In a 1988 interview, Sam Shepard commented on the centrality of the notion of family and heredity to his thought: “What doesn’t have to do with family? There isn’t anything, you know what I mean? Even a love story has to do with family. Crime has to do with family. We all come out of each other – everyone is born out of a mother and a father, and you go on to be a father. It’s an endless cycle.”1 Whether critics consider Curse of the Starving Class (1977) and Buried Child (1978) the first two parts of a “family trilogy” completed by True West (1980), or the first two movements in a quintet – those three works plus Fool for Love (1983) and A Lie of the Mind (1985) – they all agree that these two plays mark a turning point to a more realistic, perhaps somewhat O’Neillian dramaturgy. Yet, as Charles R. Lyons insists, it is a realism to which Shepard attaches his own original signature by ironically undercutting it: “Shepard took up another highly conventionalized aesthetic form – dramatic realism – and reconfigured its typical structure to accommodate the more open, fluid conventions of his writing . . . this shift forms another ‘appropriation’: Shepard’s borrowing of the conventions of dramatic realism, theatrical schemes which, by this point, were also ‘popular’ although decidedly not ideologically radical.”2
Shepard’s realism, however, because it is so intent on bringing to light the subversive and transgressive elements that more traditional examples of the genre often keep buried or repressed, approaches to a kind of American neo-Gothic.3 The way in which Margot Gayle Backus delineates between realism and Gothicism in Irish literature in her recent study of The Gothic Family Romance is applicable to Shepard’s plays as well: “Whereas realism characteristically disavows all knowledge of ‘unauthorized versions’ of the family, in the gothic such patterns of familial transgression are inescapable. These opposing stances self-evidently serve complementary ends, however: both assert an absolute disjunction between all forms of deviance and bourgeois reality. Such deviations may occur in geographically and cultural [sic] remote fantasies, but never in real life.”4 But in Shepard’s family plays just such deviations do occur within the context of “real life,” and what is ordinarily “unauthorized” suddenly becomes “authorized” and uncovered for all to see through patterns of ritual action and sociopolitical analysis of a collective guilt in which the audience is implicated if not complicitous.
Shepard displays a peculiar power in his highly symbolic family problem plays of allegorizing the American experience, of deflating the myth of America as the New Eden – whether the proverbial “garden” be an orchard in California or a farm in the midwest – and of showing the new American Adam as the cause of a new fall from grace. Curse of the Starving Class, which premiered on 21 April 1977 at London’s Royal Court Theatre (where almost exactly two decades earlier John Osborne’s legendary “kitchen sink” drama Look Back in Anger had played) before enjoying its American opening a year later at Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival on 2 March 1978, focuses on the severely dysfunctional Tate family to explore issues of home and heredity, of rootedness and escape, of determinism and change. The “curse” of the play’s title is biological and familial, as well as a result of social and economic forces. The starvation is multilayered, not only physical and emotional, but spiritual as well; a prominent part of the stage set is a refrigerator into which one or other of the characters is often found staring, and the defeated observation of “Nothing”5 when it is found to be empty of food conveys an almost metaphysical feeling of anguish and desperation. Bert Cardullo even tellingly connects “the spiritual starvation amidst plenty” to Shepard’s dramaturgic device of the narcissistic monologue that isolates characters from one another.6
Already in the play’s opening image of the son Wesley carting off the wood from a broken-down door, the home as a place of shelter and security has been violated. The proximate cause was the father Weston’s drunken arrival the night before, yet both Taylor, lawyer friend and probably lover of the mother Ella, and Ellis, a local club-owner to whom Weston owes money for some desert property, have also laid siege to the house and avocado farm on which it sits. So the question becomes who and what will nurture this family, and who and what will destroy it. Ella is intent on selling the house and property in order to effect “change” and “bring a little adventure into [their] lives” (148): she will use the money to free herself, to travel – in a kind of Jamesian echo – to old-world Europe and become cultured, even though it is difficult to imagine her having the interest that she professes in “High art. Paintings. Castles. Fancy food” (144). But she seems to believe that by changing places she can somehow remake herself. Although Weston and Ella’s daughter, Emma, feels certain they would “all be the same people” (148) anywhere else as they are in California, she, too, dearly wants “escape” and is the one who most obviously reinvents or refashions herself: a “fireball” who has refused to be held to socially constructed gender roles in the various jobs she has worked at, she dons Western garb and rides her horse through the town, shooting things up. Sensing that ownership goes finally to the one who controls the money, she determines to enter upon a life of crime, “the perfect self-employment” with its promise of “Just straight profit. Right off the top” (197–98).
