February 6th, 2010
Sam Shepard: the Workaholic Cowboy of American Theater
Sam Shepard has created “one of the most prolific and original careers in the American theater,” wrote Kevin Berger in a 2001 Salon profile of the playwright, director, author and actor.
Shepard the playwright is having a New York Mamet moment with three plays being produced this winter. I’ve seen his most recent play “Ages of the Moon,” which is running at the Linda Gross Theater in Chelsea, and I plan to check out the Athena Theatre production of “True West” as well as Ethan Hawke’s revival of “A Lie of the Mind.” Both of them are playing at Theatre Row on 42nd Street, hoping to get picked up for a Broadway run.
Hawke told The New York Times in an interview: “I moved to New York in ‘88, and the air was still very much alive with people talking about the ‘85 production. That was an “actors’ actor” production. People were production. That was an “actors’ actor” production. People were always doing scenes from this play in acting class. I loved the play, and I just hoped that nobody would revive it until I was old enough to direct it.”
Add to the New York productions current performances of Shepard plays in London, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh and Tuscon and you have a pretty good idea of his influence and enormous productivity. Here’s Berger again in Salon on Shepard’s obsessive work discipline:
“In New York in the ’60s, Shepard lived with the son of the great jazz bassist, Charlie Mingus Jr., who had also grown up in Duarte. ‘He never stopped writing,’ Mingus said of the times when Shepard wasn’t reading Beckett, Pirandello, Edward Albee and Harold Pinter. Shepard ‘would walk into a room and close the door, with the clacking of the typewriter and all. Then he would come out with a play in a box that the paper came in, a ream of paper.’
“Dennis Ludlow, who helped build horse fences and a barn on Shepard’s small Northern Californian ranch during the ’70s (and who played supporting roles in Magic Theatre productions of “Buried Child” and “Fool for Love”), tells me his most indelible memory of Shepard is of the restless playwright writing in a pocket-size notebook. ‘He was always writing down what he heard in bars, stores, everywhere,’ says Ludlow. Later, one of Shepard’s playwriting classes presented him with a carton of the tiny writing pads.”