantam Books, 1986), x.
2 Cf. Stephen J. Bottoms, The Theatre of Sam Shepard: States of Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 1998), chapters 1 and 2.
3 Michael Smith, “Theatre: Cowboys and The Rock Garden,” Village Voice, 19 November 1964.
4 Elenore Lester, “The Pass the Hat Circuit,” New York Times, Magazine section, 5 December 1965, 100.
5 Barbara Eda Young in an unpublished interview with the author, New York City, 18 February 1997. Michael Smith, who directed Icarus’s Mother at the Cino, acknowledged the mistakes he made in an introduction to the play in Shepard’s anthology, Five Plays (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 26–28.
6 Walter Hadler in an unpublished interview with the author, New York City, 24 February 1997. Subsequent quotations taken from this source.
7 Michael Smith, “Introduction” to Nick Orzel and Michael Smith (eds.), Eight Plays from Off-Off-Broadway (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 11.
8 Smith, “Theatre.” (The text of Cowboys is unpublished, but is described in detail by David J. DeRose, who acquired the only extant manuscript from Ralph Cook, in his book Sam Shepard [New York: Twayne, 1992].)
9 The Very Reverend J. C. Michael Allen, in a letter to the author dated 25 August 1995.
10 Ralph Cook, “Theatre Genesis,” in Eight Plays from Off-Off-Broadway, 94.
11 Murray Mednick in an unpublished interview with the author, Los Angeles, 14 January 1997. Subsequent quotations all from this source.
12 Tony Barsha in an unpublished interview with the author, Los Angeles, 17 January 1997. Subsequent quotations all from this source.
13 See Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Unfair Arguments with Existence (New York: New Directions, 1963), 79–85.
14 Sam Shepard, The Unseen Hand and Other Plays (New York: Bantam Books, 1986), 59. Unless otherwise indicated, page references in parentheses within the text are to this edition.
15 Michael Smith, “Theatre Journal,” Village Voice, 27 January 1966. It is worth noting that, in retrospect, Smith now recalls Judson’s Red Cross as one of the outstanding productions of the entire Off-Off-Broadway era, and his estimation of the play as one of Shepard’s best is shared by many other critics. At the time, though, in the immediate context of Shepard’s other recent output, Smith was not the only person frustrated by it.
16 Cf. Bottoms, Theatre of Sam Shepard, 60–65.
17 Robert Patrick in an interview with the author, Los Angeles, 13 January 1997.
18 The Golden Screw is anthologized in Robert J. Schroeder (ed.), The New Underground Theatre (New York: Bantam Books, 1968).
19 Richard Goldstein, “Turn of The Golden Screw,” New York World Journal Tribune, 12 February 1967, 23.
20 Cf. Bottoms, Theatre of Sam Shepard, 65–68.
21 The Hawk is anthologized in Albert Poland and Bruce Mailman (eds.), The Off-Off-Broadway Book (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972).
22 For a full listing of Genesis productions from 1964 to 1972, see Poland and Mailman, Off-Off-Broadway, xlii–xliii.
23 Arthur Sainer in an unpublished interview with the author, New York City, 15 September 1995.
24 William M. Hoffman in an unpublished interview with the author, New York City, 14 September 1995.
25 The Water Works at Lincoln remains unpublished. A 28-page manuscript was kindly supplied to me by Hadler himself.
26 Jim Goad, The Redneck Manifesto (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 16.
27 Ibid.
29 Shepard interviewed by Jonathan Cott, “The Rolling Stone Interview: Sam Shepard,” Rolling Stone, 18 December 1986–1 January 1987, 172.
30 Sam Shepard, “Azusa is a Real Place,” Plays and Players, 20.8 (May 1973), special insert, 1.
31 The image of a dead deer strapped to the front of vehicles is recurrent in Shepard’s work: see, for example, his 1988 film Far North, when Bertrum is almost run down by a hunter’s car.
32 Goad, The Redneck Manifesto, 15.
33 See Shepard’s The Tooth of Crime in Sam Shepard: Seven Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), 224.
34 Sam Shepard, Shaved Splits, in The Unseen Hand and Other Plays (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), 198.
35 This was a term applied to Mednick in particular: “Murray Mednick is nihilistic philosophically as well as dramaturgically. His plays deny all existing principles, values or institutions” (Robert J. Schroeder, introducing his edited play collection The New Underground Theatre, viii).
36 Robert Pasolli, “The Theatre of the Hung-up,” Village Voice, 19 December 1968.
37 Ed Harris quoted by Ben Brantley, “Sam Shepard: Storyteller,” New York Times, 13 November 1994, H26.
38 James Gammon quoted by Nan Robertson, “The Multi-Dimensional Sam Shepard,” New York Times, 21 January 1986, C15.
39 Sam Shepard, Simpatico (London: Methuen, 1995), 3.
40 Cf. Bottoms, Theatre of Sam Shepard, 191–92.
41 Shepard, Sam Shepard: Seven Plays, 49.
42 Shepard interviewed by Michiko Kakutani, “Myths, Dreams, Realities – Sam Shepard’s America,” New York Times, 29 January 1984, B26.