Sam

Sam Shepard and
the Aesthetics of
Performance
WHAT IS THEATRE?
Edited by Ann C. Hall
Given the changing nature of audiences, entertainment, and media, the role of the-
atre in twenty-first century culture is changing. The WHAT IS THEATRE? series
brings new and innovative work in literary, cultural, and dramatic criticism into
conversation with established theatre texts and trends, in order to offer fresh inter-
pretation and highlight new or undervalued artists, works, and trends.
ANN C. HALL has published widely in the area of theatre and film studies, is presi-
dent of the Harold Pinter Society, and is an active member in the Modern Language
Association. In addition to her book A Kind of Alaska: Women in the Plays of O’Neill,
Pinter, and Shepard, she has edited a collection of essays, Making the Stage: Essays on
Theatre, Drama, and Performance and a book on the various stage, film, print, and
television versions of Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera.
Published by Palgrave Macmillan:

Theatre, Communication, Critical Realism
By Tobin Nellhaus
Staging Modern American Life: Popular Culture in the Experimental Theatre of
Millay, Cummings, and Dos Passos
By Thomas Fahy
Authoring Performance: The Director in Contemporary Theatre
By Avra Sidiropoulou
Readings in Performance and Ecology
Edited by Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May
Theatre and War: Theatrical Responses since 1991
By Jeanne Colleran
(Re)Constructing Maternal Performance in Twentieth-Century American Drama
By L. Bailey McDaniel
Sam Shepard and the Aesthetics of Performance
By Emma Creedon
Sam Shepard and
the Aesthetics of
Performance
EMMA CREEDON
SAM SHEPARD AND THE AESTHETICS OF PERFORMANCE
Copyright © Emma Creedon, 2015.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-53057-8
All rights reserved.
First published in 2015 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
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this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-70857-4 ISBN 978-1-137-52741-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137527417
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Creedon, Emma, 1984–
Sam Shepard and the aesthetics of performance / by Emma Creedon.
pages cm.—(What is theatre?)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-349-70857-4 (alk. paper)
1. Shepard, Sam, 1943–—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.
PS3569.H394Z6685 2015
812.54—dc23 2015004658
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: July 2015
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Michael Byrne
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xi
1. Surrealism and Sam Shepard’s Early Plays: 1964–1967 1

2. Myth, Ritual, and a Search for Selfhood: 1969–1972 21
3. Surrealism and Sam Shepard’s Family Plays:
Representing Gender 43
4. A Comparative Study of Sam Shepard’s Angel City and
Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un chien andalou 79
5. Tongues, Savage/Love, and The War in Heaven: Angel’s
Monologue: Joseph Chaikin and Sam Shepard
in Collaboration 105
6. States of Shock and Simpatico: Performances of Waste 135
7. Conclusion: Through the 1990s and Beyond 163
Notes 171
Index 195
Acknowledgments
I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to the staff at the

Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, for assisting me
in my consultation of the Magic Theatre Archives. Additionally, I would
like to thank Professor Rush Rehm for inviting me to speak at the Stanford
Summer Theatre annual symposium in July 2012 at Stanford University.
This trip would not have been possible without the generous support of
University College Dublin’s Seed Funding Scheme, and I thank the college
wholeheartedly.
I would also like to extend my heartfelt thanks to the following: Jimmy
Fay for being so kind and so generous with his time, the Signature Theatre in
New York, particularly the Executive Director Erika Mallin and the Artistic
Assistant Kathryn Kozlark, and Shepard’s agent Judy Boals. I would also
like to thank the members of my PhD doctoral panel Dr. Ron Callan and
Professor Frank McGuinness for their invaluable advice. Equally, Professor
Steven Watt has been incredibly generous in endorsing this research and
was instrumental in the publication of this book. I would also like to thank
Professor Ann C. Hall, the series editor of this collection, for her enthusiasm
and commendation. Furthermore, I could not have completed this book
without the vast knowledge, the unwavering support, and the guidance of
Professor Anthony Roche. Thank you.
I am privileged to have the most generous and supportive family and
thank you for all that you have done for me. I am eternally indebted to you
in so many ways. Finally, I would like to thank my husband Michael Byrne
for his incredible encouragement and love. This book is for us.
Introduction
Reality is always suspect in a Sam Shepard play. Reviewers of

Shepard’s work readily employ the term “surreal,” yet academic criticism
has thus far failed to consider the implications of this expression and its
subsequent connections to the visual. Nor have there been any attempts
to situate Shepard’s plays within the context of the aesthetic and formal
principles of Surrealism as a visual artistic movement. In a 1984 article
for The New York Times, for instance, Michiko Kakutani associated the
hallucinatory quality of Shepard’s dramatic images with the surreal: “[H]e
has put forth a vision of America that resonates with the power of leg-
end. Surreal images bloom in his work—men turn into lizards; carrots and
potatoes grow miraculously in a barren garden; an eagle carries a cat off,
screaming into the sky—and strange, almost hallucinatory transactions
occur.”1 Elsewhere, Shepard’s plays have typically been assigned to the cat-
egories of the “American Gothic,” “Magic Realism,” or “Super Realism.”
Bernard Weiner described the perceived “reality” of Buried Child in 1978
as if “Grant Wood’s American Gothic family were perceived while on a bad
acid trip.”2 Susan Harris Smith, on the other hand, has deemed Shepard’s
theatre “sur-Natural.”3 Bonnie Marranca distinguishes an “open realism”4
in his plays, which she defines thus:
Shepard’s open realism exists in a dramatic field composed of events not

scenes, of explosions and contradictions not causes, of the overall effect,
of gestalts. It is characterized by disruption not continuity, by simultane-
ity not succession; it values anomalies not analogies. In other words, it cap-
tures a reality that disregards realism’s supposition of the rational. It praises
the differences and irregularities between things, and can accommodate the
simultaneity of experiences in expanded time/space. Consciousness as subject
matter takes precedence over the machinations of plot.5
It seems that Shepard’s dramatic landscape eludes categorization and ges-

tures toward a new figuration of realism. Shepard’s writing relies on a coarse
realism, as I will discuss; yet Marranca’s identification of contradiction,
xii Introduction
simultaneity, the irrational and a focus on consciousness in his work all have
obvious connotations of a Surrealist premise. His plays admittedly elude
rigid categorization, yet academic criticism has been consistently reluctant
to consider them under a Surrealist lens. One of the reasons for this may
lie in the fact that an acknowledgment of the Surrealism in Shepard’s work
jars with the mythologization of his public persona, as the enfant terrible
cowboy poet of the American stage. Shepard is constantly marketed as a
Western Rodeo Rider, an image that he personally continues to endorse;
in an interview with GQ Magazine in 2012, Shepard reveals that he still
refuses to use a computer, the Internet, or an email address and that his
children ridicule him as a result: “They just kind of laugh at me, like I
fell off the horse a long time ago.”6 Yet the experimentalism of the earlier
work and the theatrical “Off-Off Broadway” scene in which he honed his
craft suggest an attempt to contribute to the avant-garde theatrical canon
rather than passively carry on the mantle of the naturalistic American
twentieth-century dramatic tradition. Furthermore, his “family” plays
rely on a veneer of realism and the audience’s familiarity with preced-
ing Oedipal domestic dramas, which Shepard, then, actively exploits and
rejects. In this mode, these plays indicate a sophisticated deconstruction of
American realism and a manipulation of dramatic conventions; moreover,
the incantatory functioning of his dramatic language reveals the influ-
ence of Antonin Artaud. This, along with his long admiration for and
textual references to Samuel Beckett’s plays, positions him as a dramatist
working within a distinct European tradition of what Martin Esslin has
termed Absurdism. Additionally, an analysis of the plays in the context
of the theoretical and practical applications of Surrealism addresses the
gap in existing research in relation to the visual theatricality and formal
elements of these works. Such a reconsideration of Shepard’s work contra-
dicts implied accusations that his plays, in their largely thematic concerns
with the mythic American frontier, are inaccessible to a non-American
audience.
Shepard describes the artistic environment of New York in the 1960s,
where he spent his formative years as a playwright, as a ripe arena for artistic
pursuit similar to “a carnival, a Mardi Gras—it made you feel you could do
anything [ . . . ]. Art wasn’t a career or anything intellectual—it was a much
more playful thing, a way to inhabit a life.” 7 This book explores in part
how Shepard’s early experiences working with The Living Theatre, and his
long-term artistic relationship with Joseph Chaikin, fortifies his links with
Surrealism. Chapter 1, therefore, explores how his early plays stem from exer-
cises in the deliverance of uninhibited, uncensored thought. Shepard’s first
play, Cowboys, which premiered with The Rock Garden in 1964, stems from
his experience of New York City with his roommate Charles Mingus III,
Introduction xiii
the son of the famous jazz bassist. Stephen J. Bottoms describes how they
availed themselves of the freedom that New York offered:
[They] became a recognizable double act around the city, by running around
“playing cowboys.” This involved, they claim, riding on the hoods of taxis,
dodging buses, and introducing themselves to total strangers in adopted
comic voices: they would play any character or attitude which came to mind,
in a kind of ongoing improvisation game.8
Thus, Shepard’s anarchistic approach to life as an “ongoing improvisation

game,” while “playing cowboys” suggests his artistic modus operandi, one
that refuses to bow to dramatic convention and introduces a concern with
the performative nature of masculinity.
The second chapter focuses on the plays written over a three-year period
from 1969 to 1972, notably, The Unseen Hand (1969), Operation Sidewinder,
Shaved Splits (1970), Cowboy Mouth (1971, cowritten with Patti Smith),
The Mad Dog Blues (1971), and The Tooth of Crime (1972). An analysis of
the characters’ search for selfhood in these plays reveals the functioning
of both figurative and literal masks in a manner similar to the employment
of masks in Alfred Jarry’s Theatre. The influence of the dramatic theories of
Artaud highlights the surreal undercurrent of their conception. Surrealism
also emerges in the production of these plays, which reveals a surreal sce-
nography; the abundance and incongruous juxtaposition of “objects,” for
instance, invites comparisons with the Surrealist Object, le objet surréaliste,
closely related to the glorification of the “brand” in Pop Art. Moreover,
Bataille’s writings on the absence of myth from the 1940s offer a new means
of contextualizing Shepard’s resurrection of ritual in the creation of myth in
the context of Surrealism.
Shepard’s treatment of femininity in the vast body of his dramatic writ-
ing has continued to be a contentious issue for critics. Focusing on Shepard’s
“family” plays of the late 1970s and early 1980s, chapter 3 argues that in
both these dramatic texts and in Surrealist art, females emerge as con-
structive agents of rationality that heighten the realism of their backdrop
and consequently underscore the fragmented subjectivity of masculinity.
Shepard’s male characters may abuse women, but ultimately they do so to
their own detriment. Similarly, in Surrealist art and photography, and par-
ticularly in Hans Bellmer’s photographs of dolls from the 1930s, the female
form is subject to abuse and sexual exploitation. However, these depictions
also work to critique the cultural male-dominated environment that sanc-
tioned them. This chapter will counter accusations of misogyny directed
at the playwright by utilizing new criticism that has reassessed the female
form in Surrealist art. Furthermore, it will initiate an important discussion
xiv Introduction
in relation to the representation of masculinity and performative machismo

in these plays, especially in light of the male subject’s pursuit of an inherent,
yet elusive, selfhood.
In homage to Surrealist film, Shepard acknowledged the filmmaker Luis
Buñuel as his favorite film director in a 1994 interview with the director
Michael Almereyda for Arena magazine.9 Hence, chapter 4 examines the
Surrealist tendencies of Shepard’s play Angel City (1976), utilizing the lan-
guage of film in this analysis. With a particular focus on Un chien andalou
(1929), this chapter also examines the Surrealist films of Buñuel. Both
mediums of play and film laud the transformative potential of the cinema;
they exploit subsequent similarities to the dream-state as a means of access-
ing alternative realms of surreality. Shepard’s play redefines and draws on
Surrealism by complicating normative theatrical semiotics and introducing
the language of cinema into the representative frame.
Although Beckett is omnipresent in all of Shepard’s writing, the fifth
chapter of this book will explicitly analyze the connection. The Irish play-
wright was significantly influenced by Surrealism; Beckett’s Film (1965),
for instance (originally titled The Eye), is a 22-minute film starring Buster
Keaton, opening with an image of an eye in what seems to be a candid
reference to Un chien andalou. Cowboys #2 is a reproduction of Shepard’s
first play Cowboys (1964; now lost) and it signals Shepard’s interest in the
works of Beckett from the onset. Shepard’s early plays place language as an
auxiliary, subsidiary complement to his imagistic transmission of experi-
ence. The Surrealist artist had to find a way to paradoxically express images
derived from a world beyond the logical, ultimately in a form that was
never completely divorced from realism. Shepard’s plays approach realism
in a similar manner, without yielding to abstraction. His early plays could
hence be viewed as expressions of an isolated and interrogated anxiety that
emerges from a frustration with the incompetency of language itself. This
chapter investigates the failure of language, particularly in the context of
the simulation of aphasic linguistic expression in Tongues (1978), Savage/
Love (1979), and The War in Heaven (Angel’s Monologue; 1985), theatre
pieces that Shepard cocreated with Joseph Chaikin. This topic particularly
relates to Beckett’s conjecture that “there is nothing to express, nothing
with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express,
no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.”10 Chapter 5
develops this theme of language’s inadequacies in expression and analyzes
Shepard’s collaborations with Joseph Chaikin, who suffered from aphasia
following a stroke in 1984. This chapter traces a Surrealist lineage through
this partnership and through both writers’ admiration for Beckett. It will
reveal how the depreciation of language can facilitate the liberation of
automatist Surrealist expression.
Introduction xv
The penultimate chapter uses Bataille’s theories on nonproductive expen-

diture as a framing device and considers States of Shock (1991) and Simpatico
(1994) under the hermeneutic framework of “performance of waste.” Both
plays contain a Surrealist anarchy in their subtextual impulse to overthrow
the dominant hegemonic discourse at large, in line with Bataille’s economic
theories. In its symbolic dramaturgy, catastrophic spectacularized imagery
and stratified layers of representation, States of Shock as Shepard’s response to
the Gulf War is unmistakably surreal. The Surrealism of Simpatico, however,
emerges in the play’s fragile realism, the physical manifestation of otherwise
internalized anxiety, the discrepancies of scale and time, the atmosphere of
paranoia and the realization of fantasy. Both plays indicate the productivity
of nonproductive expenditure, a concept evident in the obsessive, hyperbolic
rendering of experience created by the prismatic scenography, and in the
compulsion to investigate one’s origins. In States of Shock, the Colonel says to
Stubbs that “[a] catastrophe has to be examined from every possible angle.”11
Shepard realizes this in the surreal creation of climatic warfare that relies on
multiple layers of spectacularized representation. This seemingly wasteful
effort also incorporates Shepard’s continued interrogation of masculinized
transgenerational trauma. Whether his male characters are at war with each
other or themselves, the catastrophe of the present is traced back through
the patrilineal line of ancestry in States of Shock and compared to the fruit-
lessness of military warfare, perhaps the most wasteful endeavor of all. The
past becomes surreally superimposed onto the present, recalling Beckett’s
writings on the “calamity of yesterday”:
We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer
what we were before the calamity of yesterday. [ . . . ] The good or evil disposi-
tion of the object has neither reality nor significance. The immediate joys
and sorrows of the body and the intelligence are so many superfoetations.
Such as it was, it has been assimilated to the only world that has reality and
significance, the world of our own latent consciousness, and its cosmography
has suffered a dislocation.12
Such is the case in States of Shock, a play that offers a fragmented and dislo-
cated map of experience that collapses time and space. This play communi-
cates with Surrealist expression in its overlapping representative fields that
lay bare the “dislocated” “cosmography” of an interiorized consciousness.
The Surrealists aimed to unearth repressed quanta of the human psyche,
notably dreams and the unconscious, in the belief that such an investiga-
tion could “unearth” the “buried child” and provide them with a greater
informed viewpoint from which a revised, more inclusive consideration of
the human condition could be observed.
Chapter 1
Surrealism and
Sam Shepard’s Early
Plays: 1964–1967
Icarus’s Mother (1965) AND

THE MANIFESTATION OF ANXIETY
In an interview with Pete Hamill for New York magazine, Shepard described
his early one-act plays as coping mechanisms that emerged from the adver-
sities of life experience:
I think of them now as survival kits, in a way. [ . . . ] They were explosions that
were coming out of some kind of inner turmoil in me that I didn’t understand
at all. There are areas in some of them that are still mysterious to me. I don’t
want to make them sound cathartic, because they weren’t. They were just
these things that came out of the situation inside me that needed a kind of
expression. They were just survival techniques, a means of putting something
outside rather than having it all inside.1
Shepard describes writing as a psychic necessity. He discusses his early works

as “explosions” or violent outbursts that were not therapeutic or liberating
but rather compulsory exorcisms. Icarus’s Mother, which premiered at Caffe
Cino in November 1965, directed by Michael Smith, most explicitly dra-
matized this. In this play, a displaced anxiety relating to the fear of flying
becomes manifest in an absurd, surreal drama concerning a Fourth-of-July
celebratory barbeque. Near the beginning, a skywriting plane circles over-
head as if reminding the characters of a universe outside of their own, despite
their attempts to lure it, the exterior, into their insular worlds:
Bill: Are you his wife, Jill?

Jill: That’s right.
2 The Aesthetics of Performance
Bill: Then we should tell him, so he doesn’t have to waste any more time.
Howard: Come on down! Your wife’s down here!
Bill: Come on down here!
[...]
Jill: Come here, honey! Here I am! (She waves.)
Bill: Come and get her!
[...]
Frank: Come and get your wife, stupid!
[...]
Howard: Come on! Land that thing!2
Indeed, any expression of idiosyncrasy from the collective group is under-

mined in this play. The other characters dissuade Pat from taking a walk
alone by threatening that all the group would have to go looking for her if
she got lost, thus all of them would miss the fireworks and they “might all
trip and be there on the beach for weeks unconscious” (77). Later on, Jill and
Pat attempt to entice and flirt with the pilot with their underwear around
their ankles, crouched on the sand as they try to urinate, as though the expo-
sure of their bodies will lure the male pilot to the ground. Meanwhile, Bill
and Howard, as though involved in an intricate conspiracy theory, attempt
secretly to send smoke signals to the plane and constantly tell lies to divert
the attention of their companions. However, in an unnerving occurrence,
the pyrotechnical demonstration eventually witnessed is not the celebratory
fireworks display anticipated. Bill and Howard inform the girls on their
return that Frank had actually witnessed the plane crashing. In an ironic
twist, this lie materializes and the recurrent themes of fire and flight in the
play merge in a kaleidoscopic combustion as the plane explodes and falls to
the ground.
The actor Stephen Rea declared of Shepard’s characters,
The people are all dislocated and strange and unconnected in Sam’s plays. It’s
all about this kind of terror—you know: the horror. The horror that’s outside,
that undefined outside world. Unseen, unknown terror, suddenly striking.
If you don’t understand that about Sam’s plays then you can’t do them.3
Rea identifies a sense of isolation in Shepard’s characters and a fear of an

exterior encroaching threatening force. Indeed, Icarus’s Mother encapsulates
a paranoid atmosphere and an escalating sense of tension that could, at any
moment, come crashing to the ground. The stage directions dictate that a
low hedge should frame the action upstage suggesting that the characters
are removed from the outside world, somewhat cocooned in their insular
worlds. Shepard’s stage directions re-accentuate the notion of an encroaching
externality near the end of the play: “There is a tremendous boom offstage,
S u r r e a l i s m a n d S a m S h e pa r d ’ s E a r ly P l ays 3
followed in a few seconds by flashes of light onstage changing from orange to blue
to yellow and then returning to the dim lighting of before; the flashes should
come from directly above them [ . . . ]” (90). Additionally, Shepard stipulates
that the noise of a crowd should start faintly near the end of the play and
increase substantially in volume toward the climax.4 The tension between
Pat and Howard also contributes to this sense of increasing paranoia: he
shakes her violently, then crosses to her slowly and stands behind her in a
menacing invasion of her physical space (80). Howard’s subsequent speech,
in which he imagines being in the cockpit of a plane “surrounded by glass
and knowing that glass is solid, yet it’s something you can see through at the
same time” (80), signals a regression to a childlike state and also alludes to
feelings of panic and trepidation:
Then you get kind of dizzy and sick to the tum tum and your heads starts to
spin so you clutch the seat with both your hands and close your eyes. [ . . . ]
But the sky creeps in out of the corner of each eye and you can’t help but see.
You can’t help but want to look. You can’t resist watching it for a second or
two or a minute. For just a little bitty while. (80–81)
The ending, made even more sinister by the fact that their fears give
birth to reality, works as an apocalyptic reminder of the unpredictability
of the external universe and its threat to the individual. Yet it also postu-
lates the potential power of unconscious fears and anxieties, in line with
Shepard’s definition of these plays as “explosions that were coming out of
some inner turmoil in me” (see the first page of this chapter). The sense of
paranoia through imagistic transmission becomes palpable to the audience.
Christopher Bigsby uses a painterly analogy to express how Shepard relies
on a reciprocal appropriation between the audience and the stage to redefine
reality: “The image coheres in the mind of the observer rather than the ico-
nography of the stage. It relies on the reality of an anxiety which transcends
the apparently insignificant nature of the action. Shepard becomes almost
like a painter [ . . . ].”5
Icarus’s Mother ends with a vivid description of the flames of the fighter
jet, the clear demarcation of images and the elimination of extraneous
characterizing or circumstantial information. In this way it recalls Roy
Lichtenstein’s cartoon painting Whaam! (1963) and would thus appear to
satisfy John Malkovich’s detection of an “exalted cartoon mythic plane”
in Shepard’s work.6 In this painting, Lichtenstein depicts a scene from
the story “Star Jockey,” which featured in the January/February edition
of the comic book All American Men of War in 1962.7 In the original story,
the World War II pilot, on witnessing the explosion of his adversary’s plane,
declares, “The enemy has become a flaming star!”8 Lichtenstein juxtaposes
the paradoxical fear of annihilation and death with the fantastic glori-
fication of victims of war as charismatic heroes. However, the primary
interpretation of the flames of the plane as a “flaming star” in the artwork
also relates to the combined images of the plane’s combustion and the
fireworks in Icarus’s Mother. Both Lichtenstein and Shepard are parodying
the quixotic misconceptions that construe the gruesome, inhuman reali-
ties of World War II; both pieces were produced in the 1960s, an era when
the threat of conscription, which was exclusive to the American male, was
pervasive. Indeed, according to Luther S. Luedtke, on the opening night
of Shepard’s first plays The Rock Garden and Cowboys in 1964, the newspa-
per headlines declared, “plan for bombing of north vietnam revived
by khanh.”9
THE SURREALISTS AND PARANOIAC ACTIVITY

Although Lichtenstein’s painting belongs to Pop Art, he was greatly influ-
enced by the paintings of Salvador Dalí. An exploration of paranoia was a
crucial concern to the Surrealists in the second decade of the movement as
artists and writers such as Dalí, Lacan, Crevel, and Bataille came to define
its stance. Relating back to Icarus’s Mother, the Greek myth of Icarus was
employed by Bataille in his denouncement of the “Icarian” aspirations of
André Breton and Surrealism in his essay “The ‘Old Mole’ and the Prefix
Sur in the Words Surhomme and Surrealist” (1929–1930). Indeed, it was the
subsequent German occupation of France in 1940 that brought Surrealism
to America in the first place. By this time, Dalí’s emphasis on the paranoiac
experience had come to eclipse automatism’s pivotal position within the
Surrealist movement in the 1930s.
The imagism of Icarus’s Mother can be considered in light of what Homer
and Kahle refer to as Surrealism’s aim to guarantee “[m]aximum impact and
a crisis of the object.”10 In their article on “A Social Adaptation Explanation
of the Effects of Surrealism on Advertising,” they define this as realized
through
1) isolation (when an object once situated outside its own field is freed of
its expected role), 2) modification (some aspect of the object is altered such
that a property not normally associated with the object is introduced, or a
property normally associated with the object is withdrawn), 3) hybridiza-
tion (two familiar objects are combined to produce a ‘bewildering one’),
4) a change in scale, position or substance creates incongruity, 5) provoca-
tion of accidental encounters, 6) double images, 7) paradox (using intellectual
antitheses), 8) conceptual bipolarity (using interpenetrating images where
two situations are observed from a single viewpoint, thus modifying spatio-
temporal experiences).11
In light of Homer and Kahle’s classification, the image of fire in this play
can be interpreted as a malleable object. Shepard isolates the image; physi-
cally, a portable barbeque billowing smoke appears in the stage directions
at the play’s opening. The image of fire introduced by the barbeque and its
intended function—as an instrument for cooking food—is modified as it
becomes a means of communicating through smoke signals with the pilot.
In terms of hybridization, the image of the fireworks appears as an amalgam
of the representation of the barbeque and the foreboding vision of the plane’s
combustion, as Howard’s words illustrate: “We’ll be down here on the grass
and he’ll be way, way, way up in the air. And somewhere in between the two
of us there’ll be a beautiful display of flashing fireworks” (79). The smoke
signals from the barbeque, the fireworks, and the flames from the plane, all
suggest discrepancies, hyperboles even, of scale. While the action begins on
the ground, we are also encouraged to view the characters from the perspec-
tive of the pilot and vice versa. Even though the stage setting suggests an
almost claustrophobic exterior, Howard’s ensuing speech contains images of
“[m]iles and miles of cow pasture and city and town,” widening the diegetic
and contextual landscape of the action.12 The shifting perspectives in scale
add to the aesthetic Surrealism of the images described. These images also
allude to a sense of omniscient vision, as though the imaginary internal
worlds and the actualized reality of the external universe have merged into
one: “So your eyes bob back and roll around in their sockets and you see
the silver-sleek jet, streamlined for speed, turn itself upside down and lie on
its back and swoop up [ . . . ]” (91). Finally, the three images superimpose in
Frank’s final monologue, creating “double images,” a “paradox,” and “concep-
tual bipolarity,” while simultaneously operating as juxtaposed variations or
substitutions on the same image. Describing the fireworks, Frank imagisti-
cally predicts, “An eruption of froth and smoke and flame blowing itself up
over and over again” (91) and
the pilot bobbing in the very center of a ring of fire that’s closing in. His white
helmet bobbing up and bobbing down. His hand reaching for his other hand
and the fire moves in and covers him up and the line of two hundred bow
their heads and moan together with the light in their faces. (92)
The coexisting images of fire in this play can be considered in terms of

Dalí’s theory of “paranoiac-critical activity.” The converging themes on
combustion relate to the Surrealist artist’s perception of reality as concurrent
dimensions, alternative fictions where the rational and the irrational, fantasy
and actuality, are granted equal degrees of veracity. In Dalí’s painting Swans
Reflecting Elephants (1937), for example, the swan is the elephant, and vice-
versa; neither image is entitled to claim greater authenticity. Dalí defined his
paranoid-critical method in his speech “The Moral Position of Surrealism”

in 1930, which begins with a self-reflexive apology for giving a lecture in
the first place. In this speech, Dalí advocates an embrace of demoralization
and the employment of paranoia as a means of achieving new idiosyncratic
veracity:
Above all, the birth of these new Surrealist images must be considered as
the birth of images of demoralization. The particular perspicacity of atten-
tion in the paranoiac state must be insisted upon; paranoia being recognized,
moreover by all psychologists as a form of mental illness which consists in
organizing reality in such a way as to utilize it to control an imaginative
construction. The paranoiac who believes himself to be poisoned discovers in
everything that surrounds him, right up to the most imperceptible and subtle
details, preparations for his own death. Recently, through a decidedly para-
noiac process, I obtained an image of a woman whose position, shadow and
morphology, without altering or deforming anything of her real appearance,
are also, at the same time, those of a horse.13
Red Cross, Cowboys#2, and Fourteen

Hundred Thousand
Dalí’s definition of “paranoid-critical activity” could characterize Shepard’s
efforts in these earlier works to stage an active state of existence infused
with otherwise abstruse paranoid modes of being. The opening scene of
Shepard’s Red Cross (1966) reveals this where Dalí’s definition of a paranoiac
endeavor is encapsulated in the characterization of Carol. The play opens
in the bedroom of a cabin where Carol and Jim are seated on opposite beds
facing each other. Both are dressed in white in an entirely white room, like a
blank canvas. Carol is in a state of extreme hypochondria:
Carol. [ . . . ] Something’s happening. My hands never sweat like that.