Weston has left Ella because of an inability to countenance the notion “that everything would stay the same” (195), and so has looked outside the home for what he thought he could not find there. At various points, he muses about going down to Mexico, though he appears tentative about the possibility of “start[ing] a whole new life” (195); while Wesley talks about desiring to set out for “Alaska, maybe . . . The frontier . . . It’s full of possibilities. It’s undiscovered” (164). If initially Weston brings only artichokes home to feed the family, later he sobers up and assumes the role of nurturer, cooking full breakfasts and doing everyone’s laundry, through which he once again establishes a connection to the family. Wesley, who displays his own nurturing side by bringing the lamb into the kitchen for warmth, is, however, the only one committed to trying to keep the orchard in the family, even to fighting physically for it, since he sees it as a part of what he belongs to and what belongs to him as “offspring” of his father.
Weston’s sense that “It was good to be connected by blood like that. That a family wasn’t just a social thing. It was an animal thing” (187) when he washes the family’s clothes, and Wesley’s shedding of his own blood in trying to reclaim the father’s money from Ellis, are only two among several images of blood in the play, including the blood of the butchered lamb. The earliest mention of blood, in fact, is to the “curse” of Emma’s first menstrual period; Ella greets the occasion with all kinds of crazily comic misinformation, while Emma inappropriately questions Taylor whether her mother still “has blood coming out of her” (153). Ironically, however, Emma’s coming to fertility barely precedes her death in what can be assumed to be a bloody car bombing meant to kill her father. So the bloodline itself becomes a curse: the past catches up with one, the child paying for the sins of the father. The family curse extends both backward to the past and forward into the future: “It goes back and back to tiny little cells and genes. To atoms. To tiny little swimming things making up their minds without us. Plotting in the womb. Before that even. In the air. We’re surrounded with it . . . It goes forward too. We spread it. We pass it on. We inherit it and pass it down and then pass it down again” (174–75). Likening the curse to original sin, Lynda Hart explains that it “controls from within and from without; it is both an internal biological and psychological structure and an insidious invader that penetrates the family’s enclosure.”7
When Wesley urinates in full view of the audience on the poster for his sister’s 4-H project, his mother can see the circumcised penis that, in her eyes, marks him as somehow identified more closely to her own father, his grandfather who was “sensitive,” rather than to Weston and the paternal grandfather known for their “short fuse” (152). Yet Wesley, first by drinking so that he feels himself, whether he likes it or not, “infected” by his father’s and grandfather’s “poison,” and then later by dressing himself in his father’s dirty clothes, seems destined – despite his inklings and intentions to the contrary – to choose to inhabit or repeat his father’s ways rather than break free and emulate his maternal grandfather. And so the curse on this family that has now lost its land – its claim on America and its future – is poised to continue unabated.
A similar strongly deterministic aura – what David J. DeRose calls “the crippling disease of heredity”8 – infects Buried Child, which was first produced at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre on 27 June 1978 and went on to win Shepard the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979. This tale of the return of the prodigal sons and grandson to the ancestral farmstead in Illinois is an even more insistent castigation of the failure of the father to hand on a potentially fruitful, life-giving legacy than Curse of the Starving Class had been. As Dodge the father sits corpse-like and immobile before a staticky, blinking television screen, his wife Halie descends from upstairs dressed completely in black, a mother in mourning at a wake not only for the family, but metaphorically for something much larger. When their grandson Vince returns after six years away, he brings with him his girlfriend, Shelly, the outsider who thinks she is about to enter a world like “a Norman Rockwell cover” (83) of “turkey dinners and apple pie and all that kinda stuff” (91); but Shepard steadily undercuts such mythicizations of the American nuclear family as it appears in popular culture by showing the disparity between the real and the imagined. For this is a family in denial, inhabiting a fetid atmosphere.
