Our conversation took place on 5 May 2000, in St. Paul, Minnesota, a city not far from where Shepard lives on a horse farm with Jessica Lange and their children. Exactly on time, casually dressed, and eager to get to business, Shepard exuded a quiet and slightly restless presence. He was ready, so we sat down and immediately launched into an afternoon’s talk. Unpretentious and charismatic, clearly aware of and yet slightly uncomfortable with his celebrity status, Shepard enjoyed discussing some of the key issues that have longed engaged his imagination. Like so many of his own characters, Shepard is a storyteller. What is probably not so apparent in reading this interview, though, is the energy, the voice, the animated quality of Shepard’s talk. He would sometimes stare right in my eyes, big hands moving, while commenting on his plays and American culture. His humor seemed genuine, self-effacing, or ironic, depending on the point he was emphasizing. Shepard, who granted the interview exclusively for this Companion, was enormously helpful. Afterwards he even sent me a working copy of his latest play, though it was still several months before its premiere. Throughout he was thoughtful and carefully selected his words, often laughing at himself when recounting the private or professional situations he has found himself in over a four-decade career in the theatre, and implicitly acknowledging that his life as a playwright, film star, director, and musician has been a chaotically amazing journey.
| ROUDANÉ: | Let’s start with a few questions about the beginning of your career. You’ve mentioned that Theatre Genesis was a kind of artistic home for you. What was it like to be a teenager arriving from California and finding himself caught up in the burgeoning Off-Off-Broadway theatre scene? |
| SHEPARD: | It was just amazing. Theatre Genesis always felt like home base, really, because that’s where I started, and it had a very different feel from all the other theatres. Each one of those theatres back then was very individual, although it was all called Off-Off-Broadway. They each had their own particular identity, and it depended directly on who was running it and who were the body of people involved. Looking back on it, it was quite an extraordinary tapestry of atmospheres. La MaMa was very different from the Judson Poets’ Theatre and from Caffe Cino. But I guess the church – St. Mark’s – really felt like home base, but it was a center for many different things besides theatre: there was poetry, there was jazz, there was dance, there was painting, sculpture, so it was kind of a magnet for the East Side. And also because it was on the East Side, this made it really very different from way over in the West Village by Caffe Cino, which was a little tiny cave. It was a really amazing time to be a kid there. It was the most fortunate thing for somebody who wanted to write plays. I just dropped down out of nowhere. It was absolute luck that I happened to be there when the whole Off-Off-Broadway movement was starting. I arrived there in ’63 and by ’64 Off-Off-Broadway was kicking out. It was just a great time for a writer. |
| ROUDANÉ: | I’ve always wondered what you meant in the “Introduction” to The Unseen Hand and Other Plays when you suggest that the plays in that volume (i.e. many of your 1960s works) can’t be fully appreciated unless contextualized within the time and place they were written. I ask, in part, because a lot of those plays still stand up so well. |
| SHEPARD: | Well, hopefully they do, but I don’t know. It’s hard to say. They were very much of the time, they were very much written out of that chaotic atmosphere that was happening, and for that reason I guess I’ve always associated The Unseen Hand and those earlier plays with the sixties. There are still quite a few of the early plays being done now. |
| ROUDANÉ: | Do you have ambivalent feelings about the sixties? |
| SHEPARD: | You know, man, I’ll tell you what: I feel like it’s been romanticized, of course, like every era that goes by that tends to get romanticized, except that I’ve never heard anybody say anything good about the seventies! But the sixties, to me, felt extremely chaotic. It did not feel like some heroic effort toward a new world, like many people make it out to be. There was an idealism on the one hand that was so out to lunch in the face of the realities. Vietnam of course shaped everything. Vietnam was the fulcrum behind it all, and there couldn’t have been a more serious, a more deadly serious anger. And I suppose you could say that it was morally correct to be against the war. But people got swept up in idealisms – the Jane Fonda thing of going with the North and getting buddy-buddy with Ho Chi Minh – and it was very confusing, and at the same time full of a kind of despair and hope. And then when the whole Civil Rights Movement kicked in, everything just doubled and doubled and doubled, until all the barrels were wide open and everybody was shooting and it felt very awesomely chaotic to me. Still, even after the Kennedy and King assassinations and all the killing in the war, it was the idealism that continued to astound, and it just seemed so naive. The reality of it to me was chaos, and the idealism didn’t mean anything. I was up against the war in Vietnam myself and was very much against it. But I wasn’t ready to become a Marxist; I didn’t