And my feet. [ . . . ] My head aches so bad. I can’t believe my head.
[ . . . ] It hurts. It’s breaking open all the time. It crashes around
inside. [ . . . ] One day it’ll break clear open and I’ll die, I’ll be dead
then. [ . . . ] It’ll just burst and there I’ll be lying in the middle of
the street or in a car or on a train. With a bursted head.
Jim: Somebody will take care of you.
Carol: It might happen when I’m skiing or swimming.
Jim: There’s always lots of people around those places. They’ll see you
and help.
Carol. They’ll see my head.14
Carol then launches into a monologue concerning a hypothetical imagi-

nary ski accident. Her speech begins with a boasting of her competence on
the slopes (140). But as the dialogue gains momentum it accumulates into a
rather sinister, unsettling account of her projected fears. Carol speaks in the
future tense as though the event were inevitable. She imagines the worst:
The skis will cut into both my legs and I’ll bleed all over. Big gushes of red
all over the snow. My arms will be broken and dragging through the blood
[ . . . ] then my head will blow up. The top will come right off. My hair will
blow down the hill full of guts and blood [ . . . ] my nose will come off and my
whole face will peel away. Then it will snap. My whole head will snap off and
roll down the hill and become a huge snowball and roll into the city and kill a
million people. My body will stop at the bottom of the hill with just a bloody
stump for a neck and both arms broken and both legs. (141)
Pertaining to Dalí’s theories, it could be argued that Carol indeed “organiz[es]

reality in such a way as to utilize it to control an imaginative construction.”15
She believes her head will break open, and Dalí posits that the physical has
no stronger claim on actuality than the imagined. In an article titled “The
Rotting Donkey,” published in the first issue of Le Surréalisme au Service
de la Révolution in July 1930, Dalí writes that
our images of reality themselves depend on the degree of our paranoid faculty
and that, even so, an individual sufficiently endowed with this faculty may,
theoretically, see at will the form of any real object change successively,
exactly as in a voluntary hallucination but this more important (in a destruc-
tive sense) difference, that the diverse forms assumed by the object in ques-
tion are universally controllable and recognizable, as soon as the paranoid has
merely pointed them out.16
We are reminded again of the variations on fire in Icarus’s Mother. Yet the
“diverse forms assumed by the object” are, in Red Cross, images of disease,
of being eaten alive from within. The fear and paranoia, which plague Carol
at the beginning of the play are literally superimposed onto Jim; her anxiety
that her head might explode at the beginning of the play translates into the
image of a literal hole in Jim’s head at the play’s close; Carol’s imagined
“little red splotch of blood and a while blanket of white snow” (141) meta-
theatrically seem to emerge from the words in the play to be supplanted onto
the stage direction so that a “stream of blood run[s] down [Jim’s] forehead ”
(156). The “double imaging” in Red Cross works as a direct response to Dalí’s
writing on paranoia, albeit transplanting interior anxiety to an exteriority:
Paranoia uses the external world as a means to assert the obsessive idea, with
its disturbing characteristic of making this idea’s reality valid to others. The
reality of the external world serves as illustration and proof, and is placed in
the service of the reality of our mind. [ . . . ] It is through a decidedly paranoid

process that it has been possible to obtain a double image: that is to say, the
representation of an object which, without the slightest figurative or anatomi-
cal modification, is at the same time the representation of another absolutely
different object, itself also devoid of any kind of deformation or abnormality
betraying some arrangement.17
Dalí attacks prospective interpretation or futile searches for meaning as

wasteful—“Once and for all we should point out to the art critics and artists,
etc., that all they can expect from the new Surrealist images is disappoint-
ment, a bad impression, and repulsion”18 —just as Red Cross evades analysis
and pertains to what could be described as a Beckettian phatic exchange of
information. Eschewing psychological realism for portraiture, the play also
displays a Surrealist fascination with the sordid and the obscene. Jim’s per-
sonal anxiety directly relates to a dose of crabs, which he absurdly discusses
(and examines) with the maid who has entered the room to change the bed
sheets: “JIM sits on the edge of the bed and picks at his legs, the MAID sits on
the other bed facing him, he gets hold of a small bug and hands it carefully to
the MAID, who looks at it in the palm of his hand” (143). Jim describes the
attack of the crabs as a “localized” epidemic while Carol reveals at the end of
the play that she is also infected with bugs “Sucking her blood.” But these
are “[b]uried in [her] skin,” striking from inside out: “They’re actually in my
skin. I’ve been carrying them around with me” (156). Dalí also advocated
that the new Surrealist image be concerned with the carnal, that psycho-
logical or theoretical paranoia can only be productive and contribute to the
deconstruction of orthodox “reality” when made manifest in material form:
The mortal activity of these new images can still, in the same way as other
Surrealist activities, contribute to the downfall of reality, and so benefit all
that which, through infamous and abominable ideals of every order, aes-
thetic, humanitarian, philosophical, etc., brings us back to the clear springs
of masturbation, exhibitionism, crime, love.19
Notwithstanding, the prioritizing of personal states of inner turmoil as wor-

thy of collective appraisal as works of art is a distinctive feature of modern
art and particularly of Surrealism.
Cowboys #2 (1967), a rewriting of the lost manuscript of Shepard’s first
play Cowboys (1964), stems from Shepard’s experience of New York as a
young man with his roommate Charles Mingus III. It inaugurates a fascina-
tion with the American West, evident throughout Shepard’s dramatic oeu-
vre. Two characters, Stu and Chet, in an obvious indebtedness to Beckett,
attempt to find refuge from the contemporary in the mythical past, the
lost America. Like Waiting for Godot, Cowboys #2 is an investigation into
what happens when we are stripped of the institutional constructs that pre-
scribe our behavior. Yet the addition in the second version of the play of
two peripheral characters Man #1 and Man #2 suggests that Stu and Chet
are no more real than the fictional cowboys they imagine. The inclusion of
these figures acts as a foregrounding device. It alludes to the concept of “actu-
alisace” or “foregrounding” as developed by the Prague School in the 1930s,
especially in their “framing” of the text as a whole, and the privileging of
language freed from its purely functional role as an instrument of com-
munication. The deliberate linguistic disjunction of the signifier from the
signified in Shepard’s writing will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 5.
Nonetheless, theatrical estrangement is also, of course, a Brechtian tech-
nique, particularly in the removal of symbolism from, and the utilization of,
language as a prop, not just for imagistic means but as one of the signifiers in
the foregrounding of the visual. As Cowboys # 2 begins, Man #1 prompts the
actors, off left, to deliver their first lines. Both Man #1 and Man #2 whistle
intermittently throughout; the sounds of car horns, a hammer, a saw, and
a single cricket interrupt the action, and at the play’s close the Men start to
reread the script of the entire play from the beginning. The stage directions
dictate that the lights come up to their full brightness as they read, exposing
the superficiality of the theatrical production. As Keir Elam writes:
It is not only the granting of unusual prominence or autonomy to aspects of

the performance which serves to foreground them, but the distancing of those
aspects from their codified functions. When theatrical semiosis is alienated,
made “strange” rather than automatic, the spectator is encouraged to take note
of the semiotic means, to become aware of the sign-vehicle and its operations.20
The alienation device in this play acts as a self-conscious commentary on

the material reality of drama itself as a deliberately premeditated construct,
yet it also highlights the present act of staging. It is the kind of theatre that
Shepard advocated as an encapsulation of the present.
This invites comparisons with Brecht’s theories on theatre from the mid
1920s; Brecht intended his epic theatre to have a social, instructive function
and deviates from Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, which aimed to catalyze
individual psychological and visceral epiphany in the viewer. Similarly, there
are contrasts inherent in the underlying intentions of Brechtian theater and
the aim of Surrealist art. But their approach to the departmentalization of
the aesthetics of their irrespective art forms overlaps in their considerations
of the visual. Both self-consciously allude to the elements that contribute to
the production of the art form. For example, René Magritte’s The Treachery
of Images (1928–1929), a painting of a pipe above the words “Ceci n’est pas
une pipe” or “This is not a pipe,” deliberately challenges the neutrality of
language. This painting directly relates to Keir Elam’s definition of linguis-

tic foregrounding. This “occurs when an unexpected usage suddenly forces
the listener or reader to take note of the utterance itself, rather than continue
his automatic concern with its ‘content.’”21 Elam concludes his discussion on
foregrounding and the performance of hierarchy (16–19) with the deduction
that “what serves most radically to alienate the signifier from its meaning-
function and to increase its opacity is actual nonsense, of the kind so richly
employed, for example, by Alfred Jarry.”22 Jarry was a significant influ-
ence on Artaud and Surrealist thought. However, Brechtian and Surrealist
aesthetics are also linked by their employment and promotion of montage
techniques, as evident in Ernst’s “collage-novels” and in these early Shepard
plays. Collage is constructed from separate, unrelated, and equally promi-
nent images or realities, like the elements of Brecht’s epic theatre, which only
assume a new reality once decontextualized and then subsequently reintro-
duced in a seemingly disparate manner. The recontextualization of these
images within their immediate environments complicates their meaning.
Thus, otherwise inoffensive banal objects take on new exciting implications
in Surrealism, like, as I will discuss, the spilling of the milk in Shepard’s play
The Rock Garden (1964), and the “junk” that Shepard employs in plays such
as The Unseen Hand (1969; discussed in chapter 2).
The influence of Brecht’s alienation technique appears in Fourteen
Hundred Thousand, which premiered at the Firehouse Theatre in Minneapolis
in the spring of 1966, directed by Sydney Schubert Walter. Framing this,
Shepard’s previous play Red Cross had premiered in January that year and
the subsequent La Turista premiered in March 1967, both directed by
Jacques Levy, an avid supporter of Brecht. This may explain the employ-
ment of the self-referential dramaturgical elements within Fourteen Hundred
Thousand, although similar techniques are evident in Shepard’s plays prior
to this. The playwright would return to a Brechtian dramaturgy during his
time in England from 1971 to 1974, especially for his 1972 play The Tooth of
Crime. Nonetheless, during the course of Fourteen Hundred Thousand, the
erratic lighting changes, shifting with alacrity from bright blue to white, the
physical construction on stage of a book shelf and the framing device of a
play within a play as several characters sit with their backs to the audience
to simultaneously take in the action, are all devices indicative of Brecht’s
metatheatricality. The audience bears witness to the construction of the
bookshelf for “fourteen hundred thousand” of Donna’s books which will
be, in her own words “a functional piece of basic furniture for around the
house” and thus the entire pursuit seems facile.23 The bookshelf, like the
infamous Godot, never arrives and the uselessness of the endeavor becomes
the absurd raison d’ être for its construction. Likewise, the audience has to
suffer the noise of the assembly, the alienating shifts of lighting, and the final
dismantling of the entire set at the end of the play, effectively destroying the
line between drama and reality. As the play concludes, Pop and Mom read
intermittent sections aloud from a book, while the other characters rather
bizarrely hum “White Christmas” (134–136).
In its Brechtian dimensions Fourteen Hundred Thousand approaches
Esslin’s definition of the Theatre of the Absurd. For Esslin argues that the
Absurd “has renounced arguing about the absurdity of the human condition;
it merely presents it in its being—that is in terms of concrete stage images”
(23). The premiere production of Fourteen Hundred Thousand was not well
received and Shepard and Schubert Walter fell out as a result. This play war-
rants consideration, however, in that Shepard’s employment of Brechtian
techniques and the play’s subsequent compatibility with the Theatre of the
Absurd, are further evidence of the influence of Surrealism in his early plays.
Indeed, there exists a clear connection between Brecht’s description of his
opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (The Rise and Fall of the City of
Mahagonny; 1929), cowritten with Kurt Weill, and a Surrealist sensibility.
Brecht wrote of Mahagonny that the opera
pays conscious tribute to the senselessness of the artistic form. Its irrationality
lies in the fact that rational elements are employed, plastic and solid reality
aimed at, but at the same time it is all cancelled out by the music. A dying
man is real. If at the same time he sings, we are transported to the sphere of
the irrational. The more unreal and unclear the music can make reality, the
more pleasurable the whole process becomes: the degree of pleasure is directly
dependent on the degree of unreality.24
Although Brecht did not describe this work as Surrealist,25 it is apparent

from this passage that his focus on “senselessness,” “irrationality,” the nihil-
ism of concrete actuality, and the generation of pleasure from the illusory,
all have a basis in Surrealist thought. Indeed, Brecht’s Mahagonny and
Shepard’s Fourteen Hundred Thousand share a number of thematic similari-
ties, notably the imagistic portrayal of similar worlds consumed by capital-
ism and an overriding sense of sprawling urban claustrophobia. In Fourteen
Hundred Thousand, for example, Pop and Mom read from a science fiction
novel, which describes America morphing into one giant, expansive city-
scape, a “linear” or “universal” city (135). This follows their narration of
a story in which an entire landscape is obliterated by snow. In comparison,
in Mahagonny, Jimmy Mahoney sings:
Why build towers high as the Himalaya, if one can’t topple them down
again, so that there’ll be general laughter? What’s straight must be twisted;
what towers high must be torn to dust. We need no hurricane, we need no
typhoon, for the horrors it can bring, that we ourselves can do.26
Both opera and play suggest that any expression of individuality is futile
while at once critiquing the underlying bourgeois values that led to the cre-
ation of both imaginary metropolises. However, at the same time they are
also critiquing their inherited conventions of drama in a manner that led
Theodore Adorno to categorize Mahagonny as “the first Surrealist opera.”27
The Rock Garden

In its montage form as three self-sufficient scenes, The Rock Garden (1964)
lends itself to Brecht’s definition of an epic form of theatre. It also success-
fully circumscribes the audience not as witnesses, as Brecht condemned, to
a misrepresentation of reality constructed from heightened emotional states,
elaborate costumes and a thus desensitized audience, but to a theatre just
like life, and not an imitation of it. Brecht wrote:
On the question of realism: the usual view is that the more easily reality can
be recognized in a work of art, the more realistic it is. Against this I would
like to set up the equation that the more recognizably reality is mastered in
the work of art, the more realistic it is. Straightforward recognition of reality
is often impeded by a presentation which shows how to master it. [ . . . ] the
artist who is a realist [ . . . ] exposes all the veils and deceptions that obscure
reality and intervenes in his public’s real action.28
The Rock Garden opens with a family sitting around a table. At the head,
a man reads while a teenage boy and a teenage girl sit either side of him,
sipping milk. Nobody utters a word; the girl spills her milk, the scene ends.
Language is radically devalued and this play illustrates Brecht’s concept of
the gestus as “[i]t excludes the psychological, the subconscious, the metaphysi-
cal unless they can be conveyed in concrete terms.”29 The Rock Garden pres-
ents the outward, concrete representation of psychological and subconscious
states. The audience has to make sense of the seemingly, unrelated “mon-
tage” of ostensibly autonomous scenes; they are forced to action and their
role as the passive consumer of a simulated reality consequently challenged.
Also, The Rock Garden, in its triptych, exhibitory form, satisfies Brecht’s
belief that epic theatre should be a “picture of the world” and not a trans-
mission of experience. The emphasis on the visual connects the dramatic
theories of Brecht with the philosophies of semiotics as outlined by Richard
Schechner and Keir Elam, with the Theatre of the Absurd and ultimately
with Surrealism.
The Rock Garden dramatizes an animosity toward inheritance, a distinct
feature of Surrealism in its antiestablishment reactionary stance, and a press-
ing concern throughout Shepard’s dramatic oeuvre. In La Turista (1967), for
instance, the female lead Salem recalls an event from her childhood when
she was scolded by her father for spitting on the top step leading up to his
house, the threshold of his domain.30 Shepard’s early work overflows with
Oedipal insinuations. Indeed, the playwright himself, christened Samuel
Shepard Rogers the seventh and called “Steve” to differentiate him from his
father, isolated himself from a transmissible ancestry by dropping his sur-
name in the early 1960s. Shepard’s 1969 play The Holy Ghostly directly refer-
ences this name change in the following exchange between father and son:
Ice: Spittin’ image of his old man. Yessir. Why if it weren’t for the age
separatin’em you’d think they was the same person.
Pop: Yer no son a’ mine. No son a’ mine woulda’ gone and changed his name
and dressed his self up like a hillbilly.31
Shepard has described The Rock Garden as a play “about leaving mom
and dad,” perhaps in reference to the difficult relationship he experienced
with his father.32 Sam Rogers the Sixth fought with the Army Air Corps in
Italy and returned to America a broken man, battling alcoholism for the
rest of his life. In 2009 Shepard starred in the film Brothers, directed by
Jim Sheridan, which also deals with the difficulties of emotional readjust-
ment, and the re-socialization that life after war demands. Shepard’s father
became a recluse in his later years, living alone in the desert, and died in
1984 after he was knocked down by a car near Santa Fe. Ellen Oumano
describes a complex relationship between father and son: “Shepard loved his
father, and experienced a good deal of pain for him and because of him. The
specter of his father’s sad fate always before him, Shepard evidently observed
and absorbed the lesson well.”33 The theme of the father as a malevolent
altruist of inheritance in Shepard’s work, and the attempt to bring a halt to
procreation and cyclical recrimination, are issues to which I will return in
chapter 3. Nonetheless, in an interview with Carol Rosen, the playwright
states of his early work:
The funny thing about Rock Garden is, if you look at that play, it’s surprising
even to me because when I look at it, I see the germ right in that little play
of a whole lot of different things. The germ is in that play of many, many to
come, much more so than Cowboys, for instance, or a lot of those other plays.
Rock Garden was sort of the beginning of something that reverberated from
there, which I didn’t realize at the time.34
The Rock Garden, although first staged in 1964, gained notoriety when it
appeared in the 1969 Off-Broadway production of Oh! Calcutta, directed
by Jacques Levy and also containing works by Samuel Beckett, Jules
Feiffer, Dan Greenburg, John Lennon, Levy himself, Leonard Melfi, David
Newman and Robert Benton, Kenneth Tynan, and Sherman Yellen. Indeed,
the title Oh! Calcutta is a play on the French phrase “O quel cul t’as!,” which
is translated in English as “What an arse you have!” The comparisons to
Marcel Duchamp’s “defacement” of the Mona Lisa L. H. O. O. Q. (1919) are
implicit—this title read aloud in French sounds remarkably similar to “Elle
a chaud au cul” or “She has a hot ass.” Indeed, Duchamp’s explanation of his
motives for his painting seems remarkably similar to the intentions of the
contributors to Oh! Calcutta; he speaks of feeling “a completely iconoclastic
attitude towards art and a feeling of general revolt against the general mis-
understanding of its mission” and that he “suddenly found [himself] [ . . . ]
ready to burn all the hitherto respected ‘effigies’ in a number of humorous,
blasphemous manifestations.”35 David Hopkins reads Duchamp’s art work
as an allusion to Guillaume Apollinaire’s play Les Mamelles de Tirésias (The
Breasts of Tiresias; 1903),36 the first play to be described by Apollinaire as
“drame surréaliste” and written the same year that Apollinaire met Alfred
Jarry.37
The dramatic triptych structure of The Rock Garden presents the audi-
ence with variations on the same theme. It opens with a nonverbal image
of deceptive domestic bliss, as four characters are seated around the dinner
table, the round table of familial politics. man, woman, girl, and boy are
so unfamiliar to each other that they do not even require names. The scene
continues invariably: “For a long period of time nothing is said.”38 A man
reads a magazine while an adolescent boy and girl drink milk and observe
each other. The girl spills her milk in an attempt to shatter the banality
of the situation, and thus the scene ends. In the second scene, the young
boy is seated in a rocking chair while his mother lies in bed, and the stage
directions imply an Oedipal subtext. The boy is dressed in his underwear
and the description of the lighting as “very pale blue” contributes to the
overtly sexual atmosphere (41). As the scene progresses, the boy gradually
dons his father’s clothes in a manner that could represent his development
from infancy (in the rocking chair) to adulthood. In this sense The Rock
Garden explores the process of leaving the figurative nest of parental depen-
dence. An entry in Shepard’s prose collection Motel Chronicles explores the
circumstances of his birth:
When I reached the wall I began to get my first taste of what it’s like to suf-
fer. The windows were directly overhead but too high to reach in my condi-
tion. Pale green light poured through them, casting a double beam on my
unconscious mother across the room. I watched her body. I knew I’d come
from her body but I wasn’t sure how. I knew I was away from her body now.
Separate. The wall was chocolate brown. I heard a humming which turned
out to be warplanes. B-29’s. I felt a tremendous panic suddenly. I was between

two worlds. The world I’d left behind and this new one. I had no idea where
to turn.39
This passage recalls Beckett’s assertion in Proust that “[t]he tragic figure
represents the expiation of original sin, of the original and eternal sin of him
and all his “socii malorum,” the sin of having been born.”40 Shepard describes
his birth as a wholly unsettling affair, associating his entrance into the world
with warplanes, panic, feelings of detachment and confusion, recalling the
themes of Icarus’s Mother. The anxiety that the separation from his mother
provokes reveals an unconscious Oedipal yearning; the war imagery sug-
gests a hypermasculinized naissance, as though his conflicted psyche repre-
sents a gender contest, the alluring lure of the mother’s body in competition
with the less inviting war simulacra of masculinity.41
A similar dichotomy operates in The Rock Garden. The second scene
could be compared in terms of lighting and thematic content to the paint-
ings of Eric Fischl. Fischl’s Bad Boy (1981), for instance demonstrates his
artistic preoccupation with white suburban American existence. Robert
Hughes describes Fischl’s art as, “[o]n a certain level [ . . . ] pure Hollywood”
yet as “relentlessly adult-hating; a sour discontinuous serial, packed with
tension, farce, and erotic misery.”42 Both Fischl’s painting and Shepard’s
play suggest an adolescent mentality and a distrust of adulthood. The paint-
ing, like the second scene of The Rock Garden, is bathed in an erotic blue
light. An older woman (a mother?) lies in bed and there are large windows
in both Shepard’s play and Fischl’s painting suggestive of the subnarratives
that penetrate both painting and text. In Bad Boy the image of the fruit has
a distinct phallic quality, alluding to the boy’s budding (or perhaps lack of)
sexuality. In both works, the boy could be read as a substitute for a father
figure. However, the ambiguous role reversal between father and son that
occurs in the second scene of The Rock Garden also works to hide the Boy’s
most recognizable congenital attributes. When the Woman draws attention
to his “bony” and “skinny” legs, which she claims are just like her father’s,
the boy puts on a pair of trousers (43). Likewise, when she highlights that
his middle toe “sticks way out further than the other toes [ . . . ] the way Pop’s
toe was,” the boy, as if rejecting and attempting to camouflage his inherited
physical attributes, puts on a pair of shoes and dons a blanket (44). By criti-
cizing his physique, the woman is inadvertently questioning his masculin-
ity: “You have the same kind of torso as he does. The same build. Only he
works out and you don’t. That’s the difference.”43 In response, the boy puts
on a shirt, foreshadowing Beth’s description of a shirt as a simulacrum of
masculinity in Shepard’s 1985 play A Lie of the Mind.44 The boy finally dons
an overcoat, only to be usurped by the man who arrives “dressed in a hat
and overcoat,” as though he had outbid the boy in the clothing stakes. The
boy renounces his position instantaneously once the man returns home; his
authority is undisputed.
The final scene of The Rock Garden dramatizes the Boy’s attempts
to counteract his powerlessness. He delivers an orgasmic monologue as
the explicit antithesis to the Man’s preceding monologue, alluding to the
fruitfulness of the garden in lieu of his own fecundity. The young man’s
physicality acts as testimony of his existence. The Man deliberates over
whether to paint his white fence (the unequivocal emblem of American
middle-class 1950s conformity), an off-white color, again evocative of
semen and predicative of the Boy’s symbolic ejaculation over the Man’s
bourgeois respectability. The Boy allows the Man to wax lyrical over the
merits of using a preservative on the fence, even prompting him with per-
plexing questions that seem to encourage the Man further:
Boy: Two coats?

Man: Yes, just a couple will do it.
Boy: Two?
Man: Yes, two or three.
Boy: Three or two?
Man: Just a couple.
Boy: Two?
Man: Yes.
Boy: Good
Man: Yes (A long pause.) That ought to do it.
Boy: Good. (47)
Throughout his conversation with the Man, the Boy recurrently falls off his
chair, then sits back down again, as though bowled over by the tediousness
of the exchange. Hence, his final speech acts as a luxuriating proclamation
of his burgeoning fertility and renders his father obsolete.
Boy: When I come it’s like a river. It’s all over the bed and the sheets and
everything. [ . . . ] I mean if a girl has a really small vagina it’s really better to
go in from behind. You know? I mean she can sit with her legs together and
you can sit facing her. You know? But that’s different. It’s a different kind of
thing. (50)
The image of ejaculation is presaged first by the spilt milk in the first scene,
and second by the Woman’s final monolog in the second scene, which
alludes to cascading liquid in a sexualized manner:
Woman: [ . . . ] It’s just that I love the rain and whenever I get the chance
I walk in it. I like it after the rain stops, too. I mean the way everything
smells and looks. Right after a good hard rain. Those are my two favorite
times. When it’s raining and right after it rains. I like it just before it rains
too but that’s different. It’s not the same. I get a different feeling just before
it rains. I mean it’s a different feeling from the one I get when it’s raining.
It’s not the same. It’s like—. (45)
The boy’s sexuality becomes a statement of his identity, the contradistinc-

tion of the Man’s portrait of masculinity. The Man speaks of going to the
Arizona desert, the ultimate frontier for any aspiring cowboy, not in an
attempt to consummate idealized stereotypes of masculine endurance
(i.e., to get himself a set of figurative testicles), but rather to gather rocks for
his garden. His pursuit of a “nice” garden, with fountains, “some of those
Oriental statues and things like that,” a manageable lawn, an orchard, all
seem rather farcical when juxtaposed with the potency of the Boy’s simu-
lated statement of machismo (49). The Man’s reflection on the waterworks
suggests a lack of sexual effectiveness:
[ . . . ] The irrigation needs to be worked on too. That will be the hardest. It’s
those damn pipes, you know? Whoever put them in when they were put in
didn’t put them in right. You know? They weren’t put in right originally. That’s
the whole thing. They were put in wrong when they were first put in. (50)
Likewise, the images of mayonnaise (an off-white milky liquid), the sprinkler
heads, and the spraying of trees all foreshadow the Boy’s speech. However,
as Luther Luedtke points out, the Boy’s attempt toward ejaculation is stifled
by his desire to, literally, stay in the womb, a paradoxical pull to stay with
yet escape from “Mom and Dad.”45 His monologue ends with the following:
“You know? I don’t know. I really like to come almost out and then all the
way into the womb. You know, very slowly. Just come down to the end and
all the way back in and hold it. You know what I mean?” (51). The scene
thus represents symbolic patricide if we consider that, while the Boy picks
himself up and resumes his position on his chair after he falls off at numer-
ous intervals, the Man, who topples off the couch as the lights black out,
does not.
The territory of childhood was celebrated and admired by the Surrealists
as an idealized landscape, free from the constraints of reason. Yet it also
figured as a rich burial ground where anxieties and fears could be secreted
and pilfered as source material in years to come. Thematically, The Rock
Garden’s concluding monologue can be compared to Dalí’s Lugubrious
Game (1929). Both works involve contradictory explorations of masturba-
tion and guilt (the stage directions place the Boy with his back to the man,
facing upstage), fear of impotence and budding fertility. In Dalí’s paint-
ing, two male f igures, possibly father and son, are soiled with blood and
excrement in the foreground. In its seemingly distasteful approach to art,

The Rock Garden meets the criteria of Dalí’s definition of a new Surrealist
image as outlined in his article “The Rotting Donkey” (1930):
Quite apart from plastic investigations and other such “bullshit” the new
Surrealist image will, more and more, take on the forms and colors of demor-
alization and confusion. The day is not far off when a painting will have the
value, and only the value, of a simple moral act, and what is more, of a simple
gratuitous act.46
Dalí here heralds the new Surrealist image as an anarchist acte gratuit,
channeling “the forms and colours of demoralization” and eliciting “repul-
sion.” He also writes, “We do not know whether behind the three great
simulacra—shit, blood and putrefaction—there does not lie the very hid-
ing place of the sought-after ‘treasure-land.’”47 In its visceral nonapologetic
candidness The Rock Garden satisfies Dalí’s appeal for amorality. Shepard’s
attempt to shock the audience from their passive ingestion of the onstage
action reveals a Brechtian desire, pertaining to what John Willett defines
as a “means of breaking the magic spell, of jerking the spectator out of the
torpor and making him use his critical sense,” just as the Boy wrenches the
Man from his own illusion of his existence.48 Ralph Cook, who directed
the Theatre Genesis production of the play in 1964, recalled in an inter-
view with David J. DeRose how Shepard utilized a subsonic oscillator dur-
ing this specific production to elicit an inaudible but physically aggravating
sound that heightened the dramatic tension throughout and purposely
caused the audience tangible discomfort.49 Thus, the ending of the play
was a physical release for the Boy, the Man, and the audience.
CONCLUSION
It is beneficial at this point to chart European Surrealism’s transition to
America. Dalí, in exile from France, moved to New York at the beginning
of the 1940s, as did Surrealism’s original founders André Breton, André
Masson, Max Ernst, and Roberto Matta. Surrealism was enormously influ-
ential on the formation of the Abstract Expressionist movement in America
and on the rejection of it, which emerged in the form of Pop Art in the
1950s and 1960s. The next chapter will examine that artistic and cultural
environment in which Sam Shepard began working in the 1960s. With
regard to the visual arts, Pop Art had emerged as a rejection of Abstract
Expressionism, yet both art movements were greatly influenced by the
Surrealist movement. Pop Art rebelled against the academic language,
the egocentric disposition, and the authority that Abstract Expressionism
demanded. It deviated from Surrealism by rejecting the attachment of

transcendental or existential subnarratives to art. Pop Art art disrupted the
sanctified notions previously affixed to Abstract Expressionism and chal-
lenged the tradition of art as an articulation of idiosyncratic emotional
states. However, artists such as Claes Oldenburg adopted the Surrealist
technique of displacement, alterations of scale, and the belief that even the
most banal and crude object could be an agent of le merveilleux, a fertile
ground for the most prolific artistic inspiration. Pop artists such as Claes
Oldenburg inherited from Surrealism the interest in the found object, the
objet trouvé, while others such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg
utilized Surrealism and the object as a means of rejecting the idealistic
introspection of Abstract Expressionism. According to Bigsby, “[t]he impact
of Surrealism is observable in Pop Art’s concern with the object, its fasci-
nation with photographic images and its attraction for linguistic games
[ . . . ].”50 Above all, Pop Art luxuriated in the excitement of commercialism,
advertising, the mass media and popular culture. From the late 1960s, in
plays such as The Unseen Hand (1969), Operation Sidewinder (1970), The
Mad Dog Blues (1971), and Cowboy Mouth (1971), Shepard engages with
the kitsch and the familiar. Plays of this era are located within a Pop Art
culture, a movement in the history of art that emerged as a savior in the
artistic war against abstraction, the resurrection of the recognizable image.
Yet it was also an early signal of postmodernism, also informed by the sur-
real, highlighting the seductiveness of consumerism and the paradox of the
emptiness at its core. The following chapter will analyze how Shepard’s
plays attempted to address this emptiness by looking to myth and ritual,
a pursuit that was largely dominated by a search for selfhood.
Chapter 2
Myth, Ritual, and a