Only two of Dodge and Halie’s three sons appear on stage. Tilden, the all-American fullback and Vince’s father, has been gone for twenty years out West, serving time for an unnamed crime in New Mexico, and now roams the property half-crazed. Bradley, who lost a leg in a chain-saw accident and harbors enormous resentment against his father, is vicious and violence-prone, placing his fingers in the traumatized Shelly’s mouth in a simulated act of sexual aggression – only to have his wooden leg later used against himself as a grimly comic weapon. Their third son, the basketball star Ansell, who was Halie’s special pride and joy and evidently the one demonstrating most promise to achieve greatness, died ignominiously in a hotel bedroom rather than as a vaunted war hero. As a drunken Vince – in a visual echo of Weston from Curse – plunges through the screen door, “tearing it off its hinges,” Halie pointedly asks, “What’s happened to the men in this family! Where are the men!” (124). Halie herself has evidently long ago given up on Dodge, and now appears to be having an affair with the effete Father Dewis; if repeated rituals fail to revivify in Curse of the Starving Class, in Buried Child organized religion seems equally moribund and ineffectual.
Dodge denies any affective bond with his family, claiming that “just because people propagate [does not mean] they have to love their offspring[.] You never seen a bitch eat her puppies?” (112). And the details of one particular act of propagation, a child born most likely – though there remains a degree of indeterminacy and unverifiability about the biological father – of an incestuous relation between Halie and Tilden, Dodge attempts to keep hidden, since “It made everything we’d accomplished look like it was nothing. Everything was cancelled out by this one mistake. This one weakness” (124). The existence of the child and its fate are the secrets upon which the play pivots. The play becomes, in part, a commentary about silencing, about limiting discourse, as Dodge attempts to prevent the subversive narrative from coming to speech. Ultimately, however, under persistent questioning from Shelly, the audience discovers not only the secret of the incest at the heart of this family, but that Dodge himself drowned the child, “Just like the runt of the litter,” and buried its remains out back, since “We couldn’t allow that to grow up right in the middle of our lives” (124). After Dodge confesses and wills his inheritance to Vince, he significantly falls into stammering and then silence.
The act of incest, sexuality turned in on itself, not only is replicated in the circular rather than linear movement of the play, which opens with Halie addressing Dodge and ends with her talking to him again, though now in the person of Vince, about the rain; but it images as well the (grand)son’s inability to break free and change – a determinism linked to heredity. The unseen pictures that adorn the upstairs walls are traces of the family “heritage” with which Vince wishes to reconnect. That his reflected image later “became his father’s face. Same bones. Same eyes. Same nose. Same breath. And his father’s face changed to his grandfather’s face. And it went on like that . . . Clear on back to faces I’d never seen before but still recognized” (130) suggests a tale about the hold of the past upon the present, of sin and guilt and retribution as inexorable as any in Greek drama.
When, near the end of Buried Child, Shelly reveals that she knows the family has a secret, Dodge remarks, “She thinks she’s going to get it out of us. She thinks she’s going to uncover the truth of the matter. Like a detective or something” (122). For the audience, his response becomes self-referential, acting as a metacritical commentary since it undercuts their own expectations of being provided with an unambiguous answer, and in that sense helps deconstruct the realistic form with all its built-in contrivances and artificialities as it moves toward a tidy resolution.9 Partly because Shepard’s plays refuse to provide the definitive sense of closure that audiences traditionally experience from dramatic realism, they invite multilayered readings – as allegorizations of experience, as symbolic structures, as mythic constructs. Built into both Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child are extensive and highly visual patterns of ritual action; the similarity of these movements in the two plays is brought into focus when, at the end of each, the mother (Ella, Halie) identifies the son or grandson (Wesley, Vince) with the absent or dead father or grandfather (Weston, Dodge).