think Marx was the answer to Vietnam any more than “flower power.” There was a crazy kind of ethos – and the Berkeley thing turned me off completely. I never went to college. You know that great Creedence Clearwater song, “I Ain’t No Fortunate Son”? I always identified exactly with that tune: I mean this was my anthem. “It ain’t me!” And that’s the way I kind of felt throughout the sixties: I was on the tail of this tiger that was wagging itself all over the place and was spitting blood in all directions. It was weird, very weird. And then to make it even more weird was acid. When acid hit the streets, then it became a circus. Then it became totally unfathomable because nobody had a clue. And there were all these Gurus coming along – Timothy Leary – and then you had the Black Panthers and then you had . . . it was really beyond belief. It was like somebody threw a lighted stick in an ammunition camp. Unbelievable. |
| ROUDANÉ: | And this prompted you to go to London in 1971? |
| SHEPARD: | Oh yeah, very much. I mean I wanted out. I wanted to get out of the insanity. Of course I was also running away from myself! But I figured you can’t do that. London was a good respite because there was a really fantastic fringe theatre scene going on there with a lot of good actors. I worked with people like Bobby Hoskins, Stephen Rea, and all those guys before they were known and they were just doing theatre for nothing. London was the first place where I ever directed my own work -at the Royal Court – Geography of a Horse Dreamer, with Stephen Rea and Bobby Hoskins and Ken Cranham in 1974. |
| ROUDANÉ: | Music has played an important role in many of your plays, and I understand you’re a fairly accomplished drummer yourself. |
| SHEPARD: | Naw, I wouldn’t go that far. I can drum a little bit, yeah. I still play music a little bit. |
| ROUDANÉ: | But hasn’t that sense of music, from rock-and-roll to jazz and to country, that you’ve enjoyed, helped you as a playwright? |
| SHEPARD: | Yeah. My dad was a drummer – he was a New Orleans jazz fanatic – and so I grew up listening to that music and he was always playing the drums in the house and stuff. So I’ve always felt that music is very important. Writing is very rhythmic, there’s a rhythmical flow to it – if it’s working. I’ve always been fascinated by the rhythm of language, and language is musical, there’s no way of getting around it, particularly written language when it’s spoken. The language becomes musical, or at least it should in one way or another. I still play music a little bit. In fact, we’ve got a band now with a friend of mine, T-Bone Burnett, called Void, and we’re trying to put something together. But I haven’t played for a long time. I used to play with a band called the Holy Modal Rounders in the sixties, which was fun and chaotic because everybody was on dope, everybody was pretty nuts, but it was fun! Music gives you a great insight into the world. When you go to places like Ireland or Mexico, where music is a deep part of the culture, you can get together and sing. Everybody knows the music. People come from very different villages but they know the same songs and sit down and sing them. And it’s really great, and primitive. It used to be that way in this country, the Mountain music and all the fiddle players from Kentucky and Tennessee. That’s why in part I like the Red Clay Ramblers, another band I worked with out of North Carolina. So, yeah, music is an important part of some of my plays. I use music a lot in A Lie of the Mind. They are a great band, the Red Clay Ramblers, who played in A Lie of the Mind. They did a great thing on Broadway called Fool Moon. That was a good show. |
| ROUDANÉ: | Of the many compelling aspects of your theatre that spark public interest and a private nerve, it’s your exploration of the American family that, for many, stands out. Especially in such plays as The Rock Garden, Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child, True West, Fool for Love, and A Lie of the Mind, strange or absent fathers, distant mothers, wayward sons, and confused daughters animate the stage. Many of us feel the way Shelly must have when she first enters the normal-seeming home in the second act of Buried Child only to find a rather bizarre family. Could you comment on your life-long interest in exploring the American family? |
| SHEPARD: | The one thing that keeps drawing me back to it is this thing that there is no escape from the family. And it almost seems like the whole willfulness of the sixties was to break away from the family: the family was no longer viable, no longer valid somehow in everybody’s mind. The “nuclear family” and all these coined phrases suddenly became meaningless. We were all independent, we were all free of that, we were somehow spinning out there in the world without any connection whatsoever, you know. Which is ridiculous. It’s absolutely ridiculous to intellectually think that you can sever yourself, I mean even if you didn’t know who your mother and father were, if you never met them, you are still intimately, inevitably, and entirely connected to who brought you into the world – through a long, long chain, regardless of whether you knew them face to face or not. You could be the most outcast orphan and yet you are still inevitably connected to this chain. I’m interested in the family’s biological connections and how