Search for Selfhood:
1969–1972
INTRODUCTION
In the plays written in the latter part of the 1960s and the onset of the 1970s,
Shepard introduces into his writing a more discernible plot and narrative
structure. He wrote his first two-act play La Turista in 1967, followed by the
similarly constructed Operation Sidewinder (1970) and The Mad Dog Blues
(1971). The playwright’s adoption of a more linear approach could be a result
of a course on screenwriting that he took at Yale in 1968. However, although
these plays are less improvisatory and more structured than their predeces-
sors, they are still unconventional and experimental. As a development of the
off-kilter realism of Shepard’s earlier work, these plays betray an American
postmodernist sensibility, one that, as I will discuss, was still rooted in
Surrealism; however, a Pop theatricality also emerges as does a refocus from
the somnolent introspection of his previous works to the wider world at large.
The Pop Art movement extracted from Surrealism its obsession with seduc-
tion, exploring the enticing appeal of consumerism, and finding artistic merit
in the most pedestrian and insipid of everyday objects. Described at the time
as the “New Surrealists,” the work of the Pop artists represented an amal-
gamation of “high” and “low” culture and adopted Surrealism’s fascination
with spontaneity and the reconstruction of spatial milieus.1
This chapter will focus on the plays written over a three-year period
from 1969 to 1972, notably The Unseen Hand (1969), Operation Sidewinder,
Shaved Splits (1970), Cowboy Mouth (1971) (cowritten with Patti Smith), The
Mad Dog Blues (1971), and The Tooth of Crime (1972). An analysis of the
characters’ search for selfhood in these plays reveals the functioning of both
figurative and literal masks in a similar manner to the employment of masks
in Alfred Jarry’s Theatre. While the influence of the dramatic theories of
Artaud highlights the surreal undercurrent of their conception, Surrealism

also emerges in production in their surreal scenography. The abundance and
incongruous juxtaposition of “objects,” for instance, invites comparisons
with the Surrealist Object, le objet surréaliste, closely related to the glorifica-
tion of the “brand” in Pop Art. Moreover, Bataille’s writings on the absence
of myth from the 1940s offer a new means of contextualizing Shepard’s
resurrection of ritual in the creation of myth in the context of Surrealism.
In addition to the formal developments in Shepard’s writing, which wit-
ness the extension of the vignette “tableau” style of his earlier plays into
longer more plot-driven narratives, Shepard extends his artistic focus from
microcosmic examinations of particularly familial relationships to larger
perspectives of American society as a whole. Such a deliberation could not
ignore the political turmoil of this era. With the exception of Cowboy Mouth,
which contains a more reflective depiction of inner turmoil, plays such as
Shaved Splits and Operation Sidewinder have a political emphasis, which tend
to bow more to satire than to mere political comment. These plays suggest a
luxuriance in material abundance, evident in the saturation of brand names
and references to popular culture throughout: “tootsie rolls,” “Jimi Hendrix,”
“Elvis Presley,” “Coca-Cola,” “Chevvys,” and so on. Shepard equally explores
the self-contrivance of identity, a pursuit that aligns his interests with those
of Andy Warhol and Pop Art in general. Additionally, Shepard’s characteriza-
tion becomes increasingly superficial as he “borrows” the identities of “ready-
made” Hollywood celebrities and American mythic heroes as simulacra that
fulfill required roles in an explicitly superficial manner—Mae West, Marlene
Dietrich, Paul Bunyan, Jesse James, and so on. Thus, in The Mad Dog Blues
and in The Unseen Hand, for example, characters are resurrected from the
folklore of the past and incongruously superimposed onto a contemporary
setting. Likewise, in Operation Sidewinder, war imagery surreally mingles
with an Indian chanting sermon. In musical terms, while the improvisatory
nature of Shepard’s earlier plays invited comparison with jazz, this is replaced
by an almost apotheosizing belief in the redemptive power of rock music.
Cowboy Mouth, for example, represents an existential search for a savior, albeit
a “rock-and-roll Jesus with a cowboy mouth,”2 because the great American
icons that he references are no longer accessible.
THE SEARCH FOR SELFHOOD

The Mad Dog Blues, subtitled a Two-Act Adventure Show, opens with a par-
ticularly deconstructive theatrical device whereby the actors deliver their
own self-reflexive character descriptions to the audience:
Kosmo: Kosmo. Tall, lean, angular, wolflike. Leads with his cock. Intuitive
decisions based on a leaking-roof brain. Lots of dashing images. Taken
Myth, Ritual , and a Search for Selfhood 23
with himself as a man with the ladies. Has a sadomasochist hid in his
closet. Fights him off in favor of a more heroic pose. Has no control over
his primeval violence. Hates politics, philosophy, and religion. Asks for
God’s help. Gropes in the dark without a game. Invents one without no
meaning. Gives the impression from the outside that he’s winning. Moves
from spot to spot across the planet hoping to find a home. (291)
This description recalls the protagonist of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896),
a character Harris Smith describes as “the image of man as a foolish and
menacing creature reflected in a magnifying mirror, his depraved and
vicious nature grotesquely distorted to reveal his essential animal qualities.”3
Both characters reveal the outward manifestations of animalistic impulses.
Kosmo and Yahoodi appear as “types” but with incongruous props: Kosmo
is a “rock-and-roll star,” who “carries a conga drum” while Yahoodi, “his
sidekick,” is “[d]ressed like a big-city dope dealer” but “carries an Indian
flute” (290). By physically staging figures from America’s mythic past in
a contemporary setting, Shepard dramatizes how his characters’ present
vision is clouded by their past. They are amplified versions of preordained
stereotyped roles, emphasizing a deficient individuality. In these plays,
the interrogation of the notion of identity becomes a pressing concern
for Shepard. In an interview with Michael Almereyda in 1994, Shepard
addressed the notion of personality as construct: “Don’t you have the feel-
ing that we all develop masks [ . . . ] layers of masks, and these masks make
up a personality, a persona, and if you stripped these away what you come
down to would be something completely different? An essence. Something
more pure—or nothing at all.”4 In The Mad Dog Blues, the distance from a
“core” self is doubly removed when the character “types” employ “ridiculous
disguises” half way through Act One—“beards and masks and stuff ” (306).
The stage directions instruct that “[f ]alse noses would be good ” in an obvi-
ous allusion to the masks employed in Ubu Roi which, according to Harris
Smith introduced “satiric masking [to] the modern stage.”5 Connectedly,
the use of stereotype and cliché works to mask the characters’ individual-
ized personal traits in a manner similar to Jarry’s employment of primitive
masks and monstrous costumes as a precursor to Surrealism. Christopher
Innes’s description of Jarry’s Ubu Roi furthers this connection: “It is in
this sense that the staging for Ubu Roi should be understood: a contradic-
tory synthesis of incongruities, liberating the imagination by the unusual
juxtaposition of everyday objects, and simultaneously offering an alterna-
tive universe in which anything is possible.”6 However, this description
could easily relate to Shepard’s plays of this period. With this in mind,
Shepard’s characters play their roles as masks that conceal an “essence”
“[s]omething more pure,” or a void. As the Snap, Crackle, and Pop rep-
resentatives of a kitsch popular culture, their brassiness and psychedelic
nature are augmented to compensate for the void at their core. Hence, these
plays can be considered as a searching penetration into the very notion of
selfhood, an attempt to give shape to that “essence” and to liberate the
repressed, a distinctly Surrealist pursuit.
In these plays, Shepard pilfers the collective unconscious of America, yet
this effort seems paradoxically doomed to failure by the postmodern form it
takes. In line with the American Pop artists of the 1960s, an artistic move-
ment, which simultaneously satirized the very culture it revered, Shepard’s
cross-examination of the concept of individuality recalls Baudrillard’s trea-
tise on the postmodern self:
Identity is a dream pathetic in its absurdity. You dream of being yourself when
you’ve nothing better to do. [ . . . ] Identity is this obsession with recognition
of the liberated being, but liberated in a vacuum, and with no idea at all now
where he is. It’s an existence label. All energies—of peoples, entire minori-
ties and individuals—are concentrated today on this derisory affirmation,
this statement bereft of pride: I am! I exist! I’m alive, I’m called so-and-so,
I’m European! You have to prove the obvious and, having done so, suddenly
it’s not obvious at all.7
To analyze Baudrillard’s words, identity, in these plays, is an absurd dream,

and the pursuit of selfhood is irrational in the dreamscapes of the plays.
Baudrillard’s definition of identity as a “liberated being . . . in a vacuum”
recalls Shepard’s implication that we employ masks to disguise our hollow
existence. Thus, the Young Man’s following affirmation in Operation
Sidewinder (his very name an abstract classification for the new generation)
seems vacuously in vain:
I am from the planet Crypton. No. I am from the Hollywood Hills. No.
I am from Freak City. [ . . . ] I am an American though. [ . . . ] I am truly an
American. I was made in America. Born, bred and raised. I have American
blood. I dream American dreams. I fuck American girls. I devour the planet.
I’m an earth eater.8
However, Baudrillard considered simulation as the obvious progression of

Surrealism, because Surrealism still utilized realism in its attempt to destroy
reality and only “augments [realism’s] intensity by setting it off against the
imaginary.”9 According to Baudrillard:
The hyperreal represents a much more advanced phase, in the sense that even
this contradiction between the real and the imaginary is effaced. The unreal
is no longer that of dream and of fantasy, of a beyond or a within, it is that of
a hallucinatory resemblance of the real itself.10
In the context of the young man’s speech in Operation Sidewinder, he cannot

actually pinpoint his specific origins. All he knows is that he is an American.
Thus “American-ness” becomes a simulacrum of the self. Shepard strips the
whole of the American being to the core; his characters search for substance,
sustenance, and verification of the indispensability of their very existence.
Surrealism is evident in these plays in the in-between dimension that the
characters occupy, between the self and the role, between a “core” that may
have an “essence” but, which also may be a void, and a palimpsest of a role,
that of a cowboy or a Hollywood movie star for instance. Highlighting the
influence of surrealism, verbal action painting, and the Happenings phase
of the 1960s Off-Off Broadway movement on La Turista, Wayne Stengel
posits that “the problem for every Shepard character, like the dilemma for
Kent and Salem, is not only knowing whether they are locked inside or out-
side of some conventional reality, but if there is or, is not, a means of passage
between these outside-inside worlds.”11
The postmodern form that the search for selfhood takes in these plays
reveals the futility of such an endeavor. Thus I argue that rather than whole-
heartedly embracing postmodernism, Shepard exploits postmodernism in
his dramatic objective to underscore the lack of authenticity in contempo-
rary society. In these plays and especially in The Tooth of Crime, Shepard
seems to be critiquing postmodernism that indicates, as Leonard Wilcox has
suggested,12 a discomfort with the form. I will discuss this in greater detail in
chapter 5 in relation to the theatre pieces that Shepard cowrote with Joseph
Chaikin where the boundaries between actor, character, and performer dis-
solve and the “attitudes” that emerge are ones of pretense, role-playing, and
an “acting-out” of selfhood. Certainly, the aforementioned quotation from
Shepard’s interview with Almereyda (p. 23) suggests that the interrogation
of the self was a personal as well as an artistic concern for the playwright.
Yet Shepard’s deliberately superficial approach to characterization in these
plays also invites comparisons with the Theatre of the Absurd. In particular,
Esslin’s description of the tendency in absurdist theatre to “present the audi-
ence with almost mechanical puppets”13 resonates here. In The Unseen Hand,
for example, Blue relies on his primordial instincts: “I’m a simple man. I eat
simple. I talk simple and I think simple.”14 Willie speaks of an oppressively
governed Orwellian “Nogoland” where even the thoughts of the Nogo are
controlled, indirectly alluding to America’s political upheaval during the
late 1960s. The word “Nogo,” according to Ron Mottram, could be read
as a variation of the Greek and Christian word “Logos,” “the controlling
principle or divine word that is the primal creative force in the universe.”15
Shepard is suggesting here that the resurgence of the principles of a “lost”
America, metaphorically evoked by the resurrection of Blue’s cowboy broth-
ers Cisco and Sycamore, is needed to nourish the spiritual desiccation of
contemporary society. Willie declares that “The sorcerers and the Silent
Ones of the High Commission have lost all touch with human emotion”
and Blue’s presence would challenge them as he “would be too real for their
experience” (11). Yet these “cowboys” are caricatures of the Old West; they
act as a code or a signifier for a “real” America that was never actually real
in the first place.
In Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present, RoseLee Goldberg observes
that early Surrealist performances did not particularly submit to the autom-
atist processes that the Surrealists advocated and that their plots, albeit fan-
tastical, were straightforward and easy to follow. In particular, Goldberg
references Apollinaire’s Sky Blue (1918) as being “about three young space-
ship adventurers who, finding their ideal woman to be one and the same
lady, destroy themselves.”16 Similarly, these plays by Shepard appear to fol-
low more conventional patterns of plot, although their stage imagery still
belongs to the surreal. The oneiric scenography for The Unseen Hand reveals
this, for instance; near the play’s conclusion: “[ . . . ] Day-Glo painted Ping-
Pong balls start to fall from the ceiling passing through black light as they fall
and bouncing on the stage [ . . . ]” (35). These plays actively engage popular
culture and are “littered” with the branded paraphernalia of contemporary
America; Blue’s opening monologue in The Unseen Hand references a col-
lage of typically American insignias—the Chevy, the highway, “Bob’s Big
Boy,” double-decker cheeseburgers and “Mercurys and Hudson Hornets”
(6–7). First staged at La Mama Experimental Theatre Club in 1969, this
play is a celebration of American iconography as recognizable as the Star
Spangled Banner. The play is set in the small town of Azusa—“‘A’, ‘Z,’ ‘U,’
‘S,’ ‘A.’ ‘Everything from “A” to “Z” in the USA.’ Azusa” (8). The town’s
very name suggests clutter, baggage even, surplus goods. The setting for
Operation Sidewinder is more indulgent, requiring a mechanical large side-
winder snake, a Volkswagen on a hydraulic lift, a ’57 Chevy convertible,
a large hotdog sign, and an elaborate concluding Hopi ceremony. On the
other hand, the set for Cowboy Mouth foreshadows Tracey Emin’s contro-
versial Turner award-nominated My Bed (1998). Shepard’s play featured the
following
A fucked-up bed center stage. Raymond, a dead crow, on the floor. Scattered
all around the floor is miscellaneous debris: hubcaps, an old tire, raggedy
costumes, a boxful of ribbons, lots of letters, a pink telephone, a bottle of
Nescafé, a hot plate. Seedy wallpaper with pictures of cowboys peeling off
the wall. Photographs of Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers. Stuffed dolls,
crucifixes. License plates from Southern states nailed to the wall. Travel
poster of Panama. A funky set of drums to one side of the stage. An electric
guitar and amplifier on the other side. Rum, beer, white lightning, Sears
catalogue.17
The set description, replete with cowboy imagery (albeit already “peeling”
away), evokes canonical figures from the American country music reper-
toire and, in a nod to contemporary consumerist culture, a Sears’s cata-
logue. Citing Marc Robinson, Stephen Watt demonstrates how the “things”
in Shepard’s plays, “—biscuits, books, Ping-Pong balls, and in True West
the dozens of toasters Lee steals—both possess the qualities of everydayness
and accrue ‘preposterous new importance’ by catalyzing the possibility of
‘new departures’ and ‘fresh responses.’”18 Watt also compares the treatment
of objects in Shepard’s work to “the connotations of the Beckettian relating
to ‘thing theory’ and Badiou’s ‘event.’”19 Robinson’s and Watt’s observations
on the manner in which everyday objects in Shepard’s work have the agency
to shift meaning, and assume, in Robinson’s words, “totemic status,” invite
comparisons with the objet surréaliste, the Surrealist object. Breton lauded
Lautréamont’s maxim of the beauty of “the chance meeting of an umbrella
and a sewing machine on a dissection table,” as the definitive Surrealist
image. In Lautréamont’s description, two incompatible objects meet in a
discordant environment, just as in The Unseen Hand where a “space freak,”
a cowboy and a drunken high school cheerleader meet on a set littered with
the detritus of the present—“garbage, tin cans, cardboard boxes, Coca-Cola
bottles and other junk” (5). Correspondingly, the Surrealists also vigor-
ously absorbed popular culture. Robert Hughes, for instance, has written
on the Surrealists’ penchant for “junk” as a surrogate for the natural world.
Removed from their habitual contexts these objects offered alternative
meanings that satisfied the Surrealist taste for disorientation:
Nature hardly mattered to the Surrealists. Their substitute for the variety of
nature was the intricacy of culture—the endless profusion of manufactured
objects that washed up in the Flea Market. Fifty years ago, junk was junk,
not “antiques” or “collectibles.” [ . . . ] It was like the unconscious mind of
Capitalism itself: it contained the rejected or repressed surplus of objects, the
losers, the outcast thoughts. There, in a real place the sewing machine met
the umbrella on the operating table—20
Objects operate in Shepard’s plays in an identical manner, as “the uncon-

scious mind of Capitalism,” the residual surplus of a culture already saturated
by the image. Bereft of any authentic symbolism in society, or, as in Surrealist
art, the natural world, which has been subsumed by motorways and gas sta-
tions, all the characters have left is contemporaneous “junk.” Yet, as Wayne
Stengel argues, these objects ineffectually fulfill their ritualistic function:
First, Shepard revels in the icons, the totems and taboos, of popular culture,
including the horror movie and the western and gangster genres. But as a
parodist of these forms, he remains deeply distrustful of their ability to give
a unifying vision or a sacramental, almost religious meaning to a society that

has lost other, more basic kinds of myth.21
Indeed, ritual, in these plays, has become misplaced. The saturation of ref-
erences to pop culture implies that the consumerist adulation of material
wealth has a sacramental resonance. Shepard critiques this ritualistic devo-
tion, lamenting the loss of “true” myth. The Mad Dog Blues for instance, is a
salutation to the traditional heroes of American folklore and the Hollywood
stage. Yet the roles he resurrects are mere simulacra of identities and “types”
that are, figuratively and literally speaking, dead and buried. Thus, Shepard
looks to the present and what he considers to be the potential of rock music
to create a new sense of ritual, as in Cowboy Mouth for instance, which will
be discussed later on in this chapter.
These plays actively ignore the boundaries between “high” and “low”
culture, just as the Surrealists “recognized that such phenomena as cinema,
comics, penny dreadfuls, dime novels, naïve art, and so on, represented a
detritus, what was usually excluded from bourgeois art and yet often con-
tained its cultural contradiction, which meant that it provided fertile ground
in which myths capable of motivating a new sensibility could be sown.”22
In these plays, Shepard certainly acknowledges contemporary America; for
instance, Shaved Splits contains an exhaustive list of references to popular
culture: “Cheeseburger Hard-On,” Mick Jagger, Times Square, “The Truth
Behind the Hell’s Angels” (a possible reference to the killing of a fan by a
Hell’s Angels member while they were “policing” a Rolling Stones concert
at Altamont in 1969), “How L.S.D. Sent Me to the Gas Chamber,” Cassius
Clay, Ringo Starr, Vietnam, “Hippie Harlots,” and so on.23
According to Natalya Lusty,
[t]he logic of the Surrealist object, like that of Surrealist identity, in its persis-
tent employment of the alter-ego, implicitly involves strategies of displacement
and doubling, requiring us to look at what has been as well as what it might
become—a strategy that registers the object and the subject’s signification
within a discourse of memory and desire.24
This invites comparisons with Bill Brown’s “thing theory.” According to

Gould, the Surrealist artist “feels he must become actively involved in the
existences of [ . . . ] objects and seeks to form a whole with them. [ . . . ] He
desires to devour the images about him, to ravish the world of its image.” 25
Gould continues “as Dalí has written, this desire to become one with the
object eventually leads to the ultimate fusion: a desire “to eat the object.”26
By extension, such consummation of the self and the object also implies that
the consumer becomes the object—the brand, the image. Indeed, the use of
archetypal figures in these plays insinuates a two-dimensional objectifica-

tion of character that heightens the imagistic Surrealism of the plays. Gould
mentions four “basic attitudes” of Surrealism of which “The Imagistic” is
the first:27
The image is the basic element of Surrealism for it is an image-conscious sen-

sibility. For René Magritte, the Belgian painter, the bowler hat is the symbol
of the bourgeois European man, and Magritte’s men in bowlers are all types,
without individual personalities. It is the man-in-the-bowler-hat image that
excites Magritte, and not the man himself. 28
Hence, Shepard’s use of stock “types” satisfies the Surrealist desire for the
consumption of the object. This is most explicitly realized in the character-
ization of Crow in The Tooth of Crime (1972), who consists of fragmentary,
one-dimensional facets of character that comply with his own idea of the
image. His identity reveals itself as a self-invention; he has consumed the
image and is thus nothing but the image. Crow declares that he “can switch
to suit”29 and sings, “I believe in my mask—The man I made up is me”
(232). Crow’s views predict the postmodern self-ingestion of the image; but,
as I have discussed, they are also rooted in a Surrealist sensibility that cel-
ebrates the archetype as a catalyst, short-circuiting the audience’s emotional
responses to the playwright’s desired effect. Dalí’s views on the consumption
of the Surrealist object represent a shift from the interior focus in Surrealism
of psychic automatism to an external concretization of dream imagery and
are particularly resonant in the context of these plays.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
It is valuable at this point to consider these plays in comparison to Artaud’s
Le Jet de sang (The Jet of Blood) from 1927. The use of stock “types” in
Shepard’s work recalls Artaud’s characterization in his play, which features,
among other characters, a Young Man, a Young Girl, a Knight, a Nurse, a
Priest, and a Whore. Indeed, the stark similarities between Artaud’s play and
Operation Sidewinder should be noted here. Both feature a nameless Young
Man and stage directions that require almost unstageable cinematic effects:
a hurricane in The Jet of Blood, “[h]uge gusts of wind blow from upstage directly
out into the audience, changing from hot to cold” in Operation Sidewinder
(287). Similarly, The Mad Dog Blues was originally entitled Dog Meat and
subtitled “A Staged Film” in earlier drafts.30 The stage directions are partic-
ularly cinematic: At one stage the action “[c]ut[s] back to Captain Kidd and
Yahoodi” (328), characters antinaturalistically cover vast expanses of space
as cinematographic representation might allow: Kosmo “travels through
different terrain and arrives at Yahoodi” (298), and the characters instanta-
neously “travel south” as the stage direction demands (302). Following the
characters self-reflexive description of themselves, the lights black out and
theme music plays, fading as the lights go out in another particularly cin-
ematic device. Furthermore, the lighting effects in Artaud’s play and at the
end of Operation Sidewinder are almost identical. Both feature alternating
blackout with the simulated theatrical effect of lightning; Shepard’s play
contains the following stage direction:
A tremendous bolt of blue light issues from the sidewinder, matched by one in
the sky. Thunder booms. The sky lights up blue again. The combination of
the voices chanting reaches an incredible shrieking, like lightning. The whole
scene crackles like high-voltage wires. (285)
This is remarkably similar to Artaud’s stage direction: “Thunder rages,

lightning zigzags in all directions, and during the lightning flashes you see
all the characters begin to run, get in each other’s way, fall down, pick them-
selves up, and run like madmen.”31 Furthermore, the Young Man asserts his
identity at the beginning of Artaud’s play in a manner similar to the self-
congratulatory statement of self by the Young Man in Shepard’s Operation
Sidewinder: “I am tall, I am clear, I am full, I am dense.”32
My argument thus far has demonstrated how, like Artaud, Shepard’s plays
reflect an endeavor to stage an internal reality liberated from traditional the-
atrical accentuations of motive, character development, and psychological
turmoil by appealing to the raw impetuous drives, an attempt to find the
“essence” behind the mask so to speak. These plays also reproduce Artaud’s
contention that the self-conscious nature of theatre should not be denied.
According to Innes, Artaud believed that “[p]resenting conventional social
themes or psychological characterization exacerbated the fundamental inau-
thenticity of stage performance, because it simply reinforced the falsified
world of appearances; consequently theatre could only escape from pretense
by setting its own standard for what is real.”33 Shepard’s plays indeed set their
own standard for what is real. His plays from this era need to be considered in
light of this subjective reality, one which I argue comes from a Surrealist ori-
gin. The unapologetic and brash portrayal of violence in these plays—the rape
scenes and murder in Operation Sidewinder, the gratuitous killing in Shaved
Splits—are in line with Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty” and his manipulation
of violence as an instrument to elicit a pure innate response from the audience.
Artaud wrote in “The Theatre of Cruelty: First Manifesto” (1932):
The theatre cannot become itself again—that is, it cannot constitute a means
of true illusion—until it provides the spectator with the truthful precipitates
of dreams in which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his fan-
tasies, his utopian sense of life and of things, even his cannibalism, pour out on a
level that is not counterfeit and illusory but internal.34
In a similar vein, Shepard wrote the following in a notebook from 1969:

“Draw primitive visions and feelings into the open [ . . . ] find areas of corre-
spondence in people’s submerged minds.”35 Both writers endeavor to unearth
the primal and the use of archetypal characterization allows them to “corre-
spond” to the myths embedded in the audience’s “submerged” unconscious.
RITUAL
From 1935 to 1936 Artaud lived with, and studied the rituals of, the
Tarahumara tribe of Northern Mexico, and the investigation of indigenous
cultures became a vital element of his drama. Surrealism glorified indigenous
ethnic tribes as “primitive” societies, which, like the writings of the mentally
insane, were exalted for their perceived authenticity. The Surrealists pursued
an anticolonialist stance as early as 1925 when they actively supported the
Riff tribesmen’s plight against the French authorities in Morocco.36 In 1931,
they mounted a counter-exhibition to the Paris Colonial Exhibition at the
Bois de Vincennes titled “L’Exposition Anticoloniale” expressing this anti-
colonialist sentiment. Furthermore, the Surrealists designed their own map
of the world in 1929, which highlighted the continents and countries that
they considered had the greatest connection to the unconscious and irratio-
nality. Shepard’s plays from the late 1960s/early 1970s feature a similar exal-
tation of the tribal, particularly the rituals of the Hopi Native Americans.
Shepard has demonstrated a ritualistic approach to theatre, an aspect of his
drama that Michael Smith recognized in an early review of the first joint
production of The Rock Garden and Cowboys at Theatre Genesis in 1964.
Smith wrote a rave review of the production for The Village Voice, one that
cemented Shepard’s reputation and contributed to his success:
The plays are difficult to categorize, and I’m not sure it would be valuable to
try. [ . . . ] Shepard is still feeling his way, working with an intuitive approach
to language and dramatic structure and moving into an area between ritual
and naturalism, where character transcends psychology, fantasy breaks down
literalism, and the patterns of ordinariness have their own lives. His is a
gestalt theater which evokes the existence behind behavior. Shepard clearly
is aware of previous work in this mode, mostly by Europeans, but his voice is
distinctly American and his own.37
Smith’s description of Shepard’s theatre as “an intuitive approach to lan-

guage and dramatic structure [ . . . ] moving into an area between ritual and
naturalism,” his detection of fantasy in Shepard’s work, and his acknow-

ledgement of “mostly European” theatrical influences all suggest comparisons
with Surrealism.
The elaborate Hopi snake dance at the end of Operation Sidewinder dem-
onstrates the most overt example of Shepard’s utilization of ritualized behav-
ior in an attempt at spiritual restoration. The Young Man and Honey, under
trance, are lured into a wikiup where they don traditional Indian costumes
and are symbolically united in a sacred ceremony. In an attempt to coun-
teract the effects of the Hopi chanting, the Young Man recites the Lord’s
Prayer. Yet, this ineffectually neutralizes the trance-inducing consequences
of the incantatory music. Christianity is by extension placed as subsidiary to
the sacred powers of the tribe, in a manner akin to the Surrealists’ attitude
toward it—at their anticolonialist exhibition in 1931, Christian iconography
was accompanied by the label “European Fetishes,” an irreverent comment
on their lack of faith in Western religiosity. A similar veneration of sacred
tribal beliefs is evident in The Holy Ghostly (1969) where a Chindi, what the
Navajo Indians believe to be the spirit of the dead, plays a prominent role. In
The Unseen Hand (1969), Shepard’s appropriation of the Morphan brothers
as stock figures from the Old American West—two cowboys and a third,
Sycamore Morphan, the “Bat Masterson” (23) lookalike—suggests the play-
wright’s resurrection of myth in the creation of ritual.
On ritual and Surrealism, Roger Caillois writes that
[r]itual realizes the myth and allows people to experience it. This is why we
find that myth and ritual are so frequently united; in fact they are indis-
sociable, and their divorce has always brought about their decline. Detached
from ritual, myth loses most of its exalting force—its capacity to be lived—if
not its raison d’être.38
Similarly, Bataille’s writings on myth from the 1940s demonstrated that “it is
necessary first of all to re-create the notion of ritual in a society within which
the value it represented (that is, the value of community) has been destroyed
by the ideology of Christianity, which was the basis of capitalism.”39 In a
related manner Shepard, in conversation with Rosen in the early 1990s,
spoke of the absence of myth in contemporary society and how myth is
devoid of a singular objective truth:
There’s myth in the sense of a lie. There’s myth in the sense of fantasy. There’s
myth in all those senses. But the traditional meaning of myth, the ancient
meaning of myth is that it served a purpose in our life. The purpose had
to do with being able to trace ourselves back through time and follow our
emotional self.
Myth served as a story in which people could connect themselves to the

present and the future. Because they were hooked up with the lineage of
myth. It was so powerful and so strong that it acted as a thread in culture.
And that’s been destroyed.
Myth in its truest form has now been demolished. It doesn’t exist any-
more. All we have is fantasies about it. Or ideas that don’t speak to our inner
self at all, they just speak to some lame notions about the past. But they don’t
connect with anything. We’ve lost touch with the essence of myth.40
The critical analysis of the role of myth in Shepard’s plays is a well-traversed

field by reviewers of his work. Shepard addresses contemporary myth as
simulation, as something that can only now exist in surreal fantasy, as an
element that is out of synchronization with the “inner self.” He thus uses
ritual in his plays as a means of reestablishing this lost connection with
myth. As Bigsby proposes, in Shepard’s plays the imagined is as potent as
that which exists:
[ . . . ] Shepard is drawn to the mythical world of heartland America as his

characters act out mythic roles, the embodiment of a culture hooked on
dreams. There is no reality outside the imagination of those who perform their
dramas in a world which is an extension of their own psyches. Reality is never
stable in Shepard’s plays. The America his characters manufacture serves the
purpose of their own needs, which are rooted less in history than in a private
set of anxieties and images [ . . . ]. The frontier they explore has less to do with
the landscape they inhibit than with their own state of mind.41
Bigsby suggests that the America that Shepard’s characters resurrect is a