The ritual actions – the first drawn from biblical theology, the second from anthropology – in each case might be termed “religious” in nature, in at least a loose sense of that term, since they center on death and rebirth. In Curse, the ritual in question is first narrated by the father and then later acted out by the son. In Act 3, Weston, who earlier has been unkempt, drunk, and violent, appears clean shaven, sober, and otherwise chastened. In a lengthy monologue spoken to Wesley, he recounts taking a peaceful walk at dawn around the avocado orchard during which he experienced a kind of epiphany, suddenly being struck that he “actually was the owner. That somehow it was me and I was actually the one walking on my own piece of land. And that gave me a great feeling” (186). He then discarded his old dirty clothes and “Just walked through the whole damn house in [his] birthday suit . . . It was like peeling off a whole person.” He followed this with a hot bath, and then a cold bath, and then a hearty farm breakfast cooked from the unexpected profusion of groceries in the refrigerator that came as a surprise, “Just like somebody knew I was going to be reborn this morning or something . . . Like I was coming back to my life after a long time a’ being away” (186–87). He then, as was mentioned earlier, washes everyone’s clothes, which engenders a feeling of closeness and interconnectedness.
Several pages later, however, we discover why this apparently cleansing and redemptive ritual does not have the desired effect of restoring a renewed patriarch to his family or bringing a “paradise” regained “for a young person” like Wesley to the farm. For Weston believes that simply by declaring himself “REBORN! I’M A WHOLE NEW PERSON NOW!” he has achieved his salvation; he no longer needs to “feel guilty . . . because I don’t have to pay for my past now!” (193). Yet Shepard apparently rejects Weston’s brand of painless atonement theology as a too easy escape from the ramifications of one’s actions: Weston must still “pay” for his past frailties and “sins,” not only by the loss of the land but also by the death of his daughter who perishes as his substitute in the car bombing intended for him.
Throughout the play, the son Wesley has always been closely connected with the lamb that he first brings onto the stage in Act 1. After hearing of his father’s ritual purification, he literally acts it out, and then expands upon or embellishes it in an almost liturgical manner. Following his father’s request that he bathe and wash the blood off his face from trying to retrieve Weston’s money, Wesley goes off and later returns to the kitchen looking “dazed,” “completely naked, his hair wet” (190). He then takes the lamb from its pen and exits. When he enters again moments later wearing Weston’s castoff “baseball cap, overcoat, and tennis shoes,” he reports that he has “butchered” the lamb for “some food,” and then “crosses quickly to the refrigerator, opens it, and starts pulling out all kinds of food and eating it ravenously” (192). The biblical echoes are many. In the Old Testament, the obedient Abraham is willing to sacrifice his son Isaac but, at the behest of an angel, slaughters the lamb instead; also, the blood of the lamb is smeared on the doors of the faithful Jews going out of Egypt as a protection against the angel taking their firstborn sons. In the New Testament, Christ, prefigured by Isaac, is the submissive lamb who sheds his blood on the cross for the sins of mankind, after giving himself under the auspices of bread and wine to his disciples to be eaten in communion; also, Christ becomes the Good Shepherd tending and watching over his flock of lambs, who are the new faithful ones.10
Yet even though Wesley imitates his father’s ritual cleansing in hot and cold baths and dons his clothing, and is, in a manner of speaking, washed in the blood of the lamb as the gospel hymn triumphantly proclaims, the ritual proves ineffectual: “it didn’t work. Nothing happened” (196). Wesley thought of himself as the lamb being sacrificed to bring salvation – not only did he have “the lamb’s blood dripping down [his] arms,” but “for a second [he] thought it was [himself] bleeding” as well; yet simultaneously he felt that “a part of [Weston] was growing on [him] . . . taking over,” so that he sensed he was “going backwards” (196, 198). The sacrifice was not efficacious; and what should have been a sacrament of communion became instead a grotesque gorging that did not satisfy the spiritual hunger. The last image we see of the lamb is of its skinned carcass when the henchmen Slater and Emerson enter, commenting that it “Looks like somebody’s afterbirth” (199). And Ella addresses Wesley as if she were speaking to Weston the husband and father rather than to the son, signaling that Wesley’s regression, as Phyllis Randall also argues, is now complete – although Bert Cardullo proposes that “the play is open-ended” in its “judgment” of whether Wesley “has truly learned anything and will succeed where his father failed.”11