those patterns of behavior are passed on. In a way it’s endless, there’s no real bottom to it. It started with a little tiny one-act play I wrote way back when called Rock Garden [1964], where there was, for the first time in my work, a father, a mother, and a son. It was a very simple one-act little play, but it keyed off into Curse of the Starving Class [1977], and that keyed off into Buried Child [1979], and that keyed off into True West [1980], Fool for Love [1983], and all of that. I mean, I look back on all of that now as being sort of seminal. It initiated something that I didn’t even see, I didn’t even recognize that this was going to be the impulse toward other things, and I certainly didn’t see myself spending my whole life on it. I’ve got this new production of True West on Broadway now – and the play’s twenty years old – and the amazing thing to me is that, now, in this time, for some reason or another, the disaster inherent in this thing called the American Family is very very resonant now with audiences. I mean it’s much more so now than when it was back when the play first started in 1980. When True West first came out, it just didn’t seem to have the punch that it has now, you know what I mean? I mean it attracts an amazingly young audience; it’s like the average age is something like thirty years old going to a Broadway play, and I just can’t believe the reaction to it – the standing ovations every night. And, granted these are remarkable actors, they are extraordinary actors doing amazing things, but, still, there is a resonance in the material that somehow catches like wildfire, and then you start to recognize the disaster. |
| ROUDANÉ: | And there is a new generation seeing True West for the first time now. How do you feel about this younger generation of audiences seeing your plays? |
| SHEPARD: | Oh, it’s unbelievable! I mean there are kids going to see it who weren’t even born when the play was written, and then I was standing in front of the theatre one night and there were two or three guys standing over to the side and one of their buddies comes up to meet them to go into the theatre and he’s just yelling the lines of the play to these other guys. And they’re not more than twenty-five years old – they couldn’t be – and he’s yelling these lines, you know, about “there aren’t any mountains in the Panhandle,” “It’s flat” and all, and it was astounding. Really amazing to me that young people are directly relating to it. You mentioned you took your teenage son to see one of my plays. One of the great things about kids coming to the theatre is that they are directly involved with the question of identity, of who they are. They are actively involved in that. Now we could still be actively involved with that when we’re sixty or seventy or eighty years old, but for kids it’s monumental because their lives are just becoming and I think that anything that speaks to that question of identity calls the kids’ attention. I think we get fooled into this notion of maturity just because we are getting old. I mean there’s maturity and there’s maturity. A man could be intellectually extremely mature and emotionally a six-year-old. You see that all the time. No wonder people freak out. Our own culture is absolutely full of this, and there are no channels, there are no openings for discovering where to go. I mean there are these bullshit encounter groups but, that, well, you know. |
| ROUDANÉ: | How do you feel about the current [2000] Broadway run of True West? |
| SHEPARD: | Oh, I think it’s wonderful. Matthew Warchus had done it like that in England. I don’t know if the actors were English or expatriate Americans, but they did it in London, so he already had the experience of having handled the actors that way – with Austin and Lee switching roles. I thought it was a great notion because of the nature, the interchangeability of the characters. And you get two dynamite actors like John Reilly and Philip Hoffman and the play takes on an added resonance. The two actors switching roles on various nights is not an easy trick. It’s a huge load, but they did it. I think they went a little nuts doing it, but they got it now. |
| ROUDANÉ: | A number of playwrights address in various ways the whole notion of the “myth of the American Dream,” however one chooses to define such a term. Many writers have said that the American Dream myth permeates all of American literature, forming an ironical cultural backdrop to the writer’s story. Do you think such a myth informs your theatre? |
| SHEPARD: | Nobody has actually ever succinctly defined “the myth of the American Dream.” What is the American Dream? Is it what Thomas Jefferson proposed? Was that the American Dream? Was it what George Washington proposed? Was it what Lincoln proposed? Was it what Martin Luther King proposed? I don’t know what the American Dream is. I do know that it doesn’t work. Not only doesn’t it work, the myth of the American Dream has created extraordinary havoc, and it’s going to be our demise. I mean if you want to – and I’m not an historian – but it’s very interesting to trace back this European imperialism, this notion that not only were we given this land by God, somehow, but that we’re also entitled to do whatever we wanted to with it, regardless of the consequences, and reap all of the fortunes out of the land, much to the detriment of everybody “below” this rampant, puritanical class of European colonialism. If you read in the journals of Lewis and Clark, it’s just amazing how these guys approached the Plains Indians, particularly the Sioux, who were not very welcoming to them, as opposed to some of the other tribes to the North who got along with them better. But the Sioux couldn’t care less about these jokers. They’d mess with them, they’d fool with them, they shot arrows at ’em, and Lewis and Clark hated the idea of going back through Lakota country because they knew they’d get the shit kicked out of them by these “crazy” people who they considered many notches below the European standard. Now if that’s the American Dream, then we were in trouble from the get go; if that’s the way the myth of the American Dream was established, we were in deep shit. Granted, Lewis and Clark and these other guys were somewhat heroic, they were vigorous, they had all of this vitality and they had all of this adventure of going into strange territory and all of that stuff, but behind the whole thing is land-hungry Europeans wanting to dominate. That’s behind the whole deal. So, again, there are so many definitions of the myth of the American Dream. I mean, now you could actually say the American Dream is the computer. It’s presented like that: the computer is the American Dream, the computer is the Answer. The Internet is the Answer. OK? Where does that leave you? I think we’ve always fallen victim to advertising from the get go. From advertising campaigns. The move westward was promoted by advertising. You know, “Come West!” “Free land!” “Manifest Destiny.” So we’ve always been seduced by advertising, and now we’re even more seduced by the computer and the Internet. We’ve fallen into that thing, you know. So the American Dream is always this fantasy that’s promoted through advertising. We always prefer the fantasy over the reality. |
| ROUDANÉ: | That’s very interesting in that some of our nation’s first literature was, in part, a kind of promotional literature: John Smith’s New England Trails [1620], The General History of Virginia [1624], and – listen to the title – Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of New England [1631]. Does this have something to do, in your plays, with the “split” within the individual’s psyche to which you’ve sometimes alluded? |
| SHEPARD: | Right. I find it to be a huge dilemma. The friction between who we instinctively feel ourselves to be and anything that’s influencing us to become something quite different. The friction there, the tensions there, particularly in this country, are huge. You see, there’s always this battle going on between what I am inclined to believe through the influences coming from outside, and what I sort of instinctively feel myself to be, which is quite a different creature. So you can’t help but get nuts in that predicament. You can’t help it. It’s almost like Dr. Faustus. It’s the same predicament, this temptation for what I am not. I am sorry I am not more eloquent about explaining this. But it seems to be that this “split,” which I worked with in Simpatico, creates a deep problem that we have very little understanding of. It can be divided in all different kinds of ways: male and female, violent and not so. And I think this “split” is where a lot of the violence comes from in the United States. This frustration between imagery and reality. I guess that’s why professional wrestling is popular. |
| ROUDANÉ: | Would this in part explain why so many of your plays have key male figures who have trouble functioning outside of the Mojave Desert? |
| SHEPARD: | Yeah, well, I grew up in a condition where the male influences around me were primarily alcoholics and extremely violent and, at the same time, like lost children, not knowing how to deal with it. Instead, they were plunked down on the desert not knowing how they got there. And slowly they began receding further and further and further away – receding from the family, receding from society. You see it with some Vietnam vets. It was the same thing, except these guys – my father’s generation – were coming out of World War II. I can’t help but think that these wars had something to do with the psychological state that they came back in. I mean imagine coming back into the Eisenhower fifties. It must not have been easy. At all. Where everything was wonderful, the front lawns were all being taken care of, there was a refrigerator in everybody’s house. Everybody had a Chevy, and these guys had just been bombing the shit out of Germany and Italy and the South Pacific and then they come back; I mean it just must have been unbelievable. I mean nobody ever really talks about that. Back then it was taboo to talk about it. “Nobody’s crazy; everybody’s in good shape.” I mean can you believe it? And this happened across the country of course, but my dad came from an extremely rural farm community – wheat farmers – in Illinois, and next thing he knows he’s flying B-24s over the South Pacific, over Rumania, dropping bombs and killing people he couldn’t even see. And then from that into trying to raise a family and growing up in white America, you know. I mean it’s extraordinary. It’s amazing the way all that flip flops, from the fifties to the sixties. This monster appears. The monster everybody was trying to keep at bay suddenly turns over. |
