Shepard's Later Plays example essay topic

Fourteen Years of Change in Sam Shepard's Six Plays Sam Shepard wrote his first two plays, Cowboys and Rock Garden at the age of twenty. Three years later, in 1966 his plays Chicago, Icarus's Mother and Red Cross won the Village Voice Obie Award for distinguished Playwriting. In 1968 Forensic and the Navigators and Melodrama Play won him his third Obie. In this paper I will focus on three of these plays, Chicago, Icarus's Mother, and Melodrama Play, and compare them with some of the plays he wrote in the late seventies and early eighties, namely Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child and True West. The first group of plays I will talk about all consist of only one act. They are highly experimental both in language and content.

They have a certain feeling of immediacy and it is obvious that Sam Shepard most probably wrote them at one sitting and did not change anything he wrote down. Like William S. Burroughs, one of the most important names of the Beat Generation, Shepard blended different elements of popular culture, like youth culture and science fiction in his works. He used rock and roll culture in Melodrama Play and created a dys topic science fictional paranoia with the airplane whose pilot, the characters thought, might see them like some kind of a "Big Brother" and even heightened that science fictional atmosphere when he made the plane crash and cause a nuclear explosion as seen in the picture below. Yalc " ynkaya 2 There is also an obvious influence of William S. Burroughs's cut up technique, a kind of verbal collage, which he first used in his notorious work Naked Lunch, as well as Jack Kerouac's jazzy improvisation - as seen in On the Road, which he wrote in three weeks without stopping - in Sam Shepard's experimental language and structure, and the stream-of-consciousness-like immediacy and coincidental ity of his earlier plays. He later says that he decided to use what he learnt from jazz musicians as a playwright. His words do not wait for the meaning when they go out of the character's mouths.

Shepard says that plays are not born out of ideas, ideas are born out of plays (Shepard, Toplu Oyunlar'y 1, 10). He uses these techniques in the long monologues of the characters when they enter a state of half insanity. In Chicago, which seems to be about nothing at all, the major character Stu who stays in a bathtub in most of the play, tells his view of life in a hysterical way, only interrupted from time to time by the other characters, who, according to Ralph Cook, the director of the first production, only exist in Stu's imagination. To give an example from Stu's monologues (his friends are going to fishing apparently. And he blames them not to be brave enough to go fishing on windy weathers. ): ...

A bunch a'cowards. They " ll wait for it to calm. It " ll warm up and they " ll come in with their sails down and their nets hanging over the edge... They " ll all be horny for the young virgins that walk the beaches... Then they " ll come onto the land and start screwing everything in sight... Once they get the taste for it they won't stop.

The boats will be there because everybody's screwing... Years go by and they " re still screwing. Old sailors with bald heads and old virgins with gray hair. The whole beach littered with bodies on top of each other...

Then they build a house... It's one house with one room and a fire pit in the middle... They " re very warm inside... Pitch black and no sound... They start screaming all together because they can't breathe (Shepard 19 - 21).

Icarus's Mother is about five people having a picnic and waiting for a fireworks show. There is an airplane flying above them, which is like a sixth character in the play. They shout at it, talk to it and the women even make a striptease for the pilot and he makes replies to them. At the end of the plane the airplane crashes and one of the characters, Frank, talk about it as a kind of fireworks show. Yalc " ynkaya 3 Sam Shepard used all his talent in improvising long monologues in this play. Almost all the characters have parts where they speak endlessly as if in a trance.

The most effective one is Frank's final monologue, describing the crash of the plane in a very festive way: Boy, oh boy, oh boy, oh boy. You guys. You guys have missed the fireworks altogether. You should have seen - this is something to behold, this is. This is the nineteenth wonder of the Western, international world brought to you by Nabisco Cracker corporation for the preservation of historians and for historians to go by. This is...

To happen under private conditions on sand. To be thinking about killing your baby boy or your baby girl or your wife or your wife's sister or your pet dog (57) Melodrama Play is about a pseudo rock star, who stole a song from his brother, called 'Prisoners, Get up out of Your Homemade Beds. ' The song immediately became a hit. However Duke Dur gens, the pseudo rock star who, like his brother Drake and his friend Cisco, is stereo typified with long untidy hair and sunglasses, is unable to make a new hit song. So he decides to cut his hair and buy a suit because he says he has made a love song. His manager Floyd brings a guardian, Peter, to guard him, his brother Drake and Cisco while they make a new song.