If, at first glance, the rituals in Curse of the Starving Class might seem potentially salvific – although perhaps none too subtle – those in Buried Child are distinctly rites of burial or entail a robbing of potency. In his article entitled “Sam Shepard’s Buried Child: the Ironic Use of Folklore,” Thomas Nash locates the play within what Northrop Frye terms the ironic mode, since it begins in realism but turns increasingly toward ritual, reenacting in modern dress the sacrificial death of the Corn King, here represented by Dodge, and the rebirth of the new King in the person of Vince, Tilden’s surviving son. And yet Nash neglects to point out the most basic irony of all: the new god is as impotent and as unable to bring renewal as the old.12 Shepard punctuates the action visually with well over half a dozen ritual burials of Dodge, whose body Halie describes as “decomposing” and “putrid”: Tilden puts the corn in Dodge’s lap, later he covers his father with a blanket, and finally he places the corn husks on him; Bradley tosses Shelly’s rabbit-fur coat over Dodge; both Halie and Vince place a rose or roses on him; and Vince, too, covers him with a blanket. And in an image that suggests removal of potency, Bradley clips off his father’s hair, cutting his scalp in the process. Like Weston in Curse, Dodge resists seeing any moral connection between past actions and present consequences. Denying any resemblance between himself and “Somebody who looks just like [he] used to look” in the gallery of family photographs displayed on the upstairs wall, Dodge claims, “That isn’t me! That never was me!” (111); furthermore, he professes an inability to “know about the past” and the desirability of making believe it “never happened.”
After Vince returns from his night-long drive across Illinois, during which he saw reflected in the windshield not only his own face but perceived it changing into that of his father and of his grandfather and of all his ancestors “Clear on back to faces I’d never seen before but still recognized. Still recognized the bones underneath” (130), he lies down and assumes exactly the same posture of his grandfather who is now dead. Rejecting change, he either cannot or will not flee from the pattern of the past which he has beheld so clearly. And when Tilden enters bearing the remains of the dead baby wrapped in muddied cloth that he has exhumed from the garden, that skeleton of the half-brother becomes linked with the “mummy’s face” Vince glimpsed in the windshield. As Halie speaks from upstairs, she talks as if to Dodge, though she is heard now only by Vince, remarking that what is sown and washed in by the rain will be reaped, and assigning a cause to the growth of the crop: “Maybe it’s the sun” (132).
The pun in the curtain line on “sun/son” alludes directly to Ibsen’s Ghosts, reminding audiences not only of a source for the realistic modern family drama structured around a secret that is only gradually revealed, but also of the earlier playwright’s delineation of the sins of the fathers being visited upon the children.13 The remains of the buried son have literally fertilized the earth in a grimly Gothic manner (perhaps appropriately calling to mind the line from T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land asking whether “that corpse you planted in your garden has begun . . . to sprout”).14 The other “son” Vince returns and the sun breaks through, yet neither his homecoming nor the sunrise, nor Halie’s bright yellow dress that has replaced her earlier black of mourning, betokens resurrection or augurs renewal. What Bradley has called a “paradise” remains firmly a postlapsarian, fallen world, just as the play’s ending, whatever signs there may be to the contrary, remains heavily ironic, dark rather than bright.