| ROUDANÉ: | Perhaps this is why you have so many baffled father figures in your plays, fathers who in part stand as an emblem for a wayward America. |
| SHEPARD: | Yeah, but I don’t think you ever begin a piece of writing with that intention; it comes out, you know what I mean? You begin from “character” and as it moves maybe it takes on some of those kinds of resonances. I don’t think you begin from saying, “OK, I’m going to make this father figure an emblem for America,” you know what I mean? If it comes out through its own force, then it’s fine. That’s something I never really realized as a writer until I got into Curse of the Starving Class, and with Curse I began to realize that these characters were not only who they were in this predicament in this little subculture but they begin to have a bigger implication – there are ripples around them, particularly in the father. |
| ROUDANÉ: | Your remarks remind me of what in part makes your plays so intensely personal and yet at the same time they transcend themselves, and touch a collective nerve the way, say, a Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman reaches audiences. |
| SHEPARD: | Is it true that Miller wrote that in three days or something? It was very fast, right? |
| ROUDANÉ: | He took about six weeks to finish Salesman, but he wrote the first act in one day. |
| SHEPARD: | Yeah, that’s happened to me before, too, and it surprised me when I read that because it is almost as if some plays write themselves, they just appear, and you’re obliged to take things down. I mean that’s almost the feeling. True West and actually Buried Child were like that. Buried Child wrote itself pretty fast. One of the amazing things about playwriting is that it really is a probe, it is a discovery, and there are many things about a play that you may not understand right in the moment of writing, and you may not really understand it actually until years later. Buried Child was like that. You know that Steppenwolf production they took to Broadway in 1996? Gary Sinise directed it. When I saw it, suddenly I understood aspects about the play I hadn’t seen before – because of this production. |
| ROUDANÉ: | Much has been said about your portraits of female characters, including that many of the women in your theatre have been marginalized or exploited by the (often demented) male figures. Might you comment on the evolution of your female characters in your plays? |
| SHEPARD: | Yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot about that. In fact, I’ve been working on a new play that has two female characters in it, mainly because I just came out of one that was almost all male. So I just wanted to shift a little bit. I’m not sure about the question of maturity or the evolution of my female characters, but I guess they have become more substantive characters rather than being emblems. I think in my earlier plays they were more emblematic, like Miss Scoons in Angel City, and stuff like that. I think that the shift in the development of my female characters began with Curse of the Starving Class, you know, with the mother and the daughter. And then the mom in Buried Child. Maybe some of the women in A Lie of the Mind, but the focus there is really on the men. That is one problem you have in the craft of playwriting: when you zero in, when you target two characters, and then you’re obliged to have other characters, it’s almost as though they’re an intrusion, they’re there as trappings around the others, which is kind of a fault in one way. But in another way it’s probably better if you just write a two-character male play and forget about the others, and not even indicate them. Beckett had a great thing about why he put Nell and Nagg, the parents in Endgame, in trash cans. He said he did it so they wouldn’t move around! It wouldn’t be messy. But sometimes, unfortunately, you target on your central characters and then these other ones kind of pop up who you don’t really have any vested interest in. They’re trappings. They’re almost like furniture, unfortunately, but that’s the way it happens. |
| ROUDANÉ: | When Tennessee Williams once was asked which of his female characters he was most fond of, he said Blanche from A Streetcar Named Desire. Looking back over all of your plays, which female characters stand out in your mind? |
| SHEPARD: | Yeah, well Williams invested his entire being in Blanche. Blanche and Williams were inseparable. But I think Mae is a pretty solid character in Fool for Love. She’s probably the most solid female character I’ve written. She really holds her own. And the mom in Curse of the Starving Class, but I think overall Mae is the strongest, not strong just in the sense of her own willfulness, but as a whole character. |
| ROUDANÉ: | Could you discuss your long and rich collaborative association with Joseph Chaikin? |