subjective one, implying a carefully built version of reality unregulated by
obligations to actuality. This reality is one that directly corresponds to the
characters’ “private set of anxieties and images.”
In a note to the English edition of The Unseen Hand, Shepard wrote
that “everybody’s caught up in a fraction world that they can’t even see,”42
alluding to the fragmentation of contemporary discourse. Willie speaks of
the prisoners of Nogoland as systemized detainees, as incapable of original
thought, and as likely to self-combust. Willie describes them as
People, like you and me, but with a strange history and stranger powers.
These powers could work for the good of mankind if allowed to unfold into
their natural creativity. But if they continue as they are they will surely work
for evil, or, worse, they will turn it on themselves and commit a horrible mass
suicide that may destroy the universe. (21)
In other words, the new system will eventually devour itself. The ending
of The Unseen Hand is disconcerting: Cisco and Blue decide that in order
to survive, they too must become institutionalized into modernity and lose
their identities:
Cisco: We could change our names. Get a haircut, some new threads. Blend
right in.
Sycamore: That’s it. That’s the ticket. I could get me an office job easy
enough.
Cisco: Sure. Western Union. Pacific Gas and Electric. Plenty of places.
Sycamore: Settle down with a nice little pension. Get me a car maybe.
Cisco: Yeah boy. And one a’ them lawnmowers ya’ sit on like a tractor.
Sycamore: Sure. We could fit right into the scheme a’ things. (37)
Cisco subsequently decides to leave Azusa with Blue, but Sycamore remains,
exactly in the same predicament as we found Blue at the beginning of the
play. To him, any attempt at change or redemption is in vain—Sycamore
recognizes that the entire scenario “[s]eemed unreal from the start anyhow”
(37). Any chance of true originality or self-sufficiency appears ultimately
futile and his speech at the end seems contradictory. The Morphan brothers
are slaves to history; they are ciphers that allude to a withering vision of the
American mythic, a vision that, as Shepard himself has professed, is already
defunct. Cisco and Blue associate self-authority with colluding to stereo-
typical notions of bourgeois complacency. Sycamore, on the other hand,
chooses suburban marginalization, while the world flashes by him. Neither
approach guarantees liberty, and the existence of an alternative survival, not
even considered. In this sense, Sycamore’s concluding monologue cannot be
read as anything but definitively sardonic:
That’s the great thing about this country, ya’ know. The fact that you can
make yer own moves in yer own time without some guy behind the scenes
pullin’ the switches on ya’. May be a far cry from bein’ free, but it sure comes
closer than most anything I’ve seen. (38)
Shepard’s refusal to reconcile the ending of this play and his avoidance of
images of healing again shield this work from accusations of mere indul-
gent ostentation and, as I have suggested, parodist superficiality. The Unseen
Hand is undoubtedly a postmodern play, but its representation of myth
relates to Bataille’s “The Absence of Myth,” written for a catalog for the
exhibition Le Surréalisme en 1947 in Paris. On myth, Bataille wrote:
The decisive absence of faith is resolute faith. The fact that a universe without
myth is the ruin of the universe—reduced to the nothingness of things—in
the process of depriving us equates deprivation with the revelation of the
universe. If by abolishing the mythic universe we have lost the universe, the
action of a revealing loss is itself connected to the death of the myth. And
today, because a myth is dead or dying, we see through it more easily than if
it were alive: it is the need that perfects the transparency, the suffering which
makes the suffering become joyful.
“Night is also the sun,” and the absence of myth is also a myth: the coldest,
the purest, the only true myth.43
Throughout the 1940s, Bataille interrogated the absence of myth in contem-

porary society, notably the lack of ancient myth, which had functioned as a
means of cementing the link between humankind and the natural world.44
But, as Michael Richardson writes, “[b]oth Bataille and the Surrealists were
convinced that [ . . . ] contemporary society was as much in need of mythi-
cal foundation as any other society, and by denying that fact it was simply
making a fetish of its absence and denying part of itself.”45 Hence, the lack
of belief in myth in contemporary society was, according to Bataille, a myth
itself. According to Richardson:
For Bataille, the profound sense of Surrealism lay in the fact that it recog-
nized the falsity of rationalism’s ideological claims to define what is ‘real.’
Such a concept destroys the notion of myth, just as it becomes itself what it
denies: reality is a myth. [ . . . ] The crucial point here is that everything about
the concept of reality is mythical. Nothing solid responds to this state: the
only reality we can know is defined by the use we make of myth to define our
ontological principles. The thrust of Western civilization has been to deny
this mythical basis, and to posit reality as an ontological given that can be
located and conquered.46
Like the “true” West that Shepard explicitly laments the loss of in his 1980
play of the same name, “reality” is exposed in The Unseen Hand as a myth.
The Nogoland that Willie describes, where the thoughts of the “prisoners
of the Diamond Cult” are policed by the “Unseen Hand” of the “Sorcerers
of the High Commission,” relies on its degree of unreality. According to
Willie, “[t]hey exist in almost a purely telepathic intellectual state” (11).
Their world would be threatened by the arrival of the Morphan broth-
ers who, according to Willie, would render their “technology and magic”
useless and could conquer the “sorcerers and the Silent Ones of the High
Commission” since they “would be too real for their experience” (11). By
extension, the Morphan Brothers occupy the realm of the hyperreal, but
the very conditions of “reality” that the Brothers represent are dubious:
Cisco and Sycamore are resurrected from the dead, while Blue, described
as “slightly drunk” at the onset of the play, has already been addressing an
imaginary character as the play opens; thus the entire scenario could simply
be a dramatization of his imagination. Furthermore, the personal history of
the Morphan brothers approaches legendary mythologization: a threesome

of cowboy outlaws “Robbin’, rapin’ and killin’” (17) who “used to bring a
whole town to a standstill just by ridin’ in” (25). The conditions of real-
ity that the fantastical world of Nogoland strives for are hence suspect in
their claims of reality, satisfying Surrealism’s contention that reality itself
is a myth.
THE TOOTH OF CRIME (1972)

According to Roland Barthes, “[t]he function of myth is to empty reality:
it is, literally, a ceaseless flowing out, a hemorrhage, or perhaps an evapo-
ration, in short a perceptible absence.”47 He writes, “We must remember
again that the privation of meaning is in no way a zero degree: this is why
myth can perfectly well get hold of it, give it for instance the signification of
the absurd, of Surrealism, etc.”48 Hence, in Barthes’s words myth can instill
“reality” deprived of meaning with a surreality. Barthes also sees myth as
“always a language robbery,”49 which is particularly pertinent to The Tooth
of Crime. In this play, words themselves ritualize in an incantatory manner.
Imagistic stimuli accrue in a crescendo, a saturation of words and images
that overwhelm our sensual digestion. The ritualization of language sug-
gests an attempt to create new myths. But the superfluity of the hedonis-
tic word play impedes the audience’s search for meaning. Words are to be
viscerally received and they are to have a certain effect on the audience.
Language digresses from its former meaning or context and is thus revealed
to be nonsensical and frustrating. Shepard makes his audience work. He has
declared the desired effect of his drama on the audience to be one of emo-
tional modification: “[h]opefully it would be something that would trans-
form the emotions of the people watching. People come into the theatre
in very different circumstances, expecting something to happen, and then
hopefully when they walk out of the theatre the chemistry’s changed.”50
Jeanette R. Malkin also acknowledges a similarity between this experimen-
tal theatrical emphasis on the play’s reception and its basic premise: “The
audience’s insecurity and difficulty, the alienation induced by the aggres-
sion of incomprehensible language and seemingly random codes, produce
an emotional correlative to the play’s theme, clearly articulated in Act II, of
shifting and tentative discourses, of a loss of tradition and life-sustaining
roots.”51 Shepard’s use of words, then, is not intended to convey meaning
but rather to function in an incantatory manner akin to Artaud’s writings
on the function of language in theatre: “To change the function of speech
in the theatre is to use it in a concrete and spatial sense, combining it with
everything in the theatre that is spatial and of significance in the concrete
domain;—to manipulate it like a solid object, one which overturns and

disturbs things [ . . . ].”52
Don Shewey connects the language in The Tooth of Crime with
Surrealism. He deems it “a sinister American rock-talk corollary to Lewis
Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” or the tongue of the droogs in Anthony Burgess’s
A Clockwork Orange [ . . . ].”53 A kaleidoscope of diagnostic images confront
the audience, initially appearing familiar. However, the incongruous jargon
soon upsets this familiarity, as Galactic Jack’s first speech indicates:
That’s me Jim. Heavy duty and on the whim. Back flappin’, side trackin’,
finger poppin’, reelin’ rockin’ with the tips on the picks in the great killer
race. All tricks, no sale, no avail. It’s in the can and on the lam. Grease it,
daddyo! (209)
Galactic Jack highlights the emptiness of the language. It is “[a]ll tricks, no

sale, no avail.” The employment of myth has emptied language of reality
and created a surreality in its place.
The Tooth of Crime, as a hyperreal matrix of dominance, resistance,
power, seduction, and high and low culture, where the partitions between
media and medium have already dissolved, reveals Shepard’s most explicit
dramatization of the postmodern condition. Yet the hybridity of references
also produces a distinctly surreal effect, as Bruce W. Powe has detected: “In
this play, Shepard creates a texture of language and music that echoes these
distinctly American traditions and concerns by using songs, slang, profan-
ity, quotations from rock hits, and words themselves as music. The form is
surreal, yet anchored in a realistic frame, the rock music scene.”54 Similarly,
Powe points out that the song at the beginning of the play—“The Way
Things Are”—presents “another sleep-walkin’ dream” (203), informing the
audience that the performance they are about to experience is beyond real-
ism: “it will have the Surrealism of a dream, the violence of surprise, the
playfulness of one adept with illusion.”55 Hoss and Crow come to blows in
a twentieth-century western showdown, an amalgam of a boxing match, a
Hip-Hop contest, a chart race to the top and a gang war; all are “ready-made”
prototypes of plot. Like Pop Art, the artistry emerges in the selection and
not the conception. Shepard utilizes cliché brazenly—via stereotype, plot,
gangland to computer slang, again indulging in preconstructed literary for-
mations and various forms of contextual terminology, that of the disc jockey
for instance. Words are used as brand names—the packaging indicative of
the content, stemming from an interest in the symbolic use of words in writ-
ers such as Stéphane Mallarmé, as referenced in Cowboy Mouth, from whom
the title of the play is borrowed.
Similarly, Shepard resurrects primitive rituals in this play in a futile

attempt to inject the contemporary with authenticity. In Act Two Hoss is
described as “a menacing ancient spirit” similar to a “voodoo man.”
Hoss: Yo’ “yeah” is tryin’ to shake a lie, boy. The radio’s lost the jungle. You
can’t hear that space ‘tween the radio and the jungle.
Crow: It’s in my blood. I got genius.
Hoss: Fast fingers don’t mean they hold magic. That’s lost to you, dude.
That’s somethin’ sunk on another continent and I don’t mean Atlantis.
You can dig where the true rhymes hold down. Yo’ blood know that if
nothin’ else. (238)
Hoss berates his opponent for not hearing “that space ‘tween the radio and
the jungle” because “[f]ast fingers don’t mean they hold magic.” In other
words Hoss considers Crow to be an imitative palimpsest of an image that
has long lost its claim to authenticity.
However much Hoss may lament the loss of authenticity, he longs for a
vision of the past that never really existed: “Rolling night clubs, strip joints.
Bustin’ up poker games. Zip guns in the junk yard. Rock fights, dirt clods,
bustin’ windows. Vandals, juvies, West Side Story” (216). Crow, on the
other hand, an empty carcass of an image devoid of morality, revels in the
vocabulary of the present. In conversation with Kenneth Chubb, Shepard
has addressed the pluralities of personality, how identity can be molded by
innate forces:
[ . . . ] you see somebody, and you have an impression of that person from
seeing them—the way they talk and behave—but underneath many, many
different possibilities could be going on. [ . . . ] It’s not as though you started
out with a character who suddenly developed into another character—it’s the
same character, who’s enlivened by animals, or demons, or whatever’s inside
of him. Everybody’s like that [ . . . ].56
The Tooth of Crime essentially dramatizes Hoss’s personal endgame with

Crow as encroaching modernity. Crow cannot be nostalgic for he has no his-
tory to mourn—his language is sharper, slicker, more rhythmically refined
than his opponent’s whose glorification of “shootin’ honest pool” and play-
ing from the heart are portrayed as ludicrous. Hoss craves old-fashioned
values that are irrelevant and defunct in this new world. But Crow reveals
Hoss’s inauthenticity, exposing him as a sham who also adopts personae and
disguises like his adversary:
Tries trainin’ his voice to sound like a frog. Sound like a Dylan, sound like
a Jagger, sound like an earthquake all over the Fender. Wearin’ a shag now,
looks like a fag now. [ . . . ] Can’t get it together for all of his tryin’. Can’t
get it together for fear that he’s dyin’. Fear that he’s crackin’ busted in two.
Busted in three parts. Busted in four. Busted and dyin’ and cryin’ for more.
Busted and bleedin’ all over the floor. All bleedin’ and wasted and tryin’ to
score. (241)
The tragedy of this play lies in the fact that Hoss represents an apocryphal
entity that can be superseded. Shepard critiques Rock and Roll’s failure to
acknowledge its roots in folk, black soul music, and jazz. He likewise refers
to the electrification of rock music, a precedent established by Bob Dylan
to whom Shepard alludes in the above quotation. Near the end of their
battle in the second act, Hoss assumes the guise of an “ancient delta blues
singer” and attacks what he alludes to as “all that kinda ‘lectric machine
gun music” (238). Then he is described as “growing physically older” and
as he does so he charts rock’s origins: “It come down a long way. It come
down by every damn black back street you can move sideways through.
‘Fore that it was snakin’ thru rubber plants. It had Cheetahs movin’ to its
rhythm. You dig?” (238). Hoss accuses Crow of taking “a free ride on a
black man’s back” (239). Yet he is met with indifference. Crow lives purely
for the immediate: “Bring it to now [ . . . ] I got no guilt to conjure! Fence
me with the present” (239). Hoss’s evocation of the cowboy image is also
thinly spread, akin to Warhol’s surface reproductions of Elvis Presley in a
cowboy guise, the star who was also accused of appropriating black music
in his rise to stardom. The repetition in Warhol’s silkscreens dilutes their
impact; the mere duplication of identical images functions as anesthesia.
The cowboy persona in Warhol’s artwork and Shepard’s painting operates
as a guise, another marketable smokescreen. During the battle in Act Two,
Hoss switches to a “kind of Cowboy-Western” image (230):
Hoss: So you gambled your measly grub stake for a showdown with the champ.
Ain’t that pathetic. I said it before and I’ll say it again. Pathetic.
(Crow is getting nervous. He feels he’s losing the match. He tries to force himself
into the walk. He chews more desperately and twirls the chain faster.)
You young guns comin’ up outa’ prairie stock and readin’ dime novels over
breakfast. Drippin’ hot chocolate down yer zipper. Pathetic. (231)
But Crow quickly retorts that his opponent has already drained this resource
dry: “Time warps don’t shift the purpose, just the style [ . . . ]. That’s about all
you’ll get outa’ second. Better shift it now Leathers” (231). For, in a telling
statement that recalls Warhol’s treatise on the commercialization of personal-
ity itself, Crow relates that “[s]ometimes the skin deceives” (231), sometimes
the mask betrays. Hoss may protest that “he’s not a fuckin’ machine” (245)
but Crow is nothing but that—like Andy Warhol, he accepts that “[t]he image
is [his] survival kit” (249). In The Performance Group’s (TPG) production of

the play, directed by Richard Schechner in 1973 at the Performance Garage
in New York, the performers played the music required themselves, rather
than feature an unseen band as the stage directions dictate. According to
Schechner, this had a deliberate function of highlighting the performative
nature of rock musicians in the 1970s and of shifting attention away from
traditional dramaturgical presentations of “character.”57
Among the postmodern pastiche of these plays, the playwright exploits
what he considers to be the redemptive possibilities of rock music in the
creation of ritual. First explored in Shepard’s and Patti Smith’s improvised
Cowboy Mouth (1971), this theme further develops in The Tooth of Crime
(1972). Cowboy Mouth was first staged by The American Place Theatre as
a double bill with Back Bog Beast Bait in April 1971, directed by Robert
Glaudini. Smith “wanted to infuse the written word with the immediacy
and frontal attack of rock and roll”58 in a similar vein to Shepard’s dra-
matic objectives. Also, according to Shepard’s biographer Shewey, Smith
“turned him on to the French Surrealist poets (Rimbaud, Villon, Nerval,
Baudelaire) [ . . . ].”59 She also describes the play as a ritual in itself: “We rit-
ualized the end of our adventure and created a portal of escape for Sam.”60
The redeeming features of rock music appear to be an attempt by the play-
wright to access a more natural or basic, unrefined sense of being. Speaking
of his works from this era Shepard has said that he “began to think rock and
roll music represented another kind of back to a raw gut kind of American
shitkicker thing.”61 He was also playing with the band The Holy Modal
Rounders at this time and while the inclusion of rock music in the plays
from this period have a distinct Brechtian dimension, the songs in Cowboy
Mouth, as with the music in the Hopi ceremony in Operation Sidewinder,
act as an endeavor to utilize ritualized behavior in an attempt at spiritual
restoration.
In an interview with Kenneth Chubb and the editors of Theatre Quarterly
in 1974, Shepard stated the following: “I think music’s really important,
especially in plays and theatre—it adds a whole different kind of perspec-
tive, it immediately brings the audience to terms with an emotional reality.
Because nothing communicates emotions better than music, not even the
greatest play in the world.”62 In The Tooth of Crime Shepard uses the power
of words to create immediacy in the same way he considers music to be
capable of eliciting impulsive feeling. Hoss and Crow live by an unregulated
ritual in a fragmented world that defies definition and needs myth to inject
authenticity into their lives. They act out their own perception of themselves,
representations, which are far from grounded in even any simulated verisi-
militude. Thus, rock music functions in this play as a means of reconnecting
with an instinctual, authenticated sense of being.
CONCLUSION
The Tooth of Crime also simultaneously demonstrates the ineffectuality of
injecting the contemporary with ritual. As Leonard Wilcox argues, “the
horror of the battle results from the fact that Crow, with his Nietzschean
language of desire, exposes Hoss’s notion of origin as a myth and in doing so
unravels Hoss’s identity before our eyes.”63 Hoss’s suicide at the end of The
Tooth of Crime recalls the postmodern self-ingestion of the image as explored
in previous plays. He considers this act as “[a] true gesture that won’t never
cheat on itself ‘cause it’s the last of its kind” (249). He consumes himself
in a manner akin to Dalí’s advocation of the self-ingestion of the image in
Surrealist art. But Hoss’s action is also a simulation of a fad of suicides by
American cult figures in the 1960s and 1970s. In this play, Shepard almost
deifies those who have died young, mentioning Jimi Hendrix, Johnny
Ace, Jackson Pollock, Janis Joplin, James Dean, Buddy Holly, and Jimmie
Rodgers. He stated in 1974 that “the idea of dying and being reborn is really
an interesting one, you know. It’s always there at the back of my head.”64
Violence is considered a primordial function, a primal instinct that, like
drugs, somewhat substantiates his characters’ actions as innate responses
and connects them to a more “primitive” and hence more “authentic” state
of existence. Before his suicide, Hoss asks Crow to teach him “how to be a
man” (243). Once he has shed his past “patterns” (245) and his accumulated
learnt perceptions of selfhood, he can access a more refined sense of being
and become his idealized consummate self:
Hoss: Yeah. It is me. Just like I always wanted to be.

[...]
Mean and tough and cool. Untouchable. A true killer. Don’t take no shit
from nobody. True to his heart. True to his voice [ . . . ]. Lives by a code.
His own code. Knows something timeless. Unending trust in himself.
No hesitation. Beyond pride or modesty. Speaks the truth without
trying. (247)
Yet at the end of this speech, Hoss cries that “it ain’t [him]” (247). The
suggestion arises that his inevitable downfall is catalyzed by his inability to
compromise his sense of self and to surrender unreservedly to the image. The
equation of primordial aggression with images of masculinity in Shepard’s
plays will be explored in detail in the following chapter.
Leonard Wilcox writes that Hoss’s suicide at the end of The Tooth of Crime
“simply defines in literal terms what he already is—an absence.”65 Crow
actively rejects any form of introspection: “I’ve called the bluff in God’s own
face / Now keep me from my fate / If I’m a fool then keep me blind,”—and
Wilcox argues that this “may imply that his willed ignorance of what lies
beyond surfaces can’t last, that “deep structures” of experience may reassert
themselves.”66 Writing on the sacrificial ritualistic rites in this play, and plac-
ing Hoss and Crow in a father-and-son paradigm, Gregory W. Lanier points
out that “[i]t is Crow’s destiny, as it is the destiny of all Sons [ . . . ] to enter
into the sacrificial pattern by donning the ancient mask and assuming the
role of the sacrificer.”67 According to Lanier, the battle between sacrifice and
sacrificer, father and son, in The Tooth of Crime is a destined perpetuation of
a cyclical fate set in motion. Thus, it seems apt that Shepard should return
to the subject of the family in his next plays. These “family” plays suggest
the futility in any attempt to evade inheritance. Shepard’s plays from the
late 1960s to the early 1970s dramatize, as I have discussed, an increasingly
desperate search for a repressed sense of self. In the following chapter, I will
assess the extent to which primordial desires and impulses, once unleashed,
can prove to be recalcitrant, cyclical, and pitiless.
Chapter 3
Surrealism and
Sam Shepard’s Family
Plays: Representing
Gender
INTRODUCTION
Shepard’s plays from 1977 to 1985 exploit the domestic sphere as an arena
for rigorous introspection; by doing so, he situates them within a t wentieth-
century dramatic American genealogy that privileges the family home.
However, this chapter will trace Shepard’s subversion of this site, created by
a sophisticated destabilization of naturalism that in turn implies a surreality.
Similarly, for Surrealist artists, the home was also a rich source for analy-
sis that prompted an examination of selfhood and the origins of identity.
In this interrogation, gender is a crucial factor, not least because woman
became the definitive emblem of “convulsive beauty” in Surrealism, but
because the entire movement has traditionally been viewed as gendered by
a phallocentric agenda. This chapter will address accusations of misogyny
directed at Shepard’s representations of women in comparison to the treat-
ment of women by Surrealism. Connectedly, this chapter will consider how
Shepard, like Surrealist artists, has exploited violence as an instrument in
the bolstering of the male ego. I will explore how masculinity is depicted
as a dangerous, yet alluring trait, along with the chronic recurrence of the
antagonistic father figure, and the absence of women from this debate.
Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class (1977), Buried Child (1978), True
West (1980), Fool for Love (1983), and A Lie of the Mind (1985) are all con-
cerned with the primal unit of human interaction—the family home, the
origins of all social interface and the domain that shapes our psychic devel-
opment. Writing the year before the first of these plays premiered, Arthur
Miller declared in 1976 that “[t]he family is still the central matrix of the
entire civilization”1 and, indeed, modern American drama is intimately
allied with the domestic realm as exploited by playwrights such as Eugene
O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee. It is crucial in the inves-
tigation of the Surrealism in these plays to examine what the playwright
subverts. Shepard situates his plays within the spectrum of an American
modern theatrical convention that reveals the visual in a painterly way and
utilizes naturalism as the foundation for this enquiry. In Shepard’s plays,
the apparent realism of the backdrop fortifies the surreal elements of the
drama. In True West, for instance, Shepard insists that productions of the
play should not be stylized or abstracted, that the scenography should be
presented as realistically as possible. The stage directions dictate:
The set should be constructed realistically with no attempt to distort its

dimensions, shapes, objects or colors. No objects should be introduced which
might draw special attention to themselves other than the props demanded
by the script. If a stylistic “concept” is grafted onto the set design it will only
serve to confuse the evolution of the characters’ situation, which is the most
important focus of the play.
Likewise, the costumes should be exactly representative of who the charac-
ters are and not added onto for the sake of making a point to the audience. 2
In presenting his plays in this seemingly realist manner, Shepard bows to a dra-
matic convention as established by Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia
Woolf (1962), for instance. Nancy Meckler, the director of the 1981 National
Theatre production of Albee’s play, compared it to Shepard’s True West, which
she had also directed, stating, “I think you have to direct it totally natural-
istically but you need to understand it expressionistically.”3 However, these
plays deliberately subvert our interpretation of normative familial interaction,
despite belonging to a long traditional lineage in their manipulation of the
subject of the family. Charles R. Lyons, for instance, notes that “Buried Child
[ . . . ] makes use of the retrospective structure that we find operative in real-
istic plays since Ibsen” and argues that “Shepard’s exploitation of this organi-
zational strategy produces a sophisticated variant of a theatrical scheme that
both exercises convention and undercuts it with irony.”4 Speaking retrospec-
tively of these plays in a playwriting master class at the Cherry Lane Theatre
in Manhattan’s West Village in 2006, Shepard stated:
It is that American tradition, those family plays, so I thought of writing

something that hadn’t been exposed or touched on. Then I started working
on it, and it turned out to be pretty dark, and I wanted it to be a comedy,
so that was the first time I started drawing up characters from my past and
messing around in that territory: family-gone-wrong.5
S u r r e a l i s m a n d S a m S h e p a r d ’ s F a m i l y P l a y s 45
Similarly, Leslie A. Wade considers these family plays to be “the master

achievements of his writing career [in which] we see the prodigious, often
raw dynamism of the jazz pieces honed and tempered, channeled within
the box-set interiors of the American domestic drama (and its modified
realism).”6
If we are to look beyond the veneer of naturalism, the stage directions
foreshadow this destabilization, Shepard’s dramatization of a “family-gone-
wrong.” In Buried Child, for example, “[t]he stairs lead off stage left up into
the wings with no landing,”7 as though they are ascending into the gods.
Johan Callens argues that in Shepard’s earlier work “[t]he surreal mystery
almost always erupted and pulverized ordinary reality,” yet in Buried Child
“it gradually emanates from the quotidian and suffuses it without causing
a break.”8 Buried Child represents perhaps Shepard’s most irreverent attack
on the notion of the sanctity of the family. This play returns to the theme of
conjugal sterility as introduced in The Rock Garden (1964), and any pretense
of domestic bliss undermined as the play progresses in a cartoon-like manner.
The absurd characterization begins to eradicate any misconceived notions of
household joy. The play opens with a pathetic fallacious premonition—the
condition inside the house is deemed by the patriarch of the family Dodge
(his very name suggests evasion) to be as “catastrophic” as the torrential rain
outside (64). In the second act, Vince, Tilden’s son and Dodge’s grandson,
returns home with his girlfriend Shelly to mayhem, to what Mel Gussow
describes as “an American nightmare in which an ingrown family bastions
itself against invading reality.”9 Shelley retrospectively ascertains that she
“thought [the homecoming] was going to be turkey dinners and apple pie
and all that kinda stuff” (91), the epitome of homely domesticity as illus-
trated by her initial remarks that the house resembles “a Norman Rockwell
cover or something” (83). This allusion suggests an attempt to generate a
painterly scenario in the minds of the audience. Yet Shelly finds the asso-
ciation darkly funny. The reference to Rockwell spawns an image of pho-
tographic realism that Shepard deliberately subverts. As Robert Coe wrote
for the New York Times Magazine in 1980, “[i]n these comic nightmares,
Shepard blends American traditional lyric realism with the freedom, wit
and terror of Surrealist irrationality.”10 For the British premiere of the play,
director Nancy Meckler deliberately cast actors that were roughly the same
age to play each member of the family in order to “help an audience into
that non-naturalistic realm of Sam’s.”11 “Nonnaturalistic” still suggests some
level of naturalism, even if evoked to subvert it, and Callens warns against
experimental productions of the play:
Critics now feel that Shepard strikes a “balance between naturalistic detail
and the wilder, more secret landscapes of being [ . . . ] between the banal and
the strange [ . . . ]. He makes us believe in the unexpected because he conjures

it out of very ordinary things” (Richardson in Shepard, 1979: ii). This balance
is more precisely a tension which would be lost in experimental productions
of the play. What director Michael Smith, the first to mention Shepard’s
Surrealism, said about Icarus’s Mother, applies even more to Buried Child: it
“needs reality in order to transcend reality.”12
Buried Child is clothed in a misleading realist carapace that ineffectually