Peter kills Duke's girlfriend Dana and hits Duke in the head. Then he asks Drake and Cisco what they think about him. He does not open the door to Floyd's men who come to take away Dana's body and gets into trouble with Floyd. Drake suggests opening the door while waiting Floyd to come.

Then he starts making the new song. The play ends this way. (It might be one of the first works of art that focuses on the life of the rock star in a critical and satirical way. It is easy to find traces of these plays in Pink Floyd's albums Wish You Were Here and The Wall. Moreover as it is "a melodrama with music" it might have influenced other rock musicals of that period.) Shepard started to use his talent for the improvised monologues gradually less and less. There is only one in Melodrama Play, the part where Peter tells a story about a man whom he saw in the street one day, who had nothing where his eyes should be and who crawled besides Peter for a while no matter how fast he walked.

We see that he used this technique even less in the seventies and eighties. He employed it considerably more in Curse of the Starving Class (1976), as in the part where Wesley tells how he felt his father coming and going, than he used it in Yalc " ynkaya 4 Melodrama Play. However, in Buried Child (1978) there is only one such speech, which is where Vince tells how he sees his father and grandfathers under his skin in his bones, and there is not even one in True West. This shows that Shepard gradually dropped his improvised technique and started to write in more conventional ways. While Shepard left his experimental writing style behind in the sixties, the plays he wrote in that period prepared the themes he used in his later plays. The tragedies of the family, abandoning fathers and Western ideals (His use of the Western and some improbable actions like getting up and going after being shot in the head as Dana does in Melodrama Play, echoes, in a way another Beat writer Richard Brautigan.

They started to write nearly at the same period, so it is possible that they might have influenced each other.) There are indefinite traces of these in Icarus's Mother and Melodrama Play. In Icarus's Mother, the airplane - probably a military one - which crashes at the end might be symbolizing Shepard's father who was in the army and left the family, thus he failed, crashed, in a way. The airplane is something that Shepard uses repeatedly in his plays. Wesley, for example, in Curse of the Starving Class, had model planes in his room and his father was a war veteran who thought about going to Mexico and leaving the family.

The father figure who leaves the family is also seen in Buried Child and True West. Tilden, in the former one went to Mexico and Austin and Lee's father left them and went to the desert to live. The father figure who goes to the desert is also available in Melodrama Play, the old man - a father figure maybe - who has no eyes asks him to read the address written on the metal tag on his neck. The tag read "Arizona" and the old man starts to go to the direction of Arizona. The fact that he has no eyes might mean that Shepard blames his father of being blind as he left the family. The violence in his later plays, like Austin's trying to strangle his brother Lee, in True West, Vince's attacking the house with bottles in Buried Child, Wesley's slaughtering the lamb, can also be traced back to his earlier plays.

However the violence in these early plays might be called "cartoon violence" as Th " ukr an Y"uce l says in her introduction to Sam Shepard's Toplu Oyunlar'y 1 (19). In Chicago Stu and Joy throw biscuits to each other and in Melodrama Play all the characters who were Yalc " ynkaya 5 beaten by Peter, even Dana who was killed, get up and go as if nothing has happened to them. Those earlier plays have that casual air and they are essentially humorous, because Shepard did not start to deal with such serious subjects as the institution of family. The characters were generally friends and settings are comfortable places like the bathroom or a picnic place in the park. The fact that they are short adds up to their being casual. However, Shepard's later plays became more and more serious, except True West maybe, turning into tragedies of grotesque families, even having a certain gothic quality.

The "curse" is in the air. Shepard's dramatic vision - improbably realistic - in those later plays is still unconventional but he applies more conventional dramatic forms and language. As these later plays became more conventional than his earlier plays, they began to be appreciated and admired more than the earlier ones. They were long, serious, clearly comprehensible and gave the favorite message of the critics, "American Dream's turning into a nightmare".

As a result Shepard won the Pulitzer prize for Buried Child. Jacques Levy, the director of the First production of Red Cross, says in "Notes on Red Cross"Sam is more interested in 'doing's something to audiences than in saying something to them" (Shepard, Chicago and Other Plays, 98) That was the case in the sixties, however as his plays became more conventional, it seems that Shepard started to be more concerned with what his plays say to the audience.