| SHEPARD: | We didn’t really work together until Tongues, that was the first thing, at the Magic Theatre, and that was in the seventies. I had known him since the mid-sixties and he had, of course, the Open Theatre, which was down on Spring Street, and I was going with a girl, Joyce Aaron, who was an actress in the company. And I used to go to rehearsals just to sit there and listen to Joe and watch him. He was so eloquent about what he was looking for in the actor. And what he was looking for was completely different from what was going on at the time, which was naturalistic, Stanislavski, Method School of Acting. Suddenly Joe opened up this whole new territory, and I think he was about the only guy in New York who was working in that way. There were some other splinter groups going on, but he was very specific about where he wanted to go with the actor. He was very inspiring, particularly to actors, because he presented opportunities that really you hadn’t encountered before. I think the Method style of acting is very limited, to tell you the truth. It is one means of an actor approaching a character, but it certainly is not the final one. It wasn’t just that Joe encouraged the actor to let go, but he asked the actor to consider many other possibilities, that the actor isn’t only there to cause the audience to believe in his behavior as being real, as being like real life. That’s not the only purpose of the actor. The actor can do many, many things. He can shift, go in many different directions: he can become an animal, he can go into all these different transformations, he can borrow from Japanese theatre. The actor can borrow from all these different avenues. He can “declare” himself, he doesn’t have to be just On the Waterfront. On the Waterfront is great, but there can be many other possibilities. |
| ROUDANÉ: | When I met with Joe Chaikin recently he mentioned that when you two collaborated, what was most important was music and humor. |
| SHEPARD: | One of the beauties of working with Joe early on was I was essentially working with him as an actor. He was the actor in the piece. He was an amazing actor, I mean this guy – oh my God! – he could do stuff with his voice and the face and body and nobody else was doing that. So I had the incredible luxury of having him, not only as an actor, but as a collaborator in the writing. As we worked, he performed or experimented. So I was directly working with an actor who was also a writer and a director. You can’t get any closer to the source. He had a tremendous impact on my work, and it was a kind of writing that I probably would have never approached on my own as a playwright because it was truly a collaborative thing. Joe very much fed into that. Many, many times when we would work, I’ve used his language directly, particularly in things like The War in Heaven, which is almost all Joe’s language that I just shaped. In When the World Was Green: A Chef’s Fable, there’s an emphasis on food at the end. That was Joe. The chef. Joe was obsessed with cooking and food, and he just insisted on this food thing. Every time we’d get together it was always about the food, and I just went along with it. I kind of liked this character, this Chef, this Chef who was a murderer. It was great working on When the World Was Green. We started off working on the Devil as a subject, and it moved into this other territory somehow. |
| ROUDANÉ: | Do you think that in some of your more recent plays, especially When the World Was Green, that you might be bestowing upon your characters a slight sense of hope, or that there may be some hint of a reconnection? |
| SHEPARD: | I don’t know, but I don’t think you can make it general like that. Each play is so different that you try to be obliged to the material, what’s there in the play, and not put anything on it. I think hope and hopelessness are intimately connected, and I don’t believe in one or the other. In a way I prefer hopelessness to hope. I think there’s more hope in hopelessness. |
| ROUDANÉ: | A number of American playwrights see themselves, despite the carnage on their stages, as moral optimists. That it’s too late for a John Proctor in The Crucible or Jessie Cates in ’night, Mother doesn’t mean the audience can’t be shocked into some form of better awareness about the self and the other, and the culture at large. Do you ever consider yourself to be a moral optimist? |
| SHEPARD: | I don’t see myself in any particular light with that; I don’t take any sides in that issue. Look at the violence in Shakespeare and, to me, Shakespeare is beyond morality, if you know what I mean. He’s not taking sides, he’s not interested in morality. What he is interested in is something eternal. He’s interested in the gods. He’s interested in the forces, the powers at work that cause all of this stuff, and how it flows through human beings, and how human beings behave in ways that they are not even conscious of, or if they become conscious of them, it’s still beyond their control. Look at King Lear: “Let it not be madness.” It is madness! There’s no way you’re going to get out of it. You can’t get out of it. You’re going to go crazy. And that to me is much much closer to the honesty of it than pretending to be on one side or the other of a morality that you don’t even really believe in. As much as you can talk yourself into doing “the right thing” as opposed to “the wrong thing,” it doesn’t make any difference, because it’s going to happen, it’s going to go down, you know? These forces are going to go down, and for us to believe that we’re somehow in the position that we individually can manipulate the forces is insanity. At the very best, I think that all we can hope for is to see that these forces are in action, and that we’re being pushed and pulled and turned in one way or another and how we ride these waves. The great thing about the Greeks is that they had a god for everything. If the wind shifted, there was a