constrains the characters’ concession to automatic or habitually ingrained
modes of conduct. Vince responds to Shelley’s comparison of the scene
to Rockwell’s paintings with the retort, “What’s a’ matter with that? It’s
American” (83). Vince considers Rockwell’s representations as a nalogous
with American life, the American way. By comparing the house to a
Rockwell painting, Shepard arouses the audience’s expectations of a familiar,
if simulated, reality in order to dismantle it. He reassures the viewer before
destabilizing any presupposed assumptions. Richard Halpern also alludes
to this sense of the illusionary in Rockwell’s work: “[Rockwell’s paintings]
are not so much innocent as they are about the ways we manufacture inno-
cence. For innocence is indeed something we make, not something we are
born to—a story we tell about ourselves, not something we are.”13 In their
divergent reflections on the American family home as a site for artistic con-
sideration, neither painter nor playwright endeavors to portray actual reality.
Rockwell famously stated that “[t]he view of life I communicate in my pic-
tures excludes the sordid and the ugly,” declaring, “I paint life as I would like
it to be.”14 Hence, by comparing Vince’s original residence to a Rockwell
painting, Shelly signals, from the onset, the synthetic nature of the apparent
reality. Hal Foster writes that the primary purpose of the Surrealist marvel-
ous is clear: the “negation” of the real, or at least of its philosophical equation
with the rational. If “reality,” Aragon wrote in 1924, “is the apparent absence
of contradiction,” a construct that effaces conflict, then “the marvelous is
the eruption of contradiction in the real,”15 an eruption that exposes the
construct as such. Shepard exposes the “construct” of reality, which reveals
the fabrication of art itself, the deceptive nature of representation. Yet
Rockwell’s paintings imply honesty and morally compliant censored views
of contemporary America in contrast to Shepard, who does not shy away
from representations of the “sordid and the ugly.” Una Chaudhuri also notes
how meaning is produced in Buried Child by the intertextual references to
canonical American plays of the twentieth century—O’Neill’s Long Day’s
Journey into Night, Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and Albee’s Who’s Afraid
of Virginia Woolf.16 Chaudhuri writes: “The unseen child—dead, buried,
denied, or unborn—is American drama’s version of the ‘hidden secret’ of
realist dramaturgy” and that “[t]he literalism of Buried Child [ . . . ] gives
the play its break with that symbolic dramaturgy of American realism to
which it is intertextually linked.”17 However, I would argue that by explicitly
staging this “hidden secret,” pertinently that of a concealed infant, Shepard
also literally displays the otherwise repressed and adheres to the Surrealist
preference for channeling the seemingly unsoiled condition of childhood
into his art. In accordance with Aragon’s writings on the Surrealist sense of
le merveilleux, Buried Child stages an “eruption of contradiction in the real”
while consciously dramatizing the mechanics of this representation at work.
The reality that Shepard represents is a simulated one, a collage of references
that work to reassure the audience they are on safe, familiar, territory. They
are not. Shepard deliberately sabotages this sense of security. He, unlike the
playwrights before him, unearths the buried child and thus delves into the
world of the surreal.
It is valuable at this point to consider the fact that Surrealist art evaded
abstraction and always adhered to coherence in form. Writing on the paint-
ings of René Magritte for instance, Silvano Levy argues that the artist “was
well versed in and overtly practiced the techniques of academic painting” but
“[c]onstantly, the rules which govern traditional painting can be seen to be
flouted in an overt manner by his work,” so much so that “Magritte appears
to have engaged in no less than a calculated defiance of the conventions of
painting.”18 The Surrealists considered the physical home as representative
of a fusion between the tangible and the ethereal, the municipal and the
clandestine. They exploited the domestic arena as a distorting twilight zone,
a kaleidoscope through which alternative realms could be scrutinized. Yet
the Surrealists’ relationship to the home was also fraught with antagonism.
As demonstrated by the work of René Magritte, Max Ernst, and Dorothea
Tanning, Surrealist depictions of the home are often nightmarish, unset-
tling, and disturbing. In Magritte’s painting L’Homme au journal (Man with
a Newspaper; 1928), the meticulous depiction of the interior of a living room,
with the phallic-like piping rising in and out of the four identical images,
demonstrates the baleful indispensability of humanity. There is something
sinister in Magritte’s depiction of lack and the almost clinical repetition of
sameness coupled with the fact that the room does not rely on the man’s
presence to exist. In Ernst’s three collage novels, La Femme 100 têtes (1929),
Rêve d’une petite fille qui voulut entrer au carmel (1930), and Une Semaine
de bonté (1934), the artist employs cutouts from nineteenth-century texts
of Victorian interiors to depict scenes of the uncanny. Foster likewise cites
Walter Benjamin’s assertion that the interior world was a necessary facilita-
tor for the reconciliation with the repressed “only to return, according to
the formula of the uncanny, in displaced fantastic form.”19 Benjamin wrote,
“From the [repression of the social] sprang the phantasmagorias of the inte-
rior. This represented the universe for the private citizen. In it he assembled
the distant in space and in time. His drawing-room was a box in the world-
theatre.”20 Ernst’s collages were inspired by nineteenth-century popular fic-
tion and contained illustrations from textbooks for children, evoking the
world of make-believe while simultaneously disturbing the memories of
childhood. The collage technique suggests the world of the dream while
introducing an element of fragmentation integral to the artist’s deliberate
delight in the ambiguous.
Dorothea Tanning’s representations of the home primarily depict harrow-
ing accounts of childhood and budding sexuality. Like Shepard, Tanning
disrupts the familiar and her paintings depict the domestic as hostile. Her
painting Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (A Little Night Music; 1943) demonstrated
the Surrealist fascination with woman as femme-enfant. A doll-like figure
swoons in ecstasy in the doorway, her clothes unraveled, whist a younger
child, despite a gravitational pull (the inception of puberty perhaps?), seems
to be challenging her sexuality as symbolized by the sunflower, a popular
Surrealist symbol of fecundity, yet also a metaphor for the Surrealist move-
ment.21 Her lower garments appear torn and a strong beam of ill-omened
light spills from the farthest door. In her work La Chambre d’Amis two doors
open as though inviting the viewer into an interior world. A prepubescent
girl stares out of the pictorial frame as a midget, in the guise of a cowboy,
smashes eggs on the floor. An older woman cradles a life-sized doll in the
bed in the background while the hooded figure of justice from The Tarot
surveys the scene.22 The scene is wrought with insinuations of soiled inno-
cence and pedophilia (alternatively at the hands of a mother), yet the incom-
patible incongruities of photographic realism and fantasy also suggest the
illustration of images from the unconscious or a dream. Similarly, Portrait
de famille (Family Portrait; 1953–1954) documents an equally ambiguous
scene as a giant (father?) figure overshadows and dominates the table where
a young woman, seated to eat, is met with an empty plate. The crisp white
tablecloth could be interpreted as bed linen and the hazy pastoral color
scheme suggests regression into memory or a reappraisal of the repressed.
The subsequent association of eating with sex, the omniscient presence of
a threatening paternal figure and the intimation of hunger all have relevance
in Shepard’s plays from this period.
Surrealist artists created often illogical, hallucinatory scenarios that rev-
eled in their nonsensical qualities. The household dwelling provided them
with copious source material in their reaction against conventional notions
of propriety. Anneleen Masschelein quotes the following as examples of the
literary uncanny—“the double, strange repetitions, the omnipotence of
thought [ . . . ], the confusion between animate and inanimate, and other
experiences related to madness, superstition or death,”23 all which have
obvious resonance in terms of Shepard’s dramatic oeuvre and Surrealism.
Indeed, in their equation of the home with the uncanny, the Surrealists
evoked Freud’s concept of the Heimlich/Unheimlich. Masschelein writes of a
fundamental contradiction at the heart of the Heimlich, that the home, with
its connotations of comfort, protection, and the proverbial, can also take on
the reverse qualities of the Unheimlich and become claustrophobic and sur-
reptitious. She posits:
Freud concludes his lexicographic research by stating that the specificity of

the sensation of the uncanny lies in the fact that something is frightening,
not because it is unfamiliar or new, but because what used to be familiar has
become something strange. He quotes a phrase by Schelling which formu-
lates precisely this relation: “unheimlich is that what ought to have remained
hidden, but has nonetheless come to light.”24
This, as Masscehlein indicates, thus relates to psychoanalysis and repression.

As with the Surrealists, Shepard’s “family” plays seem to be a probing dis-
semination of the origins of one’s derision as orchestrated by the domestic
space of childhood. This is manifested in a sense of regression for the male
characters as they entertain childish whimsies and primal yearnings that
they should now have outgrown and “what ought to have remained hidden
[ . . . ] has nonetheless come to light.” For Shepard, the domestic operates as
a rich burial ground awaiting exploration both figuratively and metaphori-
cally. However, the excavation process is habitually a belligerent affair. In
these plays, Shepard appears to perform an act of violence on the traditions
of the American twentieth-century theatre, symbolized by the American
home, deliberately shocking and scandalizing the audience in an exag-
gerated, grossly inflated, and surreal manner. He takes the familiarity of
American domestic realism and turns it on its head, creating images of the
uncanny. He theatrically realizes this in a manner close to Ernst Fischer’s
definition of the term:
the uncanny, as a characteristic feature, eschews solid boundaries between

oppositional terms. In its multidimensional flow between meanings, in its
almost imperceptible sliding from the familiar to the strange, from certainty
to doubt, secrecy to disclosure and vice versa, it seems to belong instead to
a third, interbinary, space of simultaneous possibilities: a space of disorder
between the borderlands of what we profess to know.25
Buried Child illustrates a literal penetration into the domestic. In a meta-

phorical act of assimilation or “homecoming,” Vince, the alternative prodi-
gal son, slices a hole in the screen door of the family home near the end of
Act Three and thus enters into what he refers to as “taboo territory” (127).
However, he is obliged to employ an aggressive demeanor in his seizure of
the family empire. Violence is currency for this family. The actual, unstipu-
lated burial of a child, the insinuated product of Halie and Tilden’s incestu-
ous union, by Dodge is the most violent act of Buried Child. The birth and
subsequent death of this corpse, buried under the corn crops and resur-
rected by Tilden at the play’s finale, remain an enigma. The questions sur-
rounding the child are reinforced poignantly by the family’s refusal to ask
them. Indeed, any expectations of a Norman Rockwell scene and Shelley’s
anticipation of the advances of an energized puppy—“Where’s the milkman
and the little dog? What’s the little dog’s name? Spot. Spot and Jane. Dick
and Jane and Spot” (83)—immediately collapse on their entrance. The first
image of the family introduces the visual Surrealism. Shelley finds Dodge
on the couch in a state of delirium, with a shaved, bleeding head and covered
in corn husks. According to Callens,
when Tilden is heaping corn husks on Dodge while he is sleeping on the sofa,
the surreal should emerge naturally, as in Curse, when a drunken Weston falls
asleep, spread-eagled on the kitchen table amidst a pile of laundry, or in True
West, when the suburban kitchen and the den slowly deteriorate as electric
toasters accumulate.26
While the character of Shelley may represent this “invading reality” that
Gussow describes (see the quotation earlier in this chapter), the very concept
of reality construed in this play is untrustworthy in itself. The other char-
acters in Buried Child personify inhibited desires. The title itself suggests
they live in an interior world, concerned more with what is buried than with
what is exhumed. Despite the naturalistic countenance of this play, once the
action begins, the playwright refrains from presenting the audience with the
guise of a contented domestic situation, or even reality, in order to dismantle
it; instead we are introduced to a home where instantaneously the menace of
violence threatens to overthrow familial politics.
Curse of the Starving Class is equally disturbing in its portrayal of the
antithesis of domestic bliss. Lynda Hart notes how the “opening image of
destruction and the calm acceptance of violence suggests that Shepard’s Tate
family has already plummeted to the bottom of their long day’s journey,”27
deliberately echoing O’Neill’s most famous familial play. Indeed, Shepard
stated in 1976 that this play was deliberately written in “more or less” the
style of Eugene O’Neill, a style to which he was new.28 The opening scene
again implies the bizarre. The stage directions dictate, “[s]uspended in mid-
air stage right and stage left are two ruffled, red-checked curtains, slightly
faded.”29 This works as a deliberate aesthetic realization of the uncanny.
Indeed, in a review of a production of the play at the Yale Repertory Theatre
in 1980, Edwin Wilson likened the set design, designed by Randy Drake,
to a “Surrealistic” painting.30 Similarly, Wade reads this play as Shepard’s

attempt to project on to the American family play “his signature avant-garde
devices: the trance monologue, arbitrary character transformations, and
Surrealistic stage images.”31 Wesley is cleaning up the remnants of a broken
door after his father’s violent entrance the night before, dramatizing the
fluid borders of the Heimlich/Unheimlich. The sanctuary of the home has
been penetrated, violated, and is now exposed to the threat of the outside.
What was once familiar is now under siege. Wesley’s mother Ella seems to
be delivering a monologue about the fictional dangers of menstruation, until
her daughter Emma enters from stage right as though she had been there all
along. Emma prepares a chart for a demonstration she is to give at a fair on
how to cut up a fried chicken. However, Ella has mistakenly boiled the bird
and while her daughter admonishes her mother, Wesley unzips his fly and
urinates over Emma’s demonstration chart. Later in Act One, Wesley brings
a live lamb on stage and places it into a fenced area in the kitchen and the
father Weston arrives home still slightly drunk with bags full of artichokes
as sole nourishment for his family. This juxtaposition of bizarre images in
an otherwise naturalistic setting immediately suggests the visually surreal.
In what could be considered further images of demoralization, as advocated
by the Surrealists, Wesley crosses the stage completely naked in the third
act. He later returns, dressed in his father’s filthy clothes before opening the
refrigerator and indulgently bingeing on the contents. In this play, a sense
of the absurd provides a black comedic yet sinister undercurrent that punc-
tures the thinly disguised pretext of normality, threatening to crush the
superficial and fragile domestic world of hunger upon which the Tate family
has constructed their lives. Themes of anxiety toward inheritance, and the
subsequent rebellion against this heritage, abound in Curse of the Starving
Class. This relates to Shepard’s renegade approach to his dramatic lineage
as chronicler of the twentieth-century family in American drama, and to
the Surrealists and their deliberate disregard for the boundaries of accept-
able artistic practice. The characters in Curse of the Starving Class are locked
in a system of cyclical recrimination. This incapacity to escape what is
bequeathed as a legacy dictates that the children are molded by their inher-
ited hunger. However, self-annihilation is a paternal ailment in this play.
Ella remarks to her husband: “Don’t be ridiculous! I’m not self-destructive.
Doesn’t run in my family line” (188).
The children’s Christian names indicate their parents’ hallmark: E[ll]a
and E[mm]a, Wes[ton] and Wes[ley]. They are carbon prints of their heritage,
their names a further indication of their lack of identity, a dehumanizing
refusal of their autonomy or inability to escape their inheritance. In a review
of the American premiere of the play, Richard Eder recognized the arche-
typal rendering of the characters and their seemingly one-dimensionality as
a feature of Surrealism: “Essentially the characters are grotesque archetypes.

They are often funny, and often the savage parody they personify does reg-
ister. But that is the problem. Mr. Shepard has deliberately drawn their rec-
ognizable natures into Surrealistic extremes. They become messages.”32 In
Act Three, Wesley speaks of physically embodying his father:
Wesley: I started putting all his clothes on. His baseball cap, his tennis
shoes, his overcoat. And every time I put one thing on it seemed like a part
of him was growing on me. I could feel him taking over me. [ . . . ]
I could feel myself retreating. I could feel him coming in and me going out.
Just like the change of the guards. (196)
Hence, in the final act of the play, father and son literally switch roles
and Ella confuses Wesley with her husband. Familial association denotes a
fatal inevitability that tests the endurance of all the characters. Curse of the
Starving Class ends with a bizarre anecdote about a cat and an eagle fighting
midair over the testes of a lamb, described by Weston at the beginning of the
act as “fresh little remnants of manlihood” (183). The allusions to castration
and war imagery are implicit, and Weston initially reacts to the eagle with
impulsive shock, but also veneration:
Weston: Somethin’ brought me straight up off the ground and I started

yellin’ my head off. I don’t know why it was comin’ outa’ me but I was
standing there with this icy feeling up my backbone and just yelling my
fool head off. Cheerin’ for that eagle. I’d never felt like that since the
first day I went up in a B-49. After a while I sat down again and went
on working’. And every time I cut a lamb I’d throw those balls up on
top a’ the shed roof. And every time he’d come down like the Cannonball
Express on that roof. And every time I got that feeling. (184)
Despite Weston’s espousal of the eagle’s efforts, the final image of the
brawling animals suggests disconcerting self-destruction and imminent
death:
Ella: That’s right. A big tom cat comes. Right out of the fields. And he
jumps up on top of that roof to sniff around in all the entrails or whatever
it was.
Wesley: (still with back to her) And that eagle comes down and picks up the
cat in his talons and carries him screaming off into the sky.
Ella: (staring at the lamb) That’s right. And they fight. They fight like crazy
in the middle of the sky. That cat’s tearing his chest out, and the eagle’s
trying to drop him, but the cat won’t let go because he knows if he falls
he’ll die.
Wesley: And the eagle’s being torn apart midair. The eagle’s trying to free
himself from the cat, and the cat won’t let go.
Ella: And they come crashing down to the earth. Both of them come crash-
ing down. Like one whole thing. (200)
Such an account could be read as a moralizing warning on the dangers

of, literally, the loss of “balls,” the inherent risk in the loss of masculinity.
However, Shepard’s concluding tableau could also be read as a warning of
the perils of chasing “balls,” that the futile pursuit of “manliness” can only
lead to self-destruction. As the play concludes, Wesley emulates his father’s
ritualistic cleansing “remedy,” before clothing himself in his father’s attire.
The ending of this play presages the jeopardy involved in Wesley’s
refutation of his identity in favor of that of his father; even Weston’s old
clothes (jeans or genes) symbolize pestilence, “old bum’s clothes that’ve been
thrown-up in, pissed in, and God knows what all in” (191). In association
with his interest in the primitive and reflective of Surrealism’s representa-
tion of the repressed, Shepard’s male characters invariably employ a bestial
demeanor while images of rotting animal carcasses feature habitually in
these plays: Emma’s cooked chicken in Curse of the Starving Class and the
skinned lamb carcass in the kitchen, (which Slater compares to “somebody’s
afterbirth” [198]) after Wesley slaughters the animal, an act, Wade interprets
as symbolic of “the death of his childhood world and the loss of presurbur-
ban purity.”33 The ending warns of the foreboding casualty of symbiosis, of
reliance on unsound means, and inevitable cyclical recrimination, which,
ultimately, relies on death for fulfillment.
In these plays, the unreliability of the simulated reality of the drama-
tized events is frequently flagged to the audience by means of the absurd.
Ethan Hawke directed a revival of A Lie of the Mind in 2010 and spoke of
the play’s antinaturalism in an interview with PBS at the time: “Ever since
Marlon Brando and Elia Kazan, acting has always been about naturalism.
But there’s something about this play that is not naturalistic. There is some-
thing about naturalism that is a lie. [ . . . ] The play is not a dream, but the
play kind of tells you your life is a dream.”34 A Lie of the Mind dramatizes
the aftershocks of domestic violence and advocates “true” thought, devoid
of any encumbering rationality or reason, in line with the Surrealists’ striv-
ing to liberate uncensored thought. Somewhat enigmatically, Beth’s mental
injury and subsequent aphasia (as a direct result of Jake’s beating) seem to
provide her with a heightened sensitivity to the heterogeneous and, once
again, synthetic nature of her surroundings.35 The bodily Surrealism of her
first appearance on stage could be borrowed from horror imagery: “(BETH
discovers bandage on her head and starts to rip it off. It starts to come apart in
long streamers of gauze. MIKE tries to stop her but she continues tearing the
bandage off )” (10). To cement this evocation of the living dead, Beth, still
unraveling the bandages asks “Am I a mummy now? Am I a mummy? Am
I? Am I now?”36 The apparent confusion of the etymological definition of
words works to destabilize meaning in a seemingly absurd manner and the
brokenness of her speech creates a Surrealism of language. For instance, in
her recuperation, Beth asks Mike: “Did they bury me in a tree” (24) and in
a “fierce” (25) way exclaims: “i’m dead! dead! daaah! heez too! (25). In a
contradiction of orthodox reactionary norms, Beth finds her injury funny,
and referring to Jake, states: “Heez nah weak. He bash me. (She giggles.)
Bash me goot” (23). Yet her epiphany comes with clarity: Beth’s body acts as
a vehicle that she controls, her truth is her own. She recognizes that love is
dead for her father and that “pretend is more better” (81) as it fills a void of
anonymity. She prioritizes her cognizant inner version of reality over what
she considers to be a poor substitute in her actual surroundings. Beth pro-
claims ownership over her thoughts and seems to accept a relationship with
Mike that can only survive on an insentient level: “[ . . . ] You gan’ stop my
head. Nobody! Nobody stop my head. My head is me. Heez in me. You gan
stop him in me. Nobody gan stop him in me” (25). This play adheres to the
Surrealist methodology, as described by Susan Gubar, of utilizing
absurd, provocative, and fantastic symbols to defamiliarize conventional ways

of seeing both art and reality. For, in their exploitation of erotic and perverse
images, of many different art forms and media, and of unconscious material
manifested in dreams or madness, the Surrealists mocked the hypocrisies of
bourgeois morality as the origins of repression and alienation.37
Gubar’s words are particularly relevant in Act One, Scene Seven, set in
Jake’s childhood room with “[p]lastic model airplanes covered in dust and
cobwebs of World War Two fighters and bombers hang[ing] from the ceil-
ing directly above the bed” (39). Jake has regressed to a childlike state and
his mother feeds him soup while he sits in a bed “that’s now too short for
him” (39). Lorraine reassures Jake that he is “a strong, strappin’ man,” not
long before he “begins to stomp on the soup, jumping all over the bed,
exhaling loudly and grunting like a buffalo” (40). In moments of clarity,
Jake warns his mother to stay away from his bed and he fervently demands
that his mother bring him his pants, as though he is danger of succumbing
to Oedipal desires (40). In its “defamiliariz[ation of] conventional ways of
seeing both art and reality” this play also provides an interesting annota-
tion on the opaqueness of gender roles. A Lie of the Mind promotes the dis-
solution of the boundaries that separate the two, advocating the creation
of a new “woman-man” (82) representing masculinity as just “a shirt” to
be assumed. War imagery is employed throughout as an empty signifier
of “manliness.” Lorraine mocks her husband’s “[s]ecret Mission[s]” and the

confidentiality that his job required: “He was always cookin’ up some weird
code on the phone. Tryin’ to make a big drama outa things” (40). Callens
describes a 1996 Flemish production of the play, directed by Victor Löw,
who employed “a fully-visible Thunderbolt 47P, reproduced to two-third
scale and its wings primed with bombs, [which] hovered at a threatening
angle above the stage anticipating the apocalyptic crash that terminates
Icarus’s Mother.”38 According to Callens, this prop “tied in with the surreal
proliferation of sofas, wardrobes, and infighting in this play,” and also, as
an enlarged toy, signaled the childishness of the men.39 However, women in
this play are denoted as caregivers obligated to look after their men. After
enquiring as to the whereabouts of his sister, Jake proclaims: “[s]he shouldn’t
a’ left me! She’ll regret that” (41). In Act Three, Meg claims that “[t]he
female—the female one needs—the other [ . . . ]. The male one goes off by
himself. Leaves. He needs something else. So he ends up dead. By himself”
(111). A Lie of the Mind denotes performative masculinity and femininity as
mere role-playing, as an impediment to pure chaste thought and, in effect,
as lies of the mind.
In Fool for Love, the action moves from the family home to a motel room
in the Mojave desert. Despite this interim location, the trappings of the
family still haunt the characters, as does the compulsion to examine the
raw materials, the fabric of their existence. The presence of the Old Man
on the stage immediately signifies the implausibility of the fabricated real-
ity. As though a phantom or a surreal mirage “The Old Man” sits in a
rocking chair at the front of the stage “slightly profile to the audience” (20)
although he “exists only in the minds of MAY and EDDIE” (20). The hotel
room provides a womb-like, intimate setting for the action. The charac-
ters of Eddie and May seem to have been placed in quarantine, and once
imprisoned, have succumbed to the heightened state of emotion that their
passionate, yet turbulent, relationship generates. The Old Man personifies
the inescapability of the secret that haunts them—they are half brother and
sister. As in Buried Child, concealed truths come to light and the inexo-
rableness of one’s biological origins revealed, especially in the Old Man’s
company. Their shared father, and thus their incest, is staring them in the
face. To intensify this sense of incarceration, a production of the play copro-
duced by the Cultural Affairs Department of Los Angeles and the East Los
Angeles Classic Theatre at the Madrid Theatre, Canoga Park, set Fool for
Love in a room in which two of the walls were constructed of chain-link
fences.40 Shepard intensifies the cabin-feverish claustrophobia by instruct-
ing that “[t]his play is to be performed relentlessly without a break.”41 Writing
on the New York premiere of the play in 1984, Robert Asahina described
it as belonging to Magic Realism, “in honor not of the genre of writing or
painting (though it likewise weds realistic form and Surrealistic content) but
of Martin Esslin’s Magic Theatre in San Francisco.”42 According to Asahina,
Shepard’s Magic Realism practices the “theatricality of the mundane,”
which “reveals the essential, and paradoxical, artificiality of naturalism.”43
The sense of the surreal is heightened firstly by the stage direction, which
calls for car headlights that “should be two intense beams of piercing white light
and not ‘realistic’ headlights” (36). Yet this play also subverts the American
modern realist tradition of dramatizing psychological turmoil. Rather, as
Ron Mottram notes, the psychology appears in the staging and the physi-
cality of the characters.44 Shepard directs that the bathroom and stage-left
door should contain hidden microphones and a bass drum so that “each
time the actor slams it, the door booms loud and long” (26). The Old Man’s
occupancy of the extreme down left of the stage, the heightened emotional
states of Eddie and May, and the stage direction all add weight to Bigsby’s
articulation that “this play [ . . . ] is a celebration of passion which has little to
do with the rational world.”45 In Shepard’s staging of incest, the play abides
by the Surrealists’ struggle to counter conformist ideals of apposite sexual
behavior. But the staging also attempt to redefine realism according to the
Old Man’s definition of the term: “That’s realism. I am actually married to
Barbara Mandrell in my mind. Can you understand that?” (27). Like Jake’s
vision of reality in A Lie of the Mind, the Old Man’s imagistic interior vision
trumps the veracity of his external surroundings.
Central to both Fool for Love and True West is the concentration on repul-
sion versus attraction as a means of exploring the binary nature of a split con-
sciousness. Eddie and May are depicted as yin and yang halves of a deficient
whole. A similar dichotomy operates in True West as Lee and Austin become
mounting transposing personifications of a splintered psyche, a tension
between civility and the impulsive. Lee, the personification of irrational-
ity who advocates instinctual action over Austin’s more judicious approach
to life, attempts to dissolve his brother’s civilized exterior and unearth his
subconscious hopes and desires. This primal exposé is a violent one, which
involves trashing the home their mother has made in the process. In this
play, two brothers confront each other in what could be described as a battle
between reality and fiction, civilization versus the archaic—or the duality
of the self, which also suggests the Surrealist interest in “doubling.” The
refined (rational) Austin has travelled to his mother’s home in Southern
California to seek refuge and tranquility so that he can finish writing a
screenplay while his mother holidays in Alaska. His writing is interrupted
by his (irrational) brother, Lee, who has a penchant for drink and petty
crime, preferring the freedom of desert life to more urban dwellings. Austin,
the embodiment of bourgeois propriety, longs for Lee’s life of rebellion and
begs his brother to take him to the desert where he can “cook,” “make fires,”
and “get fresh water from condensation” (48)—a place where he can reject
modern society in its entirety (“I’d cash it all in a second. That’s the truth”
[49]). However, after meeting Austin’s producer Saul Kimmer, Lee decides
to write a “Contemporary Western. Based on a true story” (18). Each brother
gradually begins to diffuse into the role of the other and the surreal images
increasingly refuse to surrender to realistic credibility. Lee is commissioned
for the project and Austin becomes disenchanted with his previous scholarly
existence, opting instead to embody Lee’s drunken life of crime: “I might
even commit bigger crimes. Bigger than you ever dreamed of. Crimes
beyond the imagination” (39). Austin agrees to document Lee’s screenplay
provided he can go and live in the desert with his brother. However, Lee goes
back on his word and the brothers face up to each other. A predilection for
the primal injects this play with the threat of anarchy.
Wendy Lesser notes that the first act of True West is staged as though from
Austin’s point of view—“rational, orderly, intellectual, with rewards for hard
work and punishments for misbehavior—a bit too restricted, but safe.”46
However, the second act becomes increasingly bizarre and the brothers suc-
cumb to bestial modes of behavior. As they both get drunk the rationality of
the situation crumbles around them, as if the audience is now experiencing
the events from their subjective reality. They become increasingly violent
and the set design, which Shepard so scrupulously describes in the opening
stage directions, literally implodes, contradicting Coe’s review of the play
in 1980 as encapsulating a “spare, almost cinematic naturalism and psycho-
logical depth devoid of his familiar surreal intrusions.”47 The stage direction
echoes the escalating sense of delirium. In the preliminary “Note on Sound”
Shepard dictates that the agitated “yapping” of coyotes should accompany
the “evolution of the character’s situation” (3):
The Coyote of Southern California has a distinct yapping, dog-like bark,

similar to the Hyena. This yapping grows more intense and maniacal as the
pack grows in numbers, which is usually the case when they lure and kill
pets from suburban yards. The sense of growing frenzy in the pack should
be felt in the background, particularly in Scenes 7 and 8. In any case, these
Coyotes never make the long, mournful, solitary howl of the Hollywood
stereotype. (4)
Mom’s tidy kitchen, like Shepard’s defamiliarization of the twentieth cen-

tury American home, has become incognito and Mom’s assertion that she
doesn’t “recognize it at all” (59) is all the more relevant in this light. The
surreal usurps the rational and the behavior of both the brothers becomes
increasingly unsocial. The setting in scene eight, for instance, depicts visual
Surrealism—the stage directions at the opening of the scene call for “a whole
bunch of stolen toasters lined up on the sink counter along with lee’s stolen T.V.,
the toasters are in a wide variety of models, mostly chrome” and “austin goes
up and down the line of toasters, breathing on them and polishing them with a
dish towel” (42–3). Simultaneously, “lee keeps periodically taking deliberate
ax-chops at the typewriter using a nine-iron” and “all of their mother’s house
plants are dead and drooping” (42). The tragedy of Lee and Austin’s battle to
the end in True West, lies in the causticity of their symbiotic bond—“I can’t
stop choking him! He’ll kill me if I stop choking him!” (58).
GENDER: THE REPRESENTATION OF MASCULINITY