While Shepard asserts that his primary focus rests on the family unit and has been known to disclaim any interest in social concerns, stating that “the American social scene . . . totally bores me,”15 the families in Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child are so rooted in a particular time and place that it is difficult to see them as divorced from a larger political canvas. And the plays are filled with verbal and visual imagery to support this view. The New West of the California avocado farm in Curse is fast becoming a kind of concrete frontier. After Emma puts on her Western outfit, she mounts her horse and rides it down the freeway, and eventually is arrested for shooting up the Alibi Club. Both Weston and Ella are engaged in making separate deals that would sell out the orchard land and the desert plot to speculators and developers, who will turn them into vast suburbias, replicating those anonymous tracts back east characterized by their egalitarian sameness. Weston calls this “a zombie invasion” (163), and later Wesley rails against the money men who “moved in on us like a creeping disease. We didn’t even notice” (194). The father here, like Willy Loman in Miller’s Death of a Salesman, has bought unquestioningly into the ethic of consumerism that sees buying and owning things as a guarantee of future success; but living a generation later, he not only borrows to buy, but uses “invisible money . . . plastic shuffling back and forth” (195) to pay for his purchases.
This decidedly anti-capitalistic strain, with its implied criticism of a warped myth of masculinity that puts the attainment of money and power over providing emotional sustenance for one’s family, links up in Curse with an exposure of a myth of nationhood that pits the militarily strong against the weak and prides itself on dominance and conquest and oftentimes false heroics. When Weston drives back to the farm in his Packard the night before the action begins and drunkenly breaks down the front door, his son is lying in bed staring up at his model airplane collection (“My P-39. My Messerschmitt. My Jap Zero” [137]) and connects the automobile with foreign reconnaissance planes ready to invade. Later, Weston himself likens the sensation of macho power and destructiveness – the feeling of explosiveness in his blood – with the heady thrill of his days in the war when he “flew giant machines in the air. Giants! Bombers. What a sight” (172). And as he contemplates various acts of gruesome violence against the wheeler-dealers from whom he bought worthless desert land, he blames the military for giving him practice in and the dulled conscience needed for killing: “I was in the war. I know how to kill . . . I’ve done it before. It’s no big deal. You just make an adjustment. You convince yourself it’s all right . . . It’s easy. You just slaughter them” (171). He repeats the image of the American B-49 bombers at the beginning of Act 3, when, talking to the penned lamb, he tells the story about cheering on the giant eagle (traditional symbol of America) that swoops down out of the sky, demonstrating some kind of “downright suicidal antics” (184) like a flyer’s crazy exploits, to gobble up the ram testicles that Weston has thrown up on the roof after castrating the lambs. Since the testicles are “remnants of manlihood,” might this not be seen as America destroying not only its supposed enemies but sacrificing its young manhood in the process as well? When Ella, addressing Wesley whom she misidentifies as Weston, narrates the story’s conclusion at the end of the play, she tells of the eagle with a cat in its mouth engaged in a mutually destructive battle that devours both predator and victim alike. And when Emerson and Slater blow up the Packard, already equated with American hegemony and its imperialist agenda, they use explosives developed by the Irish, bringing to mind still another instance of colonial oppression.
A similar quite explicit echo of America’s Manifest Destiny occurs in Buried Child when Vince returns to the farm in Act 3 to claim his patrimony, drunkenly breaking bottles while singing the Marine hymn (“From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli. We will fight our country’s battles on the land and on the sea” [125]), shouting out to an “imaginary army” as if across a battlefield and making a “whistling sound” like bombs falling. The other central image of America at war comes through discussion of Ansell – to hear his mother talk, the youngest and smartest and most promising of Dodge and Halie’s three sons – who became a soldier, not to die on a battlefield but in a motel room instead. If we are to believe Halie’s bigoted ravings, he fell victim of the Mafia after marrying a Catholic. Now, Halie talks with Father Dewis about raising a memorial to him in the town that would pay homage to him as high school athlete and untested and therefore unproven soldier, “A big, tall statue with a basketball in one hand and a rifle in the other” (73). Prowess at athletics and war become, then, the two ways that manliness is measured in America, yet in Buried Child both emerge as more hollow than heroic. For, as Halie bemoans, athletic exploits that at one time promoted moral authority and maturity have become “More vicious,” bloodier and debased, with sports figures regularly “allow[ing] themselves to run amuck. Drugs and women” (117).