god; if thunder struck, there was a god. Everything could be explained and annotated in certain kinds of ways. It must have been a fabulous culture. I mean, you could say the gods did this, and Zeus is over here causing this thing, and Athena is pissed off over here and, of course, you never know, right now, whether or not in our own contemporary notions of morality, we look at the Greek gods as being silly and illusionary. We have no idea what the Greeks’ relationship was to these different cosmic powers. We as contemporary American human beings have no notion whatsoever what their real relationship was to the forces and the powers that were going on. Simply because they named them for this, that, and the other is not, to the Greeks, superstitious so much, as really having an understanding of the forces in nature, the forces that are driving us. I think they were much better off! That cosmology came in handy. It was a great culture. But all these myths about a yearning to reconnect to some higher ritual where there was some “meaning” never really existed in American culture, except in the American Indian culture, which definitely had something akin to that. But the European culture didn’t. Manifest Destiny? Manifest Destiny didn’t come close to Athena or Odysseus. As Lee says in True West, “Built up? Wiped out is more like it. I don’t even hardly recognize it.” Maybe this is why I’ve always had a great interest in Indian culture. From what I understand of it, and I’ve gotten this from some of the Indians I’ve gotten to know, there was a real relationship between the forces of nature and the human condition. The Indians didn’t see human beings as being separate from these various natural forces. They were also big believers in signs, like if the hawk flew on the left side and crossed that way it’s going to be a bad day. Which way is the wind turning and stuff like that was very important. The Indians were listeners and in sympathetic relationship with their rituals, and all of their stories and mythologies, like the Hopi mythologies, are extraordinary. But they were put in that place because of a disaster and their purpose for living was intimately connected to the place where they were to step down at the end of that flood. It’s biblical stuff and you begin to wonder how this all relates to us. |
| ROUDANÉ: | You’ve long been involved with the cinema in various capacities, from Zabriskie Point [1970] to Hamlet [2000] – over thirty films and counting. Could you comment on your work in film? Has your work in Hollywood and in film helped you at all as a playwright? |
| SHEPARD: | I’ll tell you what it did do: it gave me a kind of perspective that was kind of surprising when I first started to do film because I didn’t realize – and I don’t know how anybody could foresee that before they stepped into doing movies – what a contrived situation it is. Everything’s contrived: you’re in this trailer out in the middle of a prairie getting make-up on and costumes and people are running around with walkie-talkies and putting lights up. It’s a kind of controlled chaos, and everything seems conjured out of somewhere, and really intruding into the atmosphere that’s there. It’s really this strange kind of little circus world that goes on out in the middle of nowhere. And that part of it fascinates me because it’s this contest between total fantasy and very much real life. For instance, with hiring extras from the village who come in; I mean some of them have never ever seen a movie, and you’re hiring them with Hollywood casting agents. “Warren, sit over there!” That part of it really fascinates me – these extreme contrasts between the contrivance and the actual. And I think that actually plays an influence in some of my short stories, plays, and stuff like that, because you can’t help but be shocked by it. We did this film in Mexico and shooting this film in Mexico reminded me of all this again. |
| ROUDANÉ: | Mexico as place, as metaphor for the mind seems to play an important role in your dramas – I think of La Turista, Seduced, or Eyes for Consuela, for instance. What is it about Mexico – the air, the colors, the land, the culture, the history – that engages you? |
| SHEPARD: | Mexico is what America should have been. Mexico still has heart, it still has extraordinary passion, it still has a sense of family and culture, of deep, deep roots. Some of it is awful – the poverty level, the oppression’s awful, and stuff like that – but there are places you go in Mexico that just make you feel like a human being. The Indian culture is what I think does it for me. We just got back from Tulum. It really is paradise. |
| ROUDANÉ: | Speaking of paradise, I recently read Cruising Paradise. I’ve read your earlier prose in Motel Chronicles and Hawk Moon, which I enjoyed, but I was in no way prepared for the imaginative leap you made in Cruising Paradise. Your prose was surprisingly textured in a way you don’t always see in the stage language and, in a sense, it was as strong a writing as I’ve seen from you. How was it for you to write fiction as opposed to writing for the stage? |