IN SHEPARD’S PLAYS
Shepard’s men are violent and impenitent in their fixation on sadism. Indeed,
in this attack, Shepard uses words as ammunition: his writing is interspersed
with Americanisms, slang, obscenities, men with “peckers” who deal in
“bucks,” characters are “smart-ass[es],” “sonuvabitch[es]” and “lamebrains.”
Shepard’s words suggest a luxuriance in succumbing to primal pulsations of
violence, and, like the Surrealists, his men are infatuated with death. Foster
equates Surrealist automatism with “the psychic mechanisms of compulsive
repetition and death drive” (7). He isolates a conflict in Freud’s theory on
the drives between Eros (the life drive) and Thanatos (the death drive), stat-
ing that “[t]he two drives appear only in combination, with the death drive
‘tinged with eroticism’” (10–11). The fixation with death becomes all the
more disconcerting in this light, and suggests an eroticism or pleasure in the
unconscious drive toward annihilation and self-destruction. Bigsby writes
on the brutality of Shepard’s male characters:
In Shepard’s work, men are violent, striking out at one another, at the women
they love and at inanimate objects. Like so many demented Billy Budds
they are unable to articulate their feelings, unable even to understand their
motives. They seldom have a job or if they do it is occasional or marginal.
They are failed farmers, minor rodeo performers. They ride on the intensity
of their emotions [ . . . ].
Something is missing from their world, above all rational control. They live
by instinct. The subconscious becomes the conscious. What is buried is disinterred.
What is felt must be enacted.48
As in Greek tragedy Shepard’s men are driven by a primal intensity, in

this case the unconscious, which is beyond their control. Bigsby seems to
extract from Shepard’s men an array of Surrealist traits, namely an interest
in the primordial, the hidden depths of the male psyche, even an inclina-
tion towards dementia. Indeed, Shepard assigns animalistic tendencies to his
male characters as perhaps most palpably illustrated in Sally’s recollection
in A Lie of the Mind of the events leading up to her father’s death, for which
she blames Jake:
Their eyes changed. Something in their eyes. Like animals. Like the way an
animal looks for the weakness in another animal. They started poking at
each other’s weakness. Stabbing. Just a little bit at a time. Like the way that
rooster used to do. That rooster we had that went around looking for the
tiniest speck of blood on a hen or a chick and then he’d start pecking away at
it. And the more he pecked at it the more excited he got until finally he just
killed it. (99)
Sally also recalls attempting to assist her father: “I went over and tried to
help Dad up but he turned on me and snarled. Just like a dog. Just exactly
like a crazy dog. I saw it in his eyes. This deep, deep hate that came from
somewhere far away. It was pure, black hate with no purpose” (99). At the
end of this scene, Sally concludes that she “saw him splattered all over the
road like some lost piece of livestock” (101).
Shepard has personally spoken of violence in the following terms:
There’s something about American violence that to me is very touching. In

full force, it’s very ugly, but there’s also something very moving about it,
because it has to do with humiliation. There’s some hidden, deeply-rooted
thing in the Anglo male American that has to do with inferiority, that has to
do with not being a man, and always, continually, having to act out some idea
of manhood that invariably is violent. This sense of failure runs very deep.49
Shepard speaks of having to “act out some idea of manhood,” as though

his masculinity were a label or a routine, one of Baudrillard’s simulacra.
Shepard seems to consider masculinity as indistinguishable from violence,
equating one with the other. Jonathan Eburne argues that “the Surrealists
viewed criminal violence as an essential part of their collective re-evaluation
of psychological and political motives, a project whose demands on the
modern imagination, and whose contribution to the politics of liberation,
promised to be nothing short of revolutionary.”50 Shepard, in his evaluation
of American violence as “touching,” “to do with humiliation,” and “inferi-
ority,” focuses on the psychology behind such acts of aggression. However,
he designates masculinity as a simulacrum, thus suggesting a lack of inher-
ent self-hood and a construction of gender along societal-formulated lines.
ACCESSING THE PRIMITIVE

In Shepard’s plays, violence has a primordial function, “primitive fears,”
that, like drugs, somewhat substantiate his characters’ actions as innate
responses. This view evokes Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty” and his inter-
est in the primitive. Artaud’s investigation of indigenous cultures became
an active ingredient in the development of his artistic hypothesis on lan-
guage. Naomi Greene writes that “Artaud’s attempt to utterly transform
and revolutionize traditional language, to create a new language capable of
expressing man’s inner reality, ended in a return to the past, a return to the
nonverbal language of animistic primitive societies.”51 Like Artaud, Shepard
venerates the instinctive and unconscious over the premeditated and deliber-
ate in search of “man’s inner reality,” that elusive core that Shepard’s men
lack. “Primitive” art, that is, images produced not from academic train-
ing but often from unpremeditated sources or from memory, in addition
to art by children and by the insane, was a great source of influence on the
Surrealists. Additionally, alcohol and drugs operate as important tools in
Shepard’s plays for accessing the Surrealist image as an offspring of chaste
thought, void of incentive or motive. In Buried Child, for example, when
Halie first encounters the cornhusks Tilden has mysteriously picked from
a yard, which has not been planted since 1935, she concludes that the men
must either be drugged or insane. Indeed, Halie interrogates her husband
and her eldest son in the following manner:
Halie [to dodge]: Have you been taking those pills? Those pills always
make you talk crazy. Tilden, has he been taking those pills?
Tilden: He hasn’t took anything. [ . . . ]
Halie: Which ones did you take? Tilden, you must’ve seen him take
something.
Tilden: He never took a thing.
Halie: Then why’s he talking crazy?
Tilden: I’ve been here the whole time.
Halie: Then you’ve both been taking something!
Tilden: I’ve just been husking the corn. (75)
Later, on Vince’s arrival home, he is forced (or chooses?) to resort to vio-

lence and alcohol in an attempt to reintegrate into the “clan.” He fetches a
“bottle” for his grandfather, then announces his return by smashing empty
bottles on the porch (125). Alcohol catalyzes the revelation of an inner con-
sciousness. The play advocates the need for ritual in contemporary society
and Tilden’s burial of Dodge in the cornhusks operates as a coincidental
surreal donation to the “chief” of the family and also a prediction that what
once was buried will soon consume him. However, unlike the yellow roses
that Halie throws on Dodge’s lap in Act Three, the cornhusks are a source
of nourishment. In Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913), the psycho-
analyst explores William Robertson Smith’s treatise on the religion of the
Semites and discusses the ancient tradition of sacrifice, noting that “if a man
shared a meal with his god he was expressing a conviction that they were of
one substance; and he would never share a meal with one whom he regarded
as a stranger” (135). Furthermore, the ingestion of the sacrificial meal by
both the god and his worshippers cemented their concrete, impenetrable
bond (137). However, Peter L. Hays has also noted:
There is an abundance of food on the stage—actual corn and carrots—but

no one eats them. Shelly makes Dodge a cup of bouillon, but he refuses
it; Halie pours Shelly a cup of whiskey but she smashes the cup. Dodge
drinks from his own bottle and refuses to share with Tilden; Halie takes
Father Dewis’ flask from his pocket. Dodge and Tilden do not recognize
Vince. In short, there is no sharing, no drinking from the same cup, no
communion.52
Food is not shared in this family, suggesting a rupture with the gods and
defamiliarization within the family home. The actions of the final scene
when Tilden climbs the stairs to his mother, carrying the corpse of the buried
child, mirror his initial offering of the cornhusks to Dodge.
The exhumation of the infant in Buried Child alludes to biblical themes
of resurrection and reincarnation. In their emphasis on the excavation of the
repressed, Freud’s writings were of the utmost importance to the Surrealists.
Indeed, with reference to the final image of Buried Child, in which Tilden
climbs the stairs toward his mother, carrying the skeletal remains of the
unearthed child, Freud denotes climbing the stairs in dreams as symbolic
of copulation,53 further emphasizing the Oedipal subtext of the play. Buried
Child acts as a reminder of how a return to the archaic can reaffirm self-
worth and amalgamate the men, in this case the Prodigal Son, back into
the tribe. Yet writing on the Australian Aborigines, Freud has noted how
totemic exogamy effectively prevented incestuous relations within clans and
that incest is taboo precisely because it is so alluring.54 Shepard places his
play outside the remit of explicable cultural exegesis; instead, he embraces
the taboo. Buried Child contains the implication that Tilden committed an
act of incest with his mother Halie, that she bore him a son and that Dodge
drowned and buried the child in their back garden. On another level, as
usurper of his grandfather’s domain, Vince, in effect, becomes his grand-
mother’s husband. This lack of reverence for totemic exogamy relates to
Shepard’s description of Tilden as “displaced” and the characters’ regressive
childlike behavior. Freud equated infantilism with neuroticism:
Psychoanalysis has taught us that a boy’s earliest choice of objects for his
love is incestuous and that those objects are forbidden ones—his mother and
his sister. [ . . . ] [A]s he grows up, he liberates himself from this incestuous
attraction. A neurotic, on the other hand, invariably exhibits some degree of
physical infantilism. He has either failed to get free from the psychosexual
conditions that prevailed in his childhood or he has returned to them—two
possibilities which may be summed up as developmental inhibition and
regression.55
Again, we see evidence of a return of the repressed. Bradley appears particu-

larly puerile in his demeanor:
Bradley: (yelling at Halie). Gimme that blanket! Gimme back that blanket!
That’s my blanket!
[...]
(Bradley thrashes helplessly on the sofa trying to reach blanket [ . . . ])
[...]
Bradley: I want my blanket back! Gimme my blanket!
(Halie turns toward BRADLEY and silences him.)
Halie: Shut up, Bradley! Right this minute! I’ve had enough!
(Bradley slowly recoils, lies back down on sofa, turns his back toward Halie
and whimpers softly [ . . . ]). (115)
In the context of Freud’s theories, Bradley’s infantile behavior may sug-

gest that he has failed to mature beyond his early incestuous attraction
towards his mother. Oedipal insinuations abound in this play. The title
Buried Child refers not only to the infant corpse at the play’s close: but
also to Vince, whose very existence was buried by the family before he
reassumed his position. The title also refers to the family’s buried secrets
and the Oedipal suggestions that surface throughout. Even the conclud-
ing image of fecundity is on a par with Oedipal notions of predestination.
Halie exclaims at the play’s close “I’ve never seen a crop like this in my
whole life. Maybe it’s the sun [ . . . ] Maybe it’s the sun” (132). The word
“sun” has obvious implications of “son” referring to the incestuous source
of regeneration, and to potential renewal of life that Vince’s return sug-
gests. This pun echoes Hamlet’s opening lines to his stepfather: “I am too
much in the sun.” Yet it also invokes the ending of Ibsen’s Ghosts during
which Osvald recalls “lying there helpless, like a little new-born baby—
beyond help, lost, hopeless—past all cure”56 and eventually descends into
an increasing numbed, almost automated state of incapacitation, repeat-
ing “dully and without expression” and “tonelessly,” “The sun, the sun . . . ”57
Robert W. Corrigan writes of Ibsen’s play that “[h]ereditary disease was for
Ibsen the symbol of all the determinist forces that crush humanity, and,
therefore, he sought to put in opposition to these forces the strongest of all
instincts—maternal passion.”58 Yet Dodge’s earlier words from the begin-
ning of Act Three haunt this final scene: “Now you think everything’s
gonna be different. Just ‘cause the sun comes out” (110).
Writing on the work of Ernst, Foster argues that “the primal scene is
so important to Ernst, for it allows him think [of ] the artist as both active
creator (of the aesthetic identity) and passive receiver (of the automatist
work), as both participant inside and voyeur outside the scene of his art.”59
Shepard’s constant reexaminations of paternal punishment coupled with
“tough” love and incestuous undertones with regard to mother−son rela-
tions indicate a similar fascination with the “primal scene.” Remnants
of this are evident as early as Shepard’s The Rock Garden, which, as dis-
cussed in chapter 1, ends with the father figure falling off the couch
(literally dethroned) after his son’s explicit monologue on his preference
for sex. In The Holy Ghostly (1969), Ice describes the genesis of the cosmos
to his Pop in terms that equate this conception with the original parental
sexual act:
For millions of years the super sun and the giant ice planet travelled through
space, spinning and spinning and spinning. Then one day they collided with
each other and the giant ice planet penetrated deep inside to the center of the
super sun and buried itself. For hundreds of years nothing happened until
one day suddenly the accumulating steam from the melting ice planet caused
an enormous explosion inside the super sun.60
Charlotte Stokes writes that “Ernst understood the fundamental aspect of

Freud’s theory: that the child is the father of the man.”61 The same could
be said of the characters in Shepard’s The Holy Ghostly with father and son
literally switching roles as the play develops. Near the beginning of the first
scene, Ice declares: “Why if it wasn’t for the age separatin’ ’em you’d think
they was the same person” (203). A probing of the father−son relationship
appears as a pressing concern for the playwright throughout his career, in
comparison to the similar themes explored in Ernst’s art. Buried Child also
interrogates the notion of identity. It indicates a more vigorous concentra-
tion on relationships and a vehement compulsion to investigate our self-
derivation. The notion of inheritance is seen as inescapable and genetics, a
curse. In the final act of the play, Vince describes how he was stopped by
his reflection in the windscreen en route to Iowa as he gradually metamor-
phosed into his grandfather:
I saw him dead and alive at the same time. . . . His face 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. Changing. Clear
on back to faces I’d never seen before but still recognized. (130)
Thus, he comes to the realization that “I’ve got to carry on the line. I’ve got
to see to it that things keep rolling” (130). Vince inherits a family he does
not know, not least the horror that plagues them. The young man takes his
rightful place on the throne (the couch) once occupied by his grandfather
and balance is restored.
THE PREDATORY FEMALE: WOMEN IN SURREALIST ART

Surrealism became increasingly fascinated with sadomasochism, which evolved
into a consideration of the sexual as deadly, a concept that was to become
manifest in an image of the predatory female. In Shepard’s plays, women act
solely as tertiary dampeners to male carnage, yet often the insatiable nature of
female sexuality poses as much of a threat as male antagonism. However, as in
the Surrealist movement, women may enjoy a ringside position as an audience
to male combat, yet they do not occupy a center-stage vantage point. But, as
metaphorical spectators rather than participants, are they consequently spared
the bloodshed and hence the blame? Rudolf E. Kuenzli argues:
Women are to the male Surrealists, as in the longstanding traditions of patri-

archy, servants, helpers in the forms of child muse, virgin, femme-enfant,
angel, celestial creature who is their salvation, or erotic object, model, doll—
or she may be the threat of castration in the forms of the ubiquitous praying
mantis and other devouring female animals.62
Indeed, the same narrow representative frames assigned to femininity in

Surrealism appear persistently in Shepard’s work. Natalya Lusty has charted
feminism’s ambivalent relationship with Surrealism as one of “cautious fas-
cination.”63 She refers to “the simultaneous absence and presence of woman
within Surrealism,” noting “her historical absence from overviews and
accounts of the movement despite her heightened visibility as a subject of
desire, indeed as the very emblem of Surrealist revolutionary practice.”64
Kuenzli employs the infamous photograph of the Surrealist artists surround-
ing a painting by René Magritte, published in La Révolution surréaliste in
1929, as a visual example of how misogyny in Surrealism operated.65 The
men are dressed in shirts and ties, the woman unclothed, passively shy-
ing away from their gaze and vainly attempting to conceal her nakedness.
Surrounding her are the words “ je ne vois pas la cachée dans la forêt” (“I do not
see the woman hidden in the forest.”)
Robert J. Belton interprets the photograph as follows:
This woman is a creature of nature, hidden from view by the closed eyelids
of her adorers, absorbed by a forest environment that denies her any cultural
identity. When women are not immersed in nature, when they break into cul-
ture, they become (or must be made) masculine, less sexually threatening.66
This image represents the Surrealist practice of favoring alternative means

of verifying reality, notably abiding by the images produced by the mind
rather than those recognized by eyesight in their negation of conventional
logic. Thus, in the male Surrealists’ minds’ eye, the female naked form takes
on a phallic quality that neutralizes the anxiety that her alien body incites.
On the other hand, Magritte’s Pleasure from 1926, which features a young
girl eating a bird, represents woman, or more particularly girl, as maraud-
ing, savage even. Similarly, sculptures such as Alberto Giacometti’s Woman
with Her Throat Cut (1932; cast 1948) represent the customary Surrealist
equation of the female with the insectile. The symbol of the praying mantis
was employed by Surrealism in order to demonstrate the predatory nature
of female sexuality, because the female insect devours the male after copu-
lation. Giacometti’s sculpture of writhing insect was displayed below the
viewer, on its back in a particularly exposed manner. Additionally, André
Masson’s mannequin for the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in 1938
was stripped, gagged, and caged. She flirtatiously peers out through a cage
door, her body along with her stylized pubic hair offered to the viewer while
her mind and voice are not. As a means of negating the ostensible threat
that women pose, women in Surrealist art were dismembered, stripped,
beheaded, and sexually objectified.
This is especially evident in Hans Bellmer’s series of photographs of
dolls or poupées, Die Puppe, and “Variations sur le montage d’une mineure
articulée.” “Doll: Variations on the Montage of an Articulated Minor,” pub-
lished in the Surrealist magazine Minotaure in December 1934. An obses-
sion with mannequins in line with ideas of consumerism and voyeurism
developed among Surrealist artists in their consideration of the female
form. Bellmer’s work has disturbing connotations of pedophilia and, in
these photographs the female body is distorted, wounded, and fragmented
into a near image of decay. Bellmer has manipulated and deformed the
mannequin in an almost hedonistic manner until it is metamorphosed
into the definitive exquisite corpse. In this work, death is juxtaposed with
desire and each catalyzes the other. Sue Taylor writes that “[h]is stated
preoccupation with little girls as subjects for his art, moreover, coincided
with the Surrealist idealization of the femme-enfant, a muse whose associa-
tion with dual realms of alterity, femininity and childhood, inspired male
artists in their self-styled revolt against the forces of the rational.”67 The
dolls are emblematic of an erotic violence. The photographs are problem-
atic in the misogynist implication that femininity is a punishable trait—it
seems almost as though the female body has been deconstructed into phal-
lic symbols that somewhat negate the threat of castration that femininity
intimates.
SAM SHEPARD’S FEMALE CHARACTERS

In a manner similar to the representation of women in Surrealist art, Shepard’s
female characters are prey to both male fetishism and brutality. Such fluc-
tuation recalls Surrealism’s sadomasochist tendencies. Becky in The Tooth of
Crime describes to the audience how she was raped and reenacts both her
own role and that of the male attacker, presumed to be Hoss because the
monologue is directed at him: “(Her hands unzip her skirt and tear it off. One
hand tries to get inside her panties while the other hand fights it off ).68 Callens
regards this scene as evidence of Shepard’s “occasional sexism” and inter-
prets this duality of representation as an implication that Becky “share[s]
in the responsibility of her rape.”69 Also, significant in terms of Surrealism,
Callens compares the synchronized enactment to René Magritte’s painting
Les jours gigantesques (1928),70 which depicts the double image of a naked
woman fighting off a suited male attacker. Surrealism’s seeming radicalism
was based on a paradox that limited sexual freedom to the heterosexual male.
Likewise, Shepard’s women are often exaggerations of a heterosexual ideal
of femininity. Shelley, for instance, is described in the notes to the opening
of Act Two of Buried Child as “[ . . . ] about nineteen, black hair, very beauti-
ful. She wears tight jeans, high heels, purple T-shirt and a short rabbit fur coat.
Her make-up is exaggerated and her hair has been curled ” (83). Salem, in La
Turista, is described simply as “a woman in panties and bra” (255). Honey in
Operation Sidewinder is described as “a very sexy chick with long blonde hair
and tight pants, high heels, etc” (226)—the “etc.” here suggests that we should
be familiar with the image by now. Attractiveness is not simply a prerequisite
for Shepard’s female characters they have to be very beautiful or very sexy.
Yet as an extension of this seemingly misogynist undercurrent, Shepard has
spoken of a self-destructiveness in his yearning to eradicate the feminine
aspects of his consciousness: “You know, in yourself, that the female part
of one’s self as a man, is, for the most part, battered and beaten up and
kicked to shit just like some women in relationships. That men themselves
batter their own female part to their own detriment.” 71 The rationale behind
Shepard’s representation of women thus appears as a self-disparaging attack.
Yet he also acknowledges the very existence of a “female part of one’s self.”
Bellmer once declared: “Man in which I appear, I am woman in my physi-
ological horizon, in my amorous vocation.”72 Interestingly, Freud argues:
We are accustomed to say that every human being displays both male and
female instinctual impulses, needs and attributes; but though anatomy, it is
true, can point out the characteristic of maleness and femaleness, psychology
cannot. For psychology the contrast between the sexes fades away into one
between activity and passivity, in which we far too readily identify activity
with maleness and passivity with femaleness, a view which is by no means
universally confirmed in the animal kingdom.73
Femininity in a man is denoted as an inescapable certainty but nonetheless

a trait with societal connotations of psychological submissiveness. Yet it can
also be potentially threatening as the symbolism of the final image of Curse
of the Starving Class suggests—a feline (figuratively feminized?) “tom cat”
tearing apart the chest of an eagle midair, culminating in their crash landing
as “one whole thing” (200).
Shepard’s treatment of women in his plays has been examined in some
depth. Certain feminist critics such as Bonnie Marranca have read Shepard’s
depiction as misogynistic in rendering his heroines as secondary consider-
ations in his investigations into masculine interaction. She reads Shepard’s
female characters as peripheral, docile figures who merely act as servants in
the revelation of an explicitly male epiphany:
It cannot be ignored that Shepard, who is in some ways an idol of his young
audiences, is not simply traditional in his view of women, but downright
oppressive [ . . . ]. The voice—of consciousness, of the emotions, of reason, of
triumph, and of failure, too—and finally, of America—is a man’s voice.74
However, David Savran has noted that Shepard shows a partiality toward male
relationships as “a kind of transcendental connection,”75 as a more mystifying
or unexplored, and thus as a more prolific and fertile ground, to which he can
apply Surrealist methods of excavation. Savran also equates Shepard’s denun-
ciation of the feminine constituents of the masculine psyche with Freud’s
writings: “In so many of Shepard’s plays, reflexive sadomasochism functions
as a kind of fantasmatic engine that relentlessly reproduces a tough male sub-
ject who proves his orneriness by subjugating and battering his (feminized)
Other.”76 Such a classification suggests an exaggerated and performative mas-
culinity at the expense of the feminized counterpart. For example, May is
transformed in Fool for Love from “her former tough drabness into a very sexy
woman” (27). Shepard stated in 1997 that this play “came out of falling in
love. It’s such a dumb-founding experience. In one way you wouldn’t trade it
for the world. In another way it’s absolute hell. More than anything, falling in
love causes a certain female thing in a man to manifest.”77 Under this theoreti-
cal lens, Shepard explores notions of femininity and masculinity but only as a
conflict of the male psyche, not as a showdown of the battle of the sexes.
In response to accusations of misogyny, Shepard stated the following in
an interview with Matthew Roudané: “[ . . . ] I think Mae is a pretty solid
character in Fool for Love. She’s probably the most solid character I’ve writ-
ten. 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 case of her own
willfulness, but as a whole character” (134). In Fool for Love, it is dangerous to
love a woman—(a “[l]ong, tender kiss” precedes a knee to the groin [26])—
while sex could be interpreted as a commercially viable currency (female
genitalia “smell[s] like metal” [22]). Yet Susan Bennett has highlighted how
the stage directions situate May in a distinctly submissive position at the
beginning of the play “as a rag doll, an inactive puppet, whose performance
the audience might assume will be triggered, if not controlled, by Eddie’s
actions and/or words”:78
MAY sits on the edge of the bed facing the audience, feet on floor, legs apart,
elbows on knees, hands hanging limp and crossed between her knees, head
hanging forward, face staring at floor. She is absolutely still and maintains
this attitude until she speaks. (20)
May only gains strength in her espousal of a violent masculine disposition.

As Lynda Hart concludes of this play: “Shepard’s attempt in Fool for Love
to represent a heterosexual encounter turns out to be only his male charac-
ters’ encounter with their imaginary others, ‘lies of the minds,’ monologues
masked as dialogue.”79
True West also explores this dichotomy between masculine and feminine
facades of the male consciousness. Austin occupies the traditionally “femi-
nine” domain of the kitchen while conducting his “research.” Yet simultane-
ously, he initially embodies reason and discipline, conventionally deemed
to be “male” characteristics. On the other hand, Lee is depicted as a man
of the desert, a quintessential cowboy, the alpha male of the duo. However,
he also symbolizes the imagination, the free spirit, the illogical, and in this
sense could be read as the more feminine of the two in his connection to
nature. Lee’s refusal to take his brother with him to the desert in the final
scene catalyzes Austin’s violent outburst, his repeated assertion that he too
is “goin’ to the desert” (58). This rebuttal inhibits the reconciliation of the
two “female” facades of the brothers’ shifting identities by denying him
self-expression and candor. The “maleness” of their personalities takes over
and a violent brawl ensues. Their mother’s reaction to the fight is chillingly
composed: “Well you can’t kill him [ . . . ]. That’s a savage thing to do” (58);
Mom does not believe that Austin has embraced his inner man sufficiently
to justify fratricide. His mother considers him not even to be man enough
to commit murder. Austin thus reverts to the role of a “savage” in order to
prove his case. If we are to consider the imagination as a trait associated with
the feminine by the Surrealists, the ending of True West could be read as a
further physical attack on the female aspects of the male psyche. And the
only manner in which Austin can prove his manliness is through violence.
On the other hand, in Buried Child, Shelly is represented as less in touch
with the imagination and constantly attempts to rationalize the unfolding
events. It is her conscious awareness of the discrepancy between the real
and the imagined that isolates her from the other [male] characters in the
play. Shepard subverts the traditional interpretation of woman as irrational

and man as logical. Dodge declares the following at the beginning of Act
Three: “There’s nothing a man can’t do. You dream it up and he can do it.
Anything” (110). Yet Shelly laments the lack of rationality in the household:
“There isn’t any reason here! I can’t find a reason for anything” (121). It is
interesting that Dodge seems to be less conscious than Shelly of the boundar-
ies of reality and fantasy. She is symbolically raped when Tilden strokes her
rabbit coat; the description of his actions is unnerving: “tilden takes it slowly,
feels the fur, then puts it on. shelly watches as tilden strokes the fur slowly. He
smiles at her [ . . . ] tilden walks around stroking the fur and smiling at the coat”
(102). Shelly strikes back by equally figuratively castrating Bradley by hiding
his wooden leg. She appears capable of symbolic castration and is a threat.
Yet, by the end of her visit, Shelly, as the personification of rationalism and
the representative of the audience’s peripheral uninformed viewpoint, fights
to preserve her sanity, not least her life. Vince victimizes and rejects her in his
inability (and unwillingness) to transcend his heritage. On the other hand, in
this rejection, Shelley finds emancipation from the madhouse, a lucky escape
for, as Vince relates, “No man or woman has ever crossed the line and lived to
tell the tale!” (127). An interrogation of the real denotes a quintessential post-
modern pursuit. Yet there seems to be a nonconformity between the weight
that Shepard’s men put on abstract notions of “true origin”—their desires,
their histories, their mythic views of masculinity, and the “true-west”—and
the lack of an examination of female “true” selfhood, and not simply the
“female part” of a man. As I have noted, the female seems to act as a filter, or
mirror, through which this penetrative search for male authenticity becomes
displaced. In the introduction to her book on the representation of women
in Surrealism, Katharine Conley quotes Luce Irigaray’s questioning of “the
place of Woman in Western philosophy”: “Does woman have an unconscious
or is she the unconscious?”80 Conley further notes:
Breton insist[ed] upon the emotional nature of the word-image flow:

“Surrealism’s essential discovery is, in effect, that without preconceived
intention, the mobile pen that writes or the mobile pencil that draws weaves
an infinitely precious substance, which cannot be substantively or commer-
cially defined but which nevertheless appears to be charged with everything
within the writer or painter that is emotional.”81
It could therefore be argued that Shepard attempts to utilize both his female
characters, and the feminine aspects of his consciousness, to access the emo-
tion necessary for “the word-image flow” unattainable to the men. Similarly,
in the opening to his chapter on “Surrealism and Misogyny,” Rudolf E.
Kuenzli cites Man Ray’s photograph of Simone Breton in which she is sitting
at a typewriter, surrounded by a group of male Surrealist artists, as indicative

of the male Surrealist motif of utilizing woman as “a recording machine”
who “has no dreams of her own, but faithfully encodes male dreams.”82
Nonetheless, Shepard’s female characters often deny this role attributed to
them. In Buried Child, Shelly exposes the fabrication of the entire scenario:
“I know you’ve got a secret. You’ve all got a secret. It’s so secret in fact, you’re
all convinced it never happened” (122). She also predicts the inevitability of
the events, refuting Father Dewis’s defense of the family for “not fulfilling
[her] hallucination” (121) with the remark: “It was no hallucination. It was
more like a prophecy. You believe in prophecy, don’t you?” (122). And, as
Callens points out, “Shelley is a catalyst in the ritual revelation of the double
offense of incest and infanticide.”83 Shepard’s female characters incessantly
offer a refreshing rationality to his plays, and in this are threatening to the
Surrealist dramatic sphere that Shepard’s men inhabit.
For the Surrealists, while the feminine was counterpart to the hysteric, the
female body also emblematized a “convulsive beauty,” an object of male fetish-
ism that was integral to the Surrealist movement, and, in this sense, extremely
powerful. Shepard’s women use this power to survive. In Act Two of Buried
Child, Shelley vehemently asserts her will (“Let go of me you sonuvabitch!
I’m not your property!” [91]). She also initially (if unsuccessfully) attempts to
acclimatize to the family way, standing in the middle of the living room with
an armload of carrots; when Vince attempts to take them from her she protests:
“I’d just as soon be a thousand miles from here [ . . . ] You’re the one who wants
to stay. So I’ll stay. I’ll stay and I’ll cut the carrots. And I’ll cook the carrots.
And I’ll do whatever I have to do to survive” (94). For Shelly to establish her-
self in this household she must enter into the world of the surreal in order to be
accepted. But this is short lived. She recognizes that these characters are alien
to the American audience—(“You’re the strangers here, not me” [121])—and
she vocalizes the upset that the audience must feel toward Shepard’s insurrec-
tionary sabotage of the American realist tradition in a metatheatrical speech
delivered as if she had wandered into the wrong play:
I don’t even know what I’m doing here. [ . . . ] I was just coming along for the
ride. I thought it’d be a nice gesture. Besides, I was curious. [Vince] made all
of you sound so familiar to me. Every one of you. For every name, I had an
image. Every time he’d tell me a name, I’d see the person. In fact, each of you
was so clear in my mind that I actually believed it was you. I really believed
when I walked through that door that the people who lived here would turn
out to be the same people in my imagination. But I don’t recognize any of
you. Not one. Not even the slightest resemblance. (121)
A Lie of the Mind could be read as Shepard’s most explicit commentary

on the subterfuge of gender itself, and how female or males roles can be,
somewhat whimsically, assumed or worn like a shirt. In Act Two, Scene