If, on the level of familial guilt, Buried Child exposes the way in which the patriarchy tries to impose order by silencing transgressive sexuality, on the level of national guilt the play, as Stephen Bottoms hints,16 may well be suggestive of a kind of historical amnesia, through which an unresolved historical event has been repressed. Halie makes this connection explicit when she remarks that “the smell” from “the stench of sin in [the] house” (116) arises not only from personal sin (the incest) but from public actions (military engagements) as well. Though assuredly not as concretely and tactilely presented as the skeleton, the nation’s guilty past – be it racism, or religious and ethnic prejudice, or, as appears most likely given the time frame of the play and Ansell’s involvement in the military, the Vietnam War – comes back to haunt the present. What might be seen as its neo-Gothic elements – such things as exhumed skeletons of dead babies – do not necessarily sit easily upon the traditional structure of dramatic realism; they might even, in fact, be seen as an attempt to subvert it by making it less shackled and more inclusive. But the narrative that Shepard contains within his now expanded form might itself also be equally subversive, giving voice through resonant use of ritual and symbol to destructive and frightening aspects of American society that have long been silenced. The unspeakable act that Dodge fights to keep unspoken can, finally, no longer be suppressed. Through plays such as Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child, Shepard might ultimately be signaling the way in which contemporary American drama itself refuses to be bounded any longer in either content or style. It is a project in which he has helped lead the way, by wedding radical ambitions to traditional form.
1 Henry I. Schvey, “A Worm in the Wood: the Father–Son Relationship in the Plays of Sam Shepard,” Modern Drama, 36.1 (March 1993): 12–26.
2 Charles R. Lyons, “Shepard’s Family Trilogy and the Conventions of Modern Realism,” in Leonard Wilcox (ed.), Rereading Shepard: Contemporary Critical Essays on the Plays of Sam Shepard (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 115–30.
3 For a discussion of Shepard’s appropriation of Gothic elements, see Stephen J. Bottoms, The Theatre of Sam Shepard: States of Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 159–60.
4 Margot Gayle Backus, The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 242.
5 All references to Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child are from Sam Shepard: Seven Plays (New York: Bantam Books, 1981). Page references in parentheses within the text are to this edition.
6 Bert Cardullo, “Sam Shepard’s Use of the Monologue in Curse of the Starving Class,” Notes on Modern American Literature, 9.2 (Fall 1995): item 11.
7 Lynda Hart, Sam Shepard’s Metaphorical Stages (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987), 71.
8 David J. DeRose, Sam Shepard (New York: Twayne, 1992), 108.
9 For a subtle treatment of Shepard’s deconstruction of realism, see Charles Lyons’s “Text as Agent in Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class,” Comparative Drama, 24.1 (Spring 1990): 24–33; and for a consideration of Shepard’s realism as postmodern pastiche, see Rodney Simard’s Postmodern Drama: Contemporary Playwrights in America and Britain (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), 78–79.
10 Lyons points out many of these biblical patterns, but with a somewhat different emphasis: “Shepard’s Family Trilogy,” 127.
11 Phyllis Randall, “Adapting to Reality: Language in Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class,” in Kimball King (ed.), Sam Shepard: A Casebook (New York: Garland Press, 1988), 132; Bert Cardullo, “Wesley’s Role in Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class,” Notes on Modern American Literature, 8.1 (Spring–Summer 1984): item 6.
12 Both Hart (Sam Shepard’s Metaphorical Stages, 86) and Simard (Postmodern Drama, 90) arrive at a conclusion similar to that of Thomas Nash, “Sam Shepard’s Buried Child: the Ironic Use of Folklore,” Modern Drama, 26.4 (1983): 486–91.
13 For a fuller discussion of these parallels, see my “Ghosts of Ibsen in Shepard’s Buried Child,” Notes on Modern American Literature, 10.1 (1986): item 3 (unpaginated). Several later critics, including David DeRose (Sam Shepard, 108), also explore this connection.
14 Simard considers Buried Child “a postmodern dramatization of The Wasteland” (Postmodern Drama, 87), while Stephen J. Bottoms examines it for its allusions to the myth of the Fisher King in The Theatre of Sam Shepard: States of Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 178.
15 Quoted in DeRose, Sam Shepard, 94.
16 Bottoms, Theatre of Sam Shepard, 176.