| SHEPARD: | Oh, thanks. I enjoyed writing that book. The strange thing about playwriting is that you reach certain points where you need to take a rest, and yet you can’t completely rest. But the short story is a wonderful little side trip. You can go into a short story in such a way that it’s not like writing a play but you can invest the same kind of force in them. I’ve always loved the form of the short story. It’s very firm. It’s such a wonderful form, and I like to keep working at it because I feel like I got such a long way to go. You read Chekhov’s stuff and you go, “Goddamn, this guy’s got volumes and volumes,” and they’re all amazing. |
| ROUDANÉ: | This story “A Man’s Man” in Cruising Paradise about the young man – you – unloading the stacks of hay was not only imagistically so vital, but it resonated for me because it brought me back to the time when I was a teenager unloading semis filled with heavy boxes in the warehouses in Chicago during the summer, and you never forget that heavy load. |
| SHEPARD: | That kind of work never leaves you, does it? I don’t do that kind of work anymore because, physically, you have to be fairly young. Those three-wire bales, I mean I’ll never forget those suckers. They weighed like 150 pounds a piece, and you miss one of those things and you think, how am I going to do this all day long? Your whole body’s scratched, your eyes are swollen, it’s about 110 degrees! Yeah, that’s in Cruising Paradise. Have you ever heard of Juan Rulfo, the Mexican novelist? He wrote a bunch of short stories called The Burning Plain that are some of the most extraordinary stories I have ever read. Oh, they’re beyond belief. And he wrote a novel called Pedro Paramo, and he had a second novel that he didn’t finish – he killed himself – that’s just incredible. He has influenced me a lot. |
| ROUDANÉ: | Do you see your work in prose helping you when you return to writing for the stage? |
| SHEPARD: | It doesn’t help with the language so much but with the material itself, the character’s place, and the substance of that place, and what Frank O’Connor – one of my all-time favorite short-story writers – called the “glowing center of action.” He said that the short story must have that “burning center or burning core of interest.” Particularly in the short story, that “burning” or “glowing” has to be apparent right away, and it has to be substantial, and it has to emanate from this “core.” It’s a tremendous thing to try to go into that and do something with it. I have written a whole bunch of short stories that haven’t gone anywhere, that don’t have a “glowing center.” But it takes you a while to realize it. In fact, I have another book that’s due, and I only have a third of it finished. I kicked out a whole lot of stories that didn’t belong. |
| ROUDANÉ: | Do you ever work on more than one play at a time? |
| SHEPARD: | I have, but now I’ve just got one. I finished that one I worked on for so long, The Late Henry Moss, and I do have another one that’s now about forty-five pages, but I think it’s one of those I’m going to set aside and come back to. One interesting thing with Henry Moss, having left it for so long, and then come back to it, it was like a new play. I remember Mark Twain saying that he did that intentionally; he’d write something and then set it aside and wouldn’t look at it for a year or more, and then would come back. It is another approach to writing. When you’re younger you’re too ambitious to do that. |
| ROUDANÉ: | You’ve mentioned before that you’ve had difficulties with ending your plays. After nearly four decades of writing, do you feel that you’ve finally gotten a handle on closing your dramas? |
| SHEPARD: | I still hate endings. Beginnings are great because there’s so much tension, mystery, anticipation, and build-up, and you can reveal so much material to draw an audience in. But endings are so weird because suddenly you’re forced to cut things off. I mean why end all this great action? Because people in the theatre have to go home? So after all this tremendous emotional build-up, just to cut the action off seems crazy. All the action after all keeps going on. |
| ROUDANÉ: | Speaking of endings, perhaps we could wrap up with a question about your latest work. Joseph Chaikin tells me that you’ve finished Henry Moss, which will open at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco in the fall. |
| SHEPARD: | Yeah, right now it’s titled The Late Henry Moss, which is actually a take-off of an Irish short story called “The Late Henry Conran” by Frank O’Connor. I’ve been working on it for the last ten years, off and on. I actually abandoned it at one point and then picked it back up again, a lot due to Joe, who read it again and thought that it would be worthwhile, and Joe actually did a workshop production of it. The play concerns another predicament between brothers and fathers and it’s mainly the same material I’ve been working over for thirty years or something but for me it never gets old, although it may for some audiences. This one in particular deals with the father, who is dead in the play and comes back, who’s revisiting the past. He’s a ghost – which has always fascinated me. Do you know the work of [John Millington] Synge, the Irish playwright? He uses corpses a lot in his plays. And the corpse is present in the play and the corpse comes alive. I don’t know, I find that fascinating, and this features in The Late Henry Moss. We start rehearsals October 3 and probably won’t get it running to mid to late November, and then we can only run it up to Christmas, so it’s a short run. We may subsequently do it in New York, I don’t know. |