Three, Beth, whose brain injury seems to have left her more attuned to the
constructed nature of the “reality” of her surroundings, observes her father’s
shirt and notes: “Look how big a man is. So big. He scares himself. His shirt
scares him. He puts his scary shirt on so it won’t scare himself. He can’t
see it when it’s on him. Now he thinks it’s him” (80). Here, Beth suggests
that masculinity is a guise, a vestimentary shroud that fools the wearer into
believing they are the uniform they don. Fittingly, she subsequently con-
fuses the etymological definition of the word “custom”:
Beth: (Referring to shirt) This is like a custom. Big. Too Big. Like a custom.
Frankie: A what?
Beth: Custom. Like a custom.
Frankie: A custom?
Beth: For play. Acting.
Frankie: Oh. You mean a ‘costume’?
Beth: Costume
Frankie: Yeah. A ‘costume.’ I get what you mean.
Beth: Pretend
Frankie: You were in a play, right? I mean you were acting.
Beth: (Moving, playing with shirt) Pretend is more better.
Frankie: What do you mean?
Beth: Pretend. Because it fills me. Pretending fills. Not empty. Other.
Ordinary. Is no good. Empty. Ordinary is empty. Now, I’m like the man.
(Pumps her chest up, closes her fists, sticks her chin out and struts in the shirt.)
Just feel like a man. Shirt brings me a man. I am a shirt man. Can you see?
Like father. You see me? Like brother. (She laughs; 81)
Beth sees masculinity as a laughable disparaged trait, a flimsy coating to

“fill” a void, the simulation of strength to conceal a facileness or barrenness
at the core. Beth’s actions explicitly theatricalize Marjorie Garber’s writings
on male subjectivity in her influential book Vested Interests: Cross Dressing
and Cultural Anxiety (1992):
I suspect that any discussion of “male subjectivity” (as a counterpart to

“female subjectivity”) is a recuperative cultural fantasy, a theoretical
back formation from “female subjectivity,” where the latter evolved as a
politically necessary critique of the presumably universal subjectivity, the
humanist concept of “man.” Does “male subjectivity,” conceptualized, rep-
resent anything more than a wistful logic of equality, which springs from
a feminist desire to make “man” part rather than whole? Is “male subjec-
tivity” not in fact, like “female fetishism,” a theoretical tit-for-tat which
finally demonstrates the limits of theorization when it comes to matters of
gender construction?84
In light of Garber’s words, by donning the shirt, Beth does indeed highlight
the fractured, or in this case vacuous, nature of Frankie’s male subjectivity
from her own female subjectivity as a “recuperative cultural fantasy.” The
shirt, like her father or her brother, “brings [her] a man.” Beth elaborates on
this pretense by associating masculinity with a violent lust, sexualizing her
body in the process, but also demanding that Frankie play the role of the
submissive female, a further act of emasculation:
Beth: Pretend to be. Like you. Between us we can make a life. You could be
the woman. You be. [ . . . ] (Moving toward Frankie) You could pretend
to be in love with me. With my shirt. You love my shirt. This shirt is a
man to you. You are my beautiful woman. You lie down. (Beth moves
in to Frankie and tries to push him down on the sofa by the shoulders.
Frankie resists.)
Frankie: Now, wait a second, Beth. Wait, wait. Come on.
(beth keeps trying to push frankie back down on sofa but frankie stays sitting.)
Beth: (Giggling, pushing frankie) You fight but all the time you want my
smell. You want my shirt in your mouth. You dream of it. Always. You
want me on your face. (81–82)
In his role as a woman, Beth demands that Frankie “pretend” to be in

love with her masculinized self. She also, somewhat problematically, sug-
gests that Frankie will enjoy being dominated and that as a “woman-man”
(82) will welcome, even crave, her assumed male command. His resistance
actually works to confirm his feminized condition. Yet on the other hand,
in Act Three, Scene Two, Beth appears dressed in an almost parodist display
of girly femininity, incongruous items that are garish in their juxtaposition,
and appearing as the superlative Surrealist femme-enfant:
Beth is dressed in a bizarre combination of clothing. She wears black high

heels with short woolen bobby socks, a tight pink skirt—below the knee,
straight out of the fifties—a fuzzy turquoise-blue short-sleeved, low cut sweater,
green tights. She wears lots of charm bracelets and a silver chain around her
neck with a St. Christopher medal, a gold cross and a rabbit’s foot.
She has various kinds of snap earrings encircling her left ear. Her hair is
piled high with a small white ribbon tied in a bow at the top. Her face is heav-
ily made up with thick glossy pink lipstick, blue mascara and dark outlined
eyebrows. (117)
Sheila Rabillard notes that Beth’s outfit, or costume, is “equally like a child
playing dress-up and like a hooker.”85 Connectedly, Florence Falk identifies
many of Shepard’s women as “child women,” a term she borrows from the
sociologist Erving Goffman:
The “child woman” is any woman who employs a set of expressions, ges-
tures, or actions to protect herself from the abuses of male power and pre-
rogative by acting as the obedient child accommodating the demands of
an authoritative parent [ . . . ]. [T]his behavioral syndrome recapitulates the
child’s survival mechanism to defend itself and to thwart or manipulate
the parent.86
In this sense, Beth exposes the transparency of masculinity and actively

reappropriates the narrow frames of representation available to her; she uti-
lizes cultural assumptions of femininity, that of the child and the whore, in
a bizarre juxtaposition that safeguards her from male abuse while also, on a
rudimentary level, satisfying their desires.
In Curse of the Starving Class, Shepard informs us that the adolescent
Emma has just starting menstruating, the definitive symbol of her already
inaugurated sexuality and the origins of reproduction. Indeed, in her mother
Ella’s most introspective speech, she speaks of the biological origin of their
despair:
Ella: Do you know what this is? It’s a curse. I can feel it. It’s invisible but it’s
there. [ . . . .] And it goes back. Deep. 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. (174)
Marranca queries, “[w]hen Emma’s own female ‘curse’ is linked poetically

to the fall of her class, it makes one ask if Shepard isn’t cursing women for
their powers of reproduction.”87 Indeed, in its evocation of Chekhov’s The
Cherry Orchard in relation to the threat of losing the family farm, this threat
also incorporates the threat of female empowerment, if we consider James F.
Schlatter’s contention that “the ideal of the family of security is embodied in
the farm” and that “[t]he farm incorporated the family in a kind of gentle,
secure patriarchy.”88 Shepard’s attempts to create more developed autono-
mous female characters may simply be acts of tokenism in that his women
are supplementary to the patriarchal hegemonic theatrical domain he has
created, rather than agents of it. In Curse of the Starving Class Emma wants
to be a mechanic and is depicted as ignorant of what femininity entails and
so the female roles associated with the domestic sphere are denied to her.
Wesley literally urinates over her attempts to learn how to cook a chicken
while Weston bans her from doing the laundry as he considers it to be his
wife’s job:
Weston: (pushing laundry to the side) She didn’t do any of this. It’s the same
as when I brought it. None of it!
Emma: I’ll do it.
Weston: No you won’t do it! You let her do it! It’s her job! What does she do
around here anyway? Do you know? [ . . . ] What does a woman do?
Emma: I don’t know. (166)
Emma’s mother instantaneously associates menstruation with injury,

even death:
Ella: Now I know the first thing you’ll think is that you’ve hurt yourself.
That’s only natural. You’ll think that something drastic has gone wrong
with your insides and that’s why you’re bleeding. That’s only a natural
reaction.
[ . . . .]
Now the first thing is that you should never go swimming when that hap-
pens. It can cause you to bleed to death. The water draws it out of you.
(138–139)
Ella next associates sanitary napkins with infection:
Ella: [ . . . ] they’re a far cry from “sanitized.” They’re filthy in fact [ . . . ]. You
don’t know whose quarters go into those machines. Those quarters carry
germs. [ . . . ] Spewing germs all over those napkins. (139)
The blood lifeline literally drains from the family as the daughter loses
blood. Emma, arguably Shepard’s most refractory character against gender
typecasting, dies in the final scene just as her menstruation commences
and just before her ostensibly ominous sexuality has been realized. She pre-
viously secured her own release from jail only by making sexual advances
toward the sergeant. Emma even considers prostitution when she conse-
quently announces that she is “going into crime” as “[i]t’s the only thing
that pays these days” (196). Any threat of female empowerment, and in
particular her reproductive capacity, is fatally interrupted, even suggested
as the “curse” that kills her, recalling Bataille’s impression that “copulation
is the parody of crime.”89 Emma dies in a car bomb, presumably intended
to murder her father; thus she becomes the sacrifice for her father’s crime.
But, as with the other female characters, Emma does not live in a state of
disillusionment or in the imaginary world of the men. She fantasizes about
working as a mechanic in Mexico but her horse riding attempt (with its
sexual implications) brings her back to reality: she “stopped dreaming and
saw [herself] being dragged through the mud” (149). Emma’s voice, like
Shelly’s, symbolizes rationalism and she recognizes that the family would
“all be the same people” (148), regardless of whether they moved away or
not. Emma advises Wesley of the pointlessness of digression from the
master plan:
Emma: Well don’t eat your heart out about it. You did the best you could.
Wesley: I didn’t do a thing.
Emma: That’s what I mean. (196)
Earlier, she warns that cooperation, or compliance, is “deadly” and that

“[i]t leads to dying” (148). Indeed, Salem ’s actions in La Turista echoed
this sentiment when she recalls spitting on the threshold of her home as
a child, just as her father was about to enter.90 A line from Patti Smith’s
poem “Jag-Arr of the Jungle” (1973) also springs to mind: “I went home to
America and threw up on my father’s bed.”91
ANALYSIS
In an analysis of the representations of the female as outlined in the previ-
ous pages, women are represented in Shepard’s plays as secondary. But, as
I have argued, they also have a constructive role as agents of a rationality that
acts as the realist counter to the surreal behavior of the men. Furthermore,
Beth’s actions in A Lie of the Mind can be read as empowering in that her
interrogation of male subjectivity ironically works to highlight its absence
in light of Garber’s writings. Shepard’s male characters kill off, beat, and
desert their female companions, ultimately to their own detriment. I will
subsequently explore alternative interpretations of Surrealist art to exem-
plify how male Surrealist artists have similarly mistreated women in their
work yet ironically these depictions work to critique the cultural environ-
ment that sanctioned them. Marranca appears to suggest that Shepard’s
treatment of women is comparable to such images of seemingly egalitarian
misogyny as evident in René Magritte’s iconic image of the female nude
in Le Viol (The Rape; 1934). This painting could be read as exemplify-
ing Surrealism’s view of women as faceless distillations of male fantasy.
Woman is projected as an inflated emblem of sexuality, personified as a
faceless, voiceless nude. In this painting, the woman’s facial features, her
very identity, have been reduced to a representation of her genitalia. Robert
Hughes saw in this work “a blind, mute, and pathetic sexuality [that] has a
truly Sadeian character.”92 Indeed, Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade, a
figure regarded by the Surrealists as estimable, is commemorated in Man
Ray’s Monument to D. A. F. de Sade (1933) and many other Surrealist
works were dedicated to him. The Marquis de Sade was perhaps the most
cogent exponent of autonomy void of the constraints of morality, law, or
reason. By equating the subject of The Rape with the Marquis, Hughes
identifies her as the victim of self-indulgent male brutality. The woman
in The Rape is mute and anonymous. Her neck and head have a phallic
quality, surrounded by pubic-like hair. Thus, the image also represents the
mechanics of the rape in progress, the face and neck, or penis, penetrating
the pubic region of the woman. Her physical appearance has been raped;
she is a hyperbole of a sexual image—her femininity stripped bare and
taken to the extreme.
In an alternative analysis of this painting, Susan Gubar has noted the
recurrence of the female image of The Rape in Magritte’s artistic body of
work as well as the fact that it appeared on the cover of Breton’s Qu’est-ce que
le Surrealisme? in 1934, thus highlighting the significance of its message to
the Surrealist agenda.93 Gubar writes:
In opposition to the approach that labels Le Viol inadequate as art, such read-
ings emphasize the fact that Breton’s contemporaries repeatedly employed
absurd, provocative, and fantastic symbols to defamiliarize conventional ways
of seeing both art and reality. For, in their exploration of erotic and perverse
images, of many different art forms and media, and of the unconscious mate-
rial manifested in dreams and madness, the Surrealists mocked the hypocri-
sies of bourgeois morality as the origins of repression and alienation.
In this context, Le Viol flaunts the mind-body split at the center of Western
culture, taunts the prudery that teaches us to cover the body and not the face,
and jokes that love is blind.94
Gubar also signals the fact that the woman is an utterly absurd “instru-
ment of pleasure”95 (the title of the painting is an allusion to a violin)
because all access to her body is denied; she appears entirely impenetrable
and her pubic region rendered as a triangular sketch. In addition, Magritte
had witnessed the removal of his mother’s body from the River Sambre,
her face concealed by her nightgown, where she drowned when the artist
was a child. Thus, this painting could be read as a cathartic exorcism for
Magritte. A Freudian reading of the painting would also suggest the explo-
ration of a lost phallus, the loss of sexuality and, simultaneously, the loss
of a mother, whose body itself is impenetrable and off limits to the artist.
This, again, suggests Freudian notions of the repressed and moral impro-
priety. Gubar’s emphasis on the dis-indoctrination of traditional means
of viewing, along with her identification of a resistance to, and deliberate
rebellion against, conservative propriety suggests an alternative reading
of the misogyny of the image. However, the fact that Magritte is actively
exploiting the female body in channeling these new ways of seeing is fun-
damentally problematic.
It would be beneficial at this point to consider Shepard’s treatment of
women in the light of Lusty’s writings on Surrealism, feminism, and psy-
choanalysis, in particular her discussion of Bellmer’s dolls. Lusty, while not
“expung[ing] the possibility of the work’s inherent misogyny” 96 suggests
that “[l]ike Bataille, Bellmer uses the female body to stage his aesthetic and
social rebellion against a repressive, autocratic, bourgeois father and culture.”97

Furthermore, Lusty posits:
Bellmer’s dolls stage a rejection of bourgeois family arrangements and the

procreative function of its sexuality, exploring instead the loss of self and the
fusion with the other in both fantasy and eroticism. But since the dolls are
also imbued with a powerful sense of nostalgia they also paradoxically invoke
a longing for the familial arrangements of a bourgeois childhood.98
A similar longing is evident in such Shepard plays as True West and Buried
Child. Contextualizing Bellmer’s dolls within the climate of censorship
in Nazi Germany, Lusty demonstrates how “perversion” in these images
“becomes a strategy of resistance to cultural norms in an escalating climate
of cultural conformity and censorship, one that unfolds the drama of filial
rebellion against the fascist father and the violent and repressive surveillance
of the Nazi state.”99 Similarly, Foster notes:
In his sadistic scenes Bellmer leaves behind masochistic traces; in his destruc-
tion of the dolls he expresses a self-destructive impulse. [ . . . ] In this regard
the poupées may go beyond (or is it inside?) sadistic mastery to the point where
the masculine subject confronts his greatest fear: his own fragmentation, dis-
integration, and dissolution.100
Foster argues that the seemingly male supremacist representation of the young
girls in Bellmer’s work is actually disparaging of the male. As an extension
to this, Lusty’s reference to the antiauthoritarian stance that these images
take and their hermeneutical reaction against “the fascist father,” relate to
Shepard’s work. Both Bellmer and Shepard utilize the female form to high-
light masculine inadequacy, relating specifically in the case of Bellmer’s dis-
embodied dolls to the fragmentation of male subjectivity. Stephen Watt has
outlined how engaging with the world through “genital-sexual activity [ . . . ]
demands a level of self-identity few of Shepard’s male characters possess.”101
Noting a passage in Motel Chronicles in which the narrator describes his
comfort at residing in the “belly of California,” Watt signals how Shepard’s
male characters resist self-creation and thus self-definition, opting instead
to “regress into an embryonic reverie that precedes subject-object dichot-
omy [ . . . ] a womb that is paradoxically a distance between the brain and
the genitals, between identity and gender.”102 In this respect, the actions of
Shepard’s male characters indicate an impulse toward the death drive and
also mirror those of Beckett’s characters who constantly vie for a release
from self-creation by returning to a world of pre-creation.103
Shepard’s female characters, rather than acting as passive receptors of male
aggression, reflect the failure of romanticized perceptions of masculinity.
Like the female form or the mannequin in Surrealist art, they are manipu-
lated, objectified, and abused. Thus, the exploitation of women in the inter-
rogation of the illusory nature of masculinity seems misogynistic. Shepard’s
women are symbolically raped, killed off, neglected, and nearly beaten to
death in this searching investigation of the “true origin” of the male. This
inquisition into the origins of male identity follows a regression to familial
derivation as in Buried Child, the journey to an inner “truth” as in A Lie of the
Mind, or a rechanneling of the cowboy existence as in True West and Fool for
Love. However, Callens argues that in relation to Buried Child, “[u]nderneath
the play’s realistic concerns throbs a holistic (feminine) longing which ani-
mated the American Dream but was thwarted in the process of colonizing
a new continent.” Thus, “the discovery that, on a deeper level, feminine
forces play a positive role in safeguarding ‘continuity,’ redresses the one-sided
negative view of women in Shepard’s plays.”104 Furthermore, Shepard’s plays
frequently dramatize a failed masculinity while the mise-en-scène lampoons
American realism in a surreal manner. Writing on Shepard’s male characters,
Carla J. McDonough remarks: “[t]he abstract qualities of independence and
originality that Shepard associates in his plays with the frontier are also con-
nected with escape and erasure for the men who ‘disappear’ into the deserts
of the West.”105 This notion of an idealized frontier that promises escapism is
only a myth in itself, and McDonough notes, “[i]f ‘real’ masculinity is located
in that frontier, then it too is an ever-receding fantasy.”106 Shepard’s male
characters thus seek to assert an illusory persona that can only be reconciled
in fallacious contexts that consequently work to nullify their existence. They
continuously seek solace from bourgeois orthodoxy, usually in the fictional
world of the frontier. I have traced how Shepard establishes a realist mise
en scéne in these plays in order to make his insurrection of the familiar all
the more shocking. In this incubatory setting, Shepard creates surreal visual
images on the stage in a seemingly oppressively patriarchal world. However,
as this chapter has demonstrated, it is not his female characters who are erased
and figuratively “absent,” it is his men.
Chapter 4
A Comparative Study
of Sam Shepard’s
Angel City and Luis
Buñuel and Salvador
Dalí’s Un chien
andalou
INTRODUCTION
This chapter will examine how Shepard’s play Angel City (1976) redefines
and draws on Surrealism by complicating normative theatrical semiotics and
introducing the language of cinema into the representative frame. It will do
so in part by examining the Surrealist films of Luis Buñuel, with a particular
focus on what is perhaps the definitive Surrealist film of the twentieth century,
Un chien andalou (The Andalusian Dog; 1929), which Buñuel cocreated with
Dalí. Shepard expressed his appreciation for Buñuel in a 1994 interview
with Michael Almereyda for Arena magazine. In response to Almereyda’s
question, “Who are your favorite film directors?” Shepard replied, “Buñuel.
Although he’s dead.”1 Likewise, Bigsby has noted the influence of Federico
García Lorca’s work on Shepard’s plays, particularly signalling the parallels
between such works as Lorca’s short Surrealist play El paseo de Buster Keaton
(Buster Keaton’s Spin) (1928) and a piece written by Shepard in the late 1970s
titled “The Escapes of Buster Keaton.” Bigsby notes:
Lorca spoke of what some chose to call his Surrealist plays as a kind of disor-
dered vision rendered onto form, Shepard of trying to “cut through space and
make perfect sense without having to hesitate for ‘meaning.’” Both writers
cited Luis Buñuel as an influence, Lorca writing a screenplay inspired by

Un chien andalou and Shepard speaking admiringly of his ability to combine
narrative with startling images.2
Shepard’s admiration of Buñuel’s treatment of narrative is apt in that the

Spanish director’s films, even as his later works assumed a more linear nar-
rative form, never became completely divorced from his earlier experiments
in Surrealist expression. La Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie (The Discreet
Charm of the Bourgeoisie; 1972), for instance, displays a more lucidly delin-
eated plot, yet as the film progresses, the dream sequences become increas-
ingly difficult to decipher from the scenes depicting “reality.” In his films,
Buñuel not only combines narrative with shocking images, he also composes
the narrative through their juxtaposition. Un chien andalou demonstrates
how a visual chain of ostensibly unrelated objects can operate as a condem-
nation of societal corruption—the nonsensicality of social, religious, and
sexual oppression, for example. The narrative reveals itself in both Un chien
andalou and Angel City by means of free association of visual concurrence,
which Shepard creates by evoking the language of jazz improvisation. The
playwright’s emphasis in Angel City on the manifestations of fantasy in a
three-dimensional, concrete yet fractured, or episodic form readily lends
itself to comparisons with cinematography; indeed, in Angel City Shepard
actively exploits cinematographic techniques to create a multifaceted play
about transformation. Both Un chien andalou and Angel City work with
hybrids of genre, exploiting the visual and exploring film and theatre with
an intense concentration on imagistic expression.
Further similarities emerge in relation to investigations of primordial
yearning. Buñuel’s inquiry extracts from dream imagery visuals associated
with repressed desire and institutional oppression; he creates unforgettable,
seemingly grotesque graphics that are as disturbing as they are enticing.
Angel City revels in fantastical images as Shepard evokes trance-like states
and concurrently extols the unconscious as a site for creative inspiration.
This play also contains many images that seem to be borrowed from Buñuel’s
repository of memorable iconography. Both exalt the power of film to mirror,
and reenact, the reverie of the dream-state. Thus, they laud the transforma-
tive, and redemptive, potential of the cinema as a means of accessing alterna-
tive realms of reality and liberating some essence of inner “truth.”
First, this chapter will provide a summary and subsequent analysis of
the opening sequence of Un chien andalou to examine how the narrative
is treated and meaning communicated. I will then contextualize the cir-
cumstances that influenced the conception of Angel City, focusing par-
ticularly on Shepard’s documentation of his experiences on tour with Bob
Dylan’s “Rolling Thunder Revue.” I will examine how Shepard’s dramatic
Angel City and Un chien andalou 81
construction of an oneiric space, created by blurring the lines between

drama and cinematography, allows for the Surrealist image to emerge.
The closing section of this chapter will center on some of Buñuel’s later
films and will demonstrate how narrative, as in Shepard’s play, is treated
imagistically in its conveyance of meaning. Ultimately, this chapter shall
deduce that the respective aims of Angel City and Buñuel’s films discussed
here overlap in their critical striving for unattainable transience in the
immutability of the celluloid image, an endeavor that suggests the impulse
toward death.
THE OPENING SEQUENCE

In Un chien andalou, Buñuel sought to emulate the form of the dream by
associating seemingly unrelated visuals as symptoms of deeper or repressed
psychological desires/anxieties/impulses. Originally a silent film and accom-
panied by a gramophone, it promoted the universal language of images.
However, Buñuel added a soundtrack to the film in 1960, which included
sections of Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, notably Isolde’s Death,
which strengthened the themes of hallucination and fatality. In the visual
deliverance of meaning, Buñuel abuses the audience’s trust from the onset
by misspelling the names of the Director of Photography Albert Dubergen,
the actors Simone Mareuil and Pierre Batcheff and referring to himself as
“Louis” Buñuel. The opening title announces “Il était une fois” (“Once
upon a time”), as though initiating the audience into a familiar fairytale. Yet
the fragmented narrative soon destabilizes the audience’s sense of comfort as
a close analysis of the plot reveals.
SUMMARY
A man (played by Buñuel himself) is sharpening a blade on a doorknob. He
runs the blade along his thumbnail to check its efficiency. The man retires
to the balcony, smoking, and gazes up at the moon, which intensifies the
sentimental ambience. A dagger of clouds slices across the moon. Yet in the
next scene, the filmic cues, that have created a sense of ease for the specta-
tor thus far, collapse. The camera rests on the face of a woman (Simone
Mareuil) who sits passively while the hand of an unseen man exposes her
eye, his diagonally striped tie falling alongside her face. The camera closes
in on the eye, the blade slices through it, and the vitreous gel seeps out,
producing one of the most unexpected, shocking and famous images in
the history of film. The title of the second chapter announces “Huit ans
après” (Eight Years Later) but the action seems to have regressed to the past.
A young man (Pierre Batcheff) is cycling down the street, wearing what
appear to be donkey’s ears and a nurse’s bib. The camera zooms in on his
diagonally striped box-like satchel (recalling the striped tie of the eye-slitter
in the prologue). The camera cuts to an image of the young woman from
the first chapter reading a book in her bedroom. She looks up, startled,
as the man cycles by her window. Her book falls open to reveal that she
has been surveying an image of Vermeer’s Lacemaker (c. 1669–1670). The
young woman rushes to the window, witnesses the man falling from his
bicycle, and runs down the stairs to embrace him. The camera again zooms
in on his diagonally striped satchel. In the next scene the young woman
has returned to her bedroom. She opens the box satchel and takes out a
diagonally striped envelope, which contains a diagonally striped tie. She
places the tie with the remainder of the injured man’s clothes, which she has
laid out in corresponding order to his body on her bed. The young woman
sits down and stares intently at this formation. Her concentration seems to
resurrect the young man who appears behind her. He is staring intently at
his hand and a close-up reveals that it is punctured with a hole from which
ants are crawling. The young woman, unperturbed, joins him in examin-
ing the hand. As they stare at the wound, the image metamorphoses firstly
into an image of a woman’s armpit and then into a sea urchin. Next, the
camera focuses from above down on to the street where a man is poking a
disembodied hand. A crowd gathers around and it emerges that the “man”
is an androgynous female who has in her possession the young man’s box
satchel from the previous scene. She stands in the traffic, clutching the
satchel and is subsequently hit by a car. A crowd surveys her body, lying in
the middle of the road.
ANALYSIS OF UN CHIEN ANDALOU

The free association of the spherical images in the opening sequence—the
doorknob, the moon, and the eyeball—suggests that Buñuel was more con-
cerned with imagistic lineage than the evolution of plot. However, Linda
Williams has thoroughly analyzed the formal properties of this opening
sequence to demonstrate how the director unsettles the ostensible realism of
the action and presages the disorientation to follow. Williams’s examination
draws on Lacan’s equation, developed from Freud, of the rhetorical devices
of metaphor and metonymy with “the new procedures of condensation and
displacement in dreams.”3 She explains how Buñuel disrupts the precluded
metaphoric process by showing the moon-cutting, which would usually
be the vehicle of the metaphor, before the eye slitting, which in normal
metaphoric associations, would constitute the tenor, or driving activity of
the association.4 Williams also highlights discrepancies in the 12 shots that
constitute the prologue with regard to the man’s positioning in relation to
the French doors5 and the often overlooked evidence that questions whether
he is the perpetrator of the eye slashing6 —(Buñuel is wearing a watch as
he sharpens the blade yet the executor of the eye slitting is watchless and
has gained a striped tie.) She notes how the character played by Buñuel
manipulates the gaze of the action, directing and cutting up the audience’s
vision until this seminal scene; thus his role operates as a metaphor for the
filmmaker:7
It is a progression to envision, which the diegetically contradictory elements

of the tie and the absence of the watch seem to affirm. The cutting that fol-
lows this envision is nothing less than its implementation, an ironic symbol
of the hand of the artist at work cutting up the continuous fabric of “reality”
into newly significant combinations.8
Buñuel was calling for a new way of seeing that liberated the mind from
passive ocular digestion as a means of rationalizing the images with which
we are presented. By slicing the eyeball, Buñuel is, quite literally, opening
the young woman’s mind, as well as the audience’s, to a new visceral experi-
ence of film that was to be felt and experienced rather than understood. In
his chapter on “The Passion for Perceiving” in Psychoanalysis and Cinema
Christian Metz describes how “[t]he practice of the cinema is only possible
through the perceptual passions” and cites “the desire to see (scopic drive,
scopophilia, voyeurism)” as “alone engaged in the art of the silent film.”9
Metz continues: “Freud notes that voyeurism, like sadism in this respect,
always keeps apart the object (here the object looked at) and the source of
the drive i.e. the generating organ (the eye); the voyeur does not look at
his eye.”10 However in Un chien andalou, the voyeuristic gaze is reflected
back on the viewer by the young woman’s unseeing, lifeless eyes, and is thus
violated by the director. Furthermore, Evans and Santaolalla discuss how
Hitchcock used a similar device for the opening credits of Vertigo (1958) as
the title of the film cuts through a close-up of a woman’s left eye (intended to
be but not actually Kim Novak’s).11 The eye is pierced a second time by the
words “Alfred Hitchcock.” In both films, the eye is suggested to be obsolete
by the director, and is replaced by the “I,” that is his subjective “eye” and thus
a series of images from his mindset. This action has gendered implications,
especially in light of Rebecca Schneider’s reading of Freud’s “The Uncanny”
in which she links “the fear of the loss of one’s penis and the fear of the loss
of one’s eyes as signifying a fear of the loss of the masculine-marked preroga-
tives of perspectival vision.”12 This denotes a violation of the female form that
has links with the discussion in the previous chapter. Nonetheless, Buñuel is
also advocating a new way of seeing, and I would argue that Shepard is also
reappropriating scopic perspective in Angel City by deliberately introducing
formal elements of the cinema into his dramaturgy. Furthermore, the clos-
ing tableau of Un chien andalou features the young woman and her lover,
buried up to their waists in the sand. Their eyes have been removed, as the
prophecy of the opening scene anticipated. This image appears subsequently
in Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days (1961) where the female protagonist
Winnie appears buried in the ground. James Knowlson has also pointed out
the striking similarity between this image and a Surrealist photograph of
Francis Day by Angus McBean, which appeared in the review The Fleet’s Lit
Up in 1938.13 As mentioned in the introduction to this book, Beckett’s Film
(1965), (originally titled The Eye) is a 22 minute film starring Buster Keaton,
opening with an image of an eye in what seems to be a candid reference to
Un chien andalou.
THE BACKGROUND TO SHEPARD’S ANGEL CITY

According to Susan C. W. Abbotson, Angel City was Shepard’s “disap-
pointed response” to his experience of touring with Bob Dylan’s “Rolling
Thunder Revue” in 1975.14 Shepard was drafted onto the tour by Dylan
to write the script for a “Fellini-esque, surreal” film (as the back cover of
Shepard’s Rolling Thunder Logbook states) that was to emerge from the expe-
riences on tour. It seems apt, considering Fellini’s declaration that “Dreams
are the only reality,”15 that Shepard should write a surreal play the following
year that centers on the film industry and incorporates intermittent musical
interludes. However, in 1974, the year before the tour, Shepard’s Geography
of a Horse Dreamer had premiered at the Theatre Upstairs in London, a
play based on the kidnapping by gangsters of a magic character named after
Buffalo Bill Cody, who can predict the winners of horse races in his dreams.
Cody is held captive in a shabby hotel room, downgraded from “The Beverly
Wilshire” in California because his erroneous predictions prove that he has
been “Backslidin’ on his system.”16 The stage directions portray a “semire-
alistic” (279) space; indeed, in a review of a production of the play at the
Yale Repertory Theater in Connecticut, Joel Schechter described the set,
designed by William Ivy Long, as containing “a huge, Alice-in-Wonderland-
sized door”17 (401). Surreal images abound—as the play develops, Cody
adopts an Irish accent and becomes increasingly like a dog (302). Yet on
another level, the Surrealism of Geography of a Horse Dreamer operates by
forcing the audience to experience the imagistic recollection of the dreams
concurrently with the characters in the play. Through the use of film, the
audience shares Cody’s vision as the play commences:
In the darkness the sound of horses galloping at a distance is heard. A slow-

motion color film clip of a horse race is projected just above CODY’S head
on the rear wall. No screen. The film begins out of focus and slowly is pulled
into a sharp picture as the sound of galloping horses grows louder. The film
clip lasts for a short while with the sound then CODY wakes up with a yell.
The film goes off and the lights onstage bang up. (279)
The play ends on an ambivalent note: Cody’s brothers Jasper and Jason, who
arrive into the hotel room dressed in Wyoming cowboy gear, rescue him.
However, Cody has already been injected with a tranquillizing serum and
his neck cut open by a doctor who seeks his “dream bone.” The conclusion
implies that either Cody’s cowboy brothers are also seeking to exploit the
dreamer for their own commercial profit or that they are simply surreal
hallucinations (“six foot five and weigh[ing] 250 lbs each”; 306), created by
Cody’s imagination. However, if Cody has lost his dream bone, then the
cowboys could represent impinging reality, a suggestion compromised by
the brothers’ surreal appearance and cowboy personae, which, as I have dis-
cussed in previous chapters, is an illusion itself.
Geography of a Horse Dreamer metaphorically comments on the commodi-
fication of the creative imagination of the artist. However, it also proves that
Shepard’s interest in dreamscapes and the oneiric world had already been
established prior to his experiences on tour with Dylan in 1975. In an entry
in The Rolling Thunder Logbook, Shepard described how Dylan attended
the US opening of the play at the Manhattan Theatre Club. He “showed
up plastered,”18 generating “[a]n explosion in the audience to match the one
on stage.”19 Indeed, Shepard’s account of his first meeting with Dylan as
recalled in The Rolling Thunder Logbook confirms that the playwright had
an early interest in Surrealism:
First thing he says to me, “We don’t have to make any connections.” At first
I’m not sure if he’s talking about us personally or the movie. “None of this has
to connect. In fact, it’s better if it doesn’t connect.” I start nodding agreement
as though I’m too cool not to understand, sliding in something half-baked
about “Surrealism.”20
Dylan had endeavored to create a film on tour that “he trust[ed] [ . . . ] to

serendipity, preferring improvisation and spontaneity.” 21 While the initial
screenplay never came to fruition, the film ultimately emerged as Renaldo
and Clara, released in 1978. The influence of The Rolling Thunder Revue’s
emphasis on “unencumbered artistic expression”22 has obvious resonance on
Angel City, most notably in the playwright’s radical association of the idea
of ‘character’ with jazz improvisation.23 Indeed, Julian Beck of the Living
Theatre once noted that “[j]azz is the hero, jazz which made an early break
into actual improvisation,” which he compared “to the automatic writing of
Surrealism.”24 Using the improvisatory motif of jazz, Angel City dramatizes
the outward crystallization of bizarre disturbed fantasy. In the preface to the
play, Shepard advocates a new approach to characterization based on musi-

cal as well as painterly premises:
NOTE TO THE ACTORS:

The term “character” could be thought of in a different way when working
on this play. Instead of the idea of a “whole character” with logical motives
behind his behavior, which the actor submerges himself into, he should con-
sider instead a fractured whole with bits and pieces of character flying off the
central theme. In other words, more in terms of collage construction or jazz
improvisation. This is not the same thing as one actor playing many different
roles, each one distinct from the other (or “doubling up” as they call it.) If
there needs to be a “motivation” for some of the abrupt changes which occur
in the play that can be taken as full-blown manifestations of a passing thought or
fantasy, having as much significance or “meaning” as they do in our ordinary
lives. The only difference is that here the actor makes note of it and brings it
to life in three dimensions. (61–62) (Emphasis mine)
Shepard advocates that the notion of character in this play should be consid-
ered in terms of a “collage construction” and the deliberate fragmentation of
the music. The layers of hallucinatory illusion aim to create “a kind of music
or painting in space” (62). Shepard’s direction to the actor that she or he
consider character as an accumulation of preselected parts, “that he’s mixing
many different underlying elements and connecting them through his intu-
ition and senses” (62), is also apt in the context of the playwright’s reflec-
tions on Dylan in the Rolling Thunder Logbook: the performer has “invented
himself [ . . . ] made himself up from scratch. That is, from the things he had
around him and inside him.”25
The representation of the role of the artist seems also to stem from
Shepard’s experiences on the tour. Rabbit is represented in the play as an
artistic savior, who appears like a quack or a miracle doctor, replete with
“a tattered detective’s type suit and overcoat, hat and tennis shoes” and carrying
“bundles of various sizes attached to him by long leather thongs and dragging on
the floor behind him” (64). He is described as a shaman or magus figure, an
“artist,” “[a] kind of magician or something” who “dream[s] things up” (67).
This description recalls the long list of “Character References” that Shepard
lists in The Rolling Thunder Logbook, presumably pertaining to Dylan
himself. These include such artistic personae as “Alchemist,” “Magician,”
“Medicine Man,” “Wizard,” “Saint,” “Demon,” “Witch,” “Prophet,”
“Cowboy,” “Assassin,” “Pilgrim,” “Messenger,” “A Nobody,” and “Idiot.”26
Rabbit appears as a mélange of these character tropes, a detective who will
penetrate through the kaleidoscopic, fragmentary chunks of images and
data thrown at the audience to unearth some elementary truth: “The point
is I’ve smelled something down here. Something sending its sweet claws way
up North. Interrupting my campfires” (69). The oxymoronic invocation of

“sweet claws” suggests an oscillating pull of both desire and revulsion and
the description of the disturbance of a campfire has equal paradoxical con-
notations of isolation and intrusion. This truth ironically lies in illusion, in
the world of the motion picture. The world of the movies represents a saving
grace from the catastrophe of the present. Rabbit has accepted the inevita-
bility of its commandeering. Some external force has seeped into Rabbit’s
mindset as his following monologue demonstrates, like the green slime that
oozes onto the stage at the end of the play:
Making me daydream at night. Causing me to wonder at the life of a recluse.

The vision of a celluloid tape with a series of moving images telling a story
to millions. Millions anywhere. Millions seen and unseen. Millions see-
ing the same story without ever knowing each other. Without even having
to be together. Effecting their dreams and actions. Replacing their books.
Replacing their families. Replacing religion, politics, art, conversation.
Replacing their minds. And I ask myself, how can I stay immune? How can
I keep my distance from a machine like that? [ . . . ] I’m ravenous for power
but I have to conceal it. (69)
THE CONTEXT FOR SHEPARD’S CONCEPTION OF ANGEL CITY

Angel City was written the year that Shepard returned to California after
three years living in England, a return that coincided with a new artistic
relationship with The Magic Theatre in San Francisco. According to John
Lion who founded the Magic Theatre, Shepard “was insatiable to be filled
up with literature, with film, and he was very open to being taken places
and shown things.”27 In a review of the original production at the theatre in
1976, Patrick Fennell described Angel City as “a mocking serio-comedy which
seeks to discover the sickness behind the celluloid dream machine through
magic, trance states, and flights of fantastical mystery.”28 The imagery of
Angel City invites comparisons with Un chien andalou from the onset. Lanx’s
opening speech contains references to “Babies’ eyes bleed[ing]” and “Grown
men keel[ing] over” (64). It opens with images of a severance between the
body and the mind, disconnected “seeing,” and even the wounded eye:
Lanx: (as though reading from a script) “It’s a great office. A great life. All
hell passes before me, and I can watch it like a junkie. With no pain.” (64)
(Emphasis mine)
Further on in the first act, Tympani’s criticism of the film industry also
includes references to disembodied eyeballs: “Fun? What is this supposed
to be? Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland get their big break and move to
Philadelphia with the Dorsey brothers? [ . . . ] We’re in the middle of a dung

heap here [ . . . ] You tear your eyeballs out and watch them get kicked down
the street” (82). Near the end of the play, Wheeler provides a commentary
for the battle between Miss Scoons and Lanx stating: “The generals see each
other eye to eye. There’s a meeting in their eyes. They recognize themselves”
(106). Wheeler’s monologue later contains references to “[t]he moon rac[ing]
across the sky” (107).
Both Angel City and Un chien andalou are political reactions against
capitalism consistent with Foster’s definition of “the project to which the
Surrealist marvelous is implicitly pledged,” namely “the reenchantment
of a disenchanted world, of a capitalist society made ruthlessly rational.”29
Contextually, Angel City is a play concerned with the Hollywood film
industry. Shepard stated that it originated from his experience of trying
to pitch a screenplay based on Appaloosa horse racing to the film indus-
try in LA: “ . . . Angel City is mainly from that, and the whole process of
being naïve and stupid in the face of something that’s very sophisticated on
a certain level.”30 It was written as a response to Shepard’s experience while
writing the screenplay for the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s
first American film Zabriskie Point (1970). Indeed, Lanx and his partner
Wheeler draft in the “artist” and stunt man Rabbit Brown to create a “disas-
ter on the screen” (70), echoing the apocalyptic ending of Antonioni’s film.
Zabriskie Point ends with images of pyrotechnic combustion, (similar to
the ending of Shepard’s earlier play Icarus’s Mother); the main female lead,
Daria (Halprin), looks back at her boss’s house in the Phoenix desert and
imagines it blowing up. This detonation is repeated several times in slow
motion, from different angles, in the hallucinatory final sequence. As the
scene develops such tenets of consumerism as a fridge, clothing, a television
set, and the carcass of a cooked chicken literally implode, backed by the
song “Careful with That Axe, Eugene” by Pink Floyd. The death of Daria’s
love interest Mark (Frechette) precedes the ending of the film; Mark had
previously painted “No words” onto the side of a stolen airplane, a fitting
metaphor for the director’s nonverbal visual expression. Despite the fact that
Shepard was replaced as the screenwriter of Zabriskie Point, Angel City shares
the imagistic aesthetic of Antonioni’s film.
AN ANALYSIS OF Angel City (1976)

The stage directions of Angel City dictate that the “[b]asically bare stage”
features a “large suspended blue neon rectangle with empty space in the middle”
that is “lit from time to time” and that “[b]ehind the rectangle the upstage wall
is covered by a scrim which can be backlit in different colors” (63). A platform is
placed behind the neon frame so that “[w]hen the actors enter on this platform
they become framed by the rectangle” (63). Effectively, the set calls for a large
symbolic television screen to feature on the stage. This neon rectangle acts
as the boundary between the drama onstage and the “film,” which is per-
formed beyond this device. It dictates the parameters between “illusion” as
represented in the neon frame and “reality” as represented in the play. The
play, of course, is a performance and this further complicates the semantic
system and the audience’s epistemological acceptance of the dramatic pro-
cess. The characters appear intermittently as though they are either in a play,
or in a film in a play, or watching a film in a play. Furthermore, the actors in
this play are either playing a real-time character in a play, or a real-time char-
acter playing a recorded actor playing a character in a film, or a real-time
character watching a real-time character playing a recorded actor playing a
character in a film. Keir Elam writes:
When we enter the theatre and agree to participate in the performer-spectator

transaction, we automatically apply those codes specific to the performance—
which can be termed theatrical codes—that permit us to apprehend it in its
own terms and not as, say, a spontaneous and accidental event or a piece of
film.31
Shepard is disrupting these theatrical codes for, in this play, the audience
communally experiences the screening of the “film,” as do the characters.
Buñuel also introduces meta-filmic elements by indulging himself as direc-
tor and perpetrating the eye slitting in the opening sequence in Un chien
andalou. On this film, Jack Undank wrote: “The oneiric screen is a fully
self-absorbed dumb show within which the dreamer is sealed as actor or
spectator.”32 Buñuel’s Los Olvidados (The Young and the Damned; 1950) also
contains dream sequences and a meta-filmic component, evident when the
young protagonist, Pedro, while at a juvenile rehabilitation farm, throws an
egg at the camera and it smears the lens, obstructing our view. Similarly, in
Angel City the audience assimilates into the play as active observers of and
participants in the drama. The conversion of the theatre into a movie theatre
is achieved by sudden changes in both the music and the lighting onstage
that catalyze the abrupt shifts in character as required by Shepard’s prefa-
tory notes on character. This emerges in the stage direction as when Lanx
assumes the role of a victorious onscreen boxer:
(Loud screech from the saxophone offstage. rabbit suddenly whirls the
swivel chair around so it’s facing upstage. At the same time the lights go
black and the rectangle is lit. The scrim turns dark red. tympani pulls the
other chair downstage center, facing front, and sits in it like a little boy, eating
popcorn and watching movies [ . . . ].)
[...]
(lanx enters on the platform up left in boxer shorts, black boxing shoes,
towel around his neck and swollen eyes, his nose bleeding profusely. He is
raising his arms to a distant cheering audience, in victory. He crosses into the
rectangle and keeps acknowledging his audience silently.)
[...]
(Rising sax. Sound of mass applause. lanx exits right, shadowboxing as
he goes. Rectangle goes unlit. Scrim out. Stage lights back up. rabbit whirls
the chair around facing front again. RABBIT and tympani freeze a second
[ . . . ].) (79–81)
At the end of the play, the characters are indeed “Frozen in the Act of
Creation” (76) as Miss Scoons’s words predict. The characters of Lanx and
Miss Scoons experience a series of metamorphoses, regressing into adoles-
cent roles:
lanx and miss scoons are now sitting on the edge of the platform, swing-
ing their legs back and forth and eating imaginary popcorn as they watch
RABBIT and WHEELER like two teenagers watching a movie. LANX
make no acknowledgement of WHEELER’S presence other than that he’s an
image on a movie screen. (109)
The glowing rectangle on the stage has a further function, however. Toby
Silverman Zinman notes that “[e]ach character in the play is transformed
not only by stepping into the neon frame but also by watching it.”33 The
characters are thus converted (demoted?) to the same position as that of
the audience. Miss Scoons, for instance, describes how she is in both the
position of spectator and performer, and, like the audience, is witnessing
“[p]eople living in dreams which are the same dreams I’m dreaming but
never living” (77). Miss Scoons plays a variety of filmic roles in this play—
described at the beginning of the play as the “[v]ery sexy [ . . . ] typical secretary
type” (66), she transforms into a melodramatic narrative voiceover for a film
once she is framed by the neon rectangle (74). Later on in the act, the neon
frame entrances her: “miss scoons turns toward the rectangle as though to
leave but stops suddenly. She seems to go into a hypnotic state and just stares at
the triangle” (77). She expresses her desire to embody, rather than simply
occupy, the world of the dream. Thus, each character’s attempt to flee from
their roles as fragmentary personae lead them to the world of the oneiric cel-
luloid as Miss Scoon’s monologue demonstrates:
I look at the screen and I am the screen. I’m not me. I don’t know who I am.
I look at the movie and I am the movie. I am the star. I am the star in the
movie. For days I am the star and I’m not me. I’m me being the star. I look
at my life when I come down. I look and I hate my life when I come down.
I hate my life not being a movie. I hate my life not being a star. I hate being
myself in my life which isn’t a movie and never will be. I hate having to eat.
Having to work. Having to sleep. Having to go to the bathroom. Having to
get from one place to another with no potential. Having to live in this body
which isn’t a star’s body and all the time knowing that stars exist. That there
are people doing nothing all their life except being in movies. Doing nothing
but swimming and drinking and laughing and being driven to places full
of potential. People never having to feel hot pavement or having to look at
weeds growing through cracks in the city. People never having to look the city
square in the eyes. (77)
Laura Mulvey has written on how the cinema screen can facilitate the audi-
ence’s regression to the state prior to Lacan’s classification of the instance
of self-identification in the “mirror-stage.” She notes how the audience can
“lose themselves” in a film, yet simultaneously “the cinema has distinguished
itself in the production of ego ideals as expressed in particular in the star sys-
tem, the stars centering both screen presence and screen story as they act out
a complex process of likeness and difference (the glamorous impersonates
the ordinary).”34 Miss Scoons seeks release into an ego ideal as defined by
Mulvey, yet her attempts are in vain. In this play, the “ego ideals,” the stars,
consume their own identities by degenerating to the roles of spectator and
thus, according to Mulvey’s equation of cinematic reception and the mirror-
stage, to a state prior to subjective recognition. Wheeler exclaims in Act
One that “[w]e must help them devour themselves or be devoured by them”
(71), yet he fulfills his own prophecy. Christian Metz writes in Psychoanalysis
and Cinema that “fictional theatre tends to depend more on the actor (rep-
resenter), fictional cinema more on the character (represented)” and that
“[e]ven when the cinema spectator does identify with the actor rather than
with the part [ . . . ] it is with the actor as ‘star’, i.e. still as a character, [ . . . ]
itself fictional.”35 Thus, by defining herself not just as a film star, which she
extrinsically observes, but as the film in its entirety, Miss Scoons character-
izes herself as a prerecorded entity that is fixed and thus unchangeable. As
Metz writes “the cinematic part is fastened once and for all to its interpreter
[ . . . ] because its representation involves the reflection of the actor and not
the actor himself, and because the reflection (the signifier) is recorded and is
hence no longer capable of change.”36
Florence Falk discusses this play, and particularly Miss Scoons’s “I”
speech, in relation to the screen as a replacement of “reality” for a structure
of images, with the subjective viewer, the “I” as a construct itself.37 In the
context of Falk’s argument, Miss Scoons desires to escape “the real” and
embrace her “potential,” “that is, to live in dreams rather than for them.”38
The suggestion here is that this is the only way she can escape from the
actual play and gain intransience in a prefabricated film reel, an escape

from “real” into “reel” time.39 If we are to read the violation of the “eye” as
the eradication of the “I” in the context of the opening sequence of Un chien
andalou, then Miss Scoons’s monologue imagistically signals a negation of
the self as an accumulation of performed roles as well as a desecration of
the body as a vehicle for being. She seems to be calling for the liberation
of a core self, if it exists, removed from the corporeal, which could actu-
ally inhabit the dream world. Her speech rejects the visceral and the needs
of her body—eating, sleeping, urinating/defecating—especially when she
knows that there are those who have actually been integrated into the onei-
ric sphere, “living in dreams which are the same dreams I’m dreaming but
never living” (77).
The characters in this play search for a nonexistent release. Buñuel
remarked that “Surrealism has made me see something very important: that
man is not free.”40 Indeed, it emerges that Shepard’s characters do not have
an essential core and they cannot connect to one another: “Doesn’t anybody
know each other?” (78) Rabbit asks in exasperation as the initial outsider.
First, the neon rectangle, and thus the world of celluloid, suggests not eman-
cipation but immutability. Second, by focusing on the cathartic potential of
the film as dream, the characters in this play are merely seeking a release into
a highly symbolic realm that is also constructed out of layers of meaning
that signal to a separate deeper or more essential selfhood. Freud speaks of
dreams as “symptoms”41 and argues that “every dream will reveal itself as a
psychological structure, full of significance, and one which may be assigned
to a specific place in the psychic activities of the waking state.”42 Dreams are
not the answer, then, but indicative of a cure. But if the characters and the
audience are unaware that they are dreaming, then have they not entered
into what Florence Falk refers to as the “Ultimate Illusion—namely, that
the image is reality”?43 Near the end of the first act, Tympani defines fear
as “the imagination of dying” and Rabbit concurs that “the imagina-
tion of dying is more scary than actually dying!” (86). Thus, cerebral
contemplation, or fantasy, is deemed to be more physically affecting than
the actual event.
THE DREAMSCAPES OF ANGEL CITY AND UN CHIEN ANDALOU

In addition to the mutual experience of a film, there is a sense in Angel City
that both the audience and the actors are sharing a collaborative dream.
This suggests that the audience is not simply required to suspend reality, but
to actually live through a reverie. Early in Act Two, Tympani insinuates as
much: “We’ve been locked out of time” [ . . . ]. “What’s happened is that we’re
locked into the narrowest past of our dream machine” (97). The association
of theatrical and dream worlds heightens the empirical nature of the action,
because, as Undank writes, the dreamer is unaware that he/she is dreaming
and consequently experience their visions viscerally: “Nothing in fact, at the
experiential level, separates the dream from life, those vases communicants—
which is why its terrors and delights are so unmediatedly acute. [ . . . ] There
is no recourse but to endure it.”44 Undank also emphasizes the intentional
escapism from rationality that dreaming proposes:
What dreams, “the representation effected by the dream-work which was

never intended to be understood ” (Freud’s italics), offer the dreamer is not,
paradoxically the intimation or chance of knowledge, nor the powers of art,
but the victimizing triumph of feeling pure and simple, feeling inscrutably
linked to things and events, like the inexplicable shock of a pinprick.45
Both the film and the play require the flouting of conventional reasoning
as a crucial ingredient in the absorption of the drama. Yet, as an extension
to the stress that Freud placed on the origins of dreams as psychic states
that are representational but elude rationalization, Buñuel indicates in his
autobiography My Last Breath that he had written the script to Un chien
andalou in collaboration with Dalí with only one rule in mind: “No idea or
image that might lend itself to rational explanation of any kind should be
accepted.”46 At the premiere screening of the film in Paris, a leaflet was cir-
culated by the writers indicating that “Nothing, in the film, Symbolizes
Anything.”47
This declaration parallels Shepard’s direction to his actors to disregard
the impulse to “answer intellectually” for the actions of their character. Ross
Wetzsteon recalls how Shepard, speaking to a group of Wetzsteon’s students
once at The City College of New York, “ruthlessly refus[ed] to admit—to
the extent of posing as an inarticulate hick—his plays had any meaning at
all.”48 In his Note to the Actors in the play’s preface, Shepard advises the
actor to approach the idea of character as though “he’s mixing many dif-
ferent underlying elements and connecting them through his intuition and
senses to make a kind of music or painting in space without having to feel
the need to completely answer intellectually for the characters’ behavior”
(62). In both play and film, form and content induce analogies with dream-
ing. According to Tympani, the Hollywood producers of a proposed disaster
movie, Lanx and Wheeler, are “looking for something beyond the imagina-
tion” (76). They want to create, “[c]inematically speaking,” a film that is at
once an “apparition” (68), “[s]omething unearthly” (68). In this pursuit, and
in Wheeler’s intention to create “[n]ot simply an act of terror but something
which will in fact drive people right off the deep end,” further parallels
between Angel City and Un chien andalou emerge.
Certainly, Buñuel, Dalí, and Wheeler’s ambitions for their respective films
overlap. Wheeler expresses a desire to create a film that will
[l]eave them blithering in the aisles. Create mass hypnosis. Suicide.

Autodestruction. Something which will open entirely new fads in sadomas-
ochism. Penetrating every layer of their dark subconscious and leaving them
totally unrecognizable to themselves. Something which not only mirrors
their own sense of doom but actually creates the possibility of it right there in
front of them. It’s our duty. We owe it to the public. For without the public
we are nothing but a part of that public. We must stand apart, on another
plane. We must rise to the challenge. We must help them devour themselves
or be devoured by them. The time is ripe for this obliteration. We must rise
to the occasion or be lost forever in a tidal wave of oblivion! (71)
Interestingly, Marsha Kinder views Buñuel’s later film The Exterminating

Angel (1962) as a precursor to the disaster genre of the 1970s.49 However,
the actual screening of Un chien andalou provoked an audience reaction
that seems to fulfill Wheeler’s desired effect as outlined above. Henry
Miller describes how the 17-minute film was received in Madrid, follow-
ing its premiere at Le Studio des Ursulines in Paris in 1929: “Afterwards
they showed Un chien andalou. The public shuddered, making their seats
creak, when an enormous eye appeared on the screen and was cut coldly by
a razor, the drops of liquid from the iris leaping onto the metal. Hysterical
shouts were heard.”50 Both film and play work as successions of fragmented
vignettes as imagistic expression eclipses the need for plot. Similarly, Freud
argued, “one cannot make the dream as a whole the object of one’s atten-
tion, but only the individual components of its content.”51 As his interpreta-
tion considered the dream to be “a conglomerate of psychic formations,”52
they emerge as “visual and auditory images.”53 Thus, both the film and the
play echo the structure of a dream by focusing on images as synecdoche of
a larger reality.
In terms of the significance of this collective ingestion of the action,
which in itself is masquerading as a recorded piece of film, J. F. Pagel, C.
Kwiatkowski, and K. E. Brotles have explored the similarities between
dreaming and watching a film:
Film is a dreamlike medium. Intriguing similarities exist between dream and

the creative imagery of film. Attending the cinema at its best can parody
the experience of a collective dream (Metz, 1982). A dream can be difficult
to describe in words, but even the first filmmakers realized that film visu-
alizations could be used to emulate dreams (Orwell, 1970). In dream as in
film, there are not only images; there are successions whether organized or
chaotic of places, actions, and characters. Their stories exist for an individual
temporary suspending involvement with the external world. It is no accident

that those dark and lavish rooms where film was first shown were called
‘dream palaces’ (Chanan, 1996). There are differences—dreamers do not
generally know they are dreaming, while spectators know they are at the
cinema.54
This excludes, of course, the audience of this play. In an interview with

Sylvie Drake in 1979, Shepard stated that “I don’t believe any artist is ter-
ribly aware of his artistic consciousness or the evolution of that conscious-
ness, only as in a dream . . . ”55 The complication of dramatic semiotic codes
in Angel City and the disorientation that ensues is anticipated in the Note
on the Music that presages the play. Music is described as being indepen-
dent of the drama. The jazz saxophonist is to be “cut off from the other
characters in the play, even when he appears on stage” and his acoustics are
to be received as though “above the chaos” and “tend[ing] to explode right
though the action and out the other side” (61) as though the audience were
experiencing his music autonomously and separately from the play, (in the
movie theatre perhaps). At one stage, Lanx chases the saxophonist off the
stage shouting “I’ve Told You a Hundred Times I Can’t Stand That
Sound! You’re Gonna Crack My Window” (69). He suggests here that
the music will bring the audience to a new visceral reality that will shatter
the illusion that the cinematic frame, the “window,” has created. As Act One
begins, the sound of a drum-roll meta-theatrically announces the beginning
of the “film” on stage and the neon lights of the blue rectangle ignite, yet
“[s]lowly yellow light begins to fill the stage area as TYMPANI begins to reach a
thundering pitch on the drums” (63). The lights of the cinema seems to “come
up” on the stage just as the film is about to start, again complicating what
is screened, performed, and experienced. The unsettling effect recalls how
Breton’s praised film’s “power to disorientate” (73):
This disorientation works on many levels, I mean to say, it admits of differ-

ent degrees. The marvel, besides which the merits of a given film count for
little, resides in the devolved faculty of the first-comer to abstract himself
from his own life when he feels like it [ . . . ] as soon as he passes through one
of the muffled doors that give on to the blackness. From the instant he takes
his seat to the moment he slips into the fiction evolving before his eyes, he
passes through a critical point as captivating and imperceptible as that unit-
ing waking and sleeping (the book and even the play are incomparably slower
in producing this release).56
The effect could be described as at once disconcerting, alienating and cine-

matographic. Indeed, Un chien andalou and Angel City both endeavor to alien-
ate the audience by “the literal translation of dreamlike subjective reality.”57
THE SURREALIST IMAGE EMERGES IN ANGEL CITY

In these works, the sense of alienation as discussed in the previous pages
directly results from the disruption of conventional narratives. In addition,
such alienation is effected by the simulation of reality as Shepard attempts
to recreate the trompe l’oeil or “trick of the eye” effect that was so vital to
Surrealist aesthetics. The viewer had to both recognize and relate to what
was being depicted so that their expectations could be overturned. Surrealist
painting, for instance, had to be executed with a photographic realism such
as is evident in René Magritte’s paintings La Reproduction Interdite (1937)
or Le Musée d’une Nuit (1927) so that conventional realism could be flouted.
Shepard replicates this trompe l’oeil device in the suggestion that the char-
acters of Wheeler and Rabbit, by the end of the play, come to star in the
very movie they were seeking to create. Their assimilation into the world
of the motion picture is prefigured in the second act when Wheeler uses a
flashlight as would an usher at the cinema. The stage directions prescribe
that “WHEELER pulls out a long black flashlight and clicks it on in the
dark. The only lights now are the neon rectangle, backlighting on scrim, and
WHEELER’S flashlight” (105). This is interesting in terms of Metz’s treatise
in “Identification, Mirror,” which argues that “[a]ll vision consists of a dou-
ble movement: projective (the “sweeping” searchlight) and introjective: con-
sciousness as a sensitive recording surface (as a screen).”58 Hence “[d]uring
the performance the spectator is the searchlight [ . . . ], duplicating the pro-
jector which itself duplicates the camera, and [the spectator] is also the sensi-
tive surface duplicating the screen, which itself duplicates the f ilmstrip.”59
In this context, Wheeler’s actions duplicate the processes of the voyeuristic
gaze of the audience and he in turn replicates both the camera itself and the
screen: “(WHEELER chases [RABBIT], miming a movie camera, trying to
photograph him)” (104). Metz’s argument also relates to Wheeler’s response
to Rabbit’s aversion to the imaginary camera:
Rabbit: It’s Devil!

Wheeler: It’s not. It’s beautiful. It makes us see ourselves. It brings things
back to life. (104)
As in Un chien andalou, the audience’s voyeuristic gaze is replicated by

the object of their desire, puncturing the hermetically sealed cinematic
sphere. By the end of the second act, Shepard dictates that Rabbit “is seated
downstage in swivel chair facing rectangle upstage, his back to the audience”
(194). A bizarre Samurai battle between the two “chieftains” Lanx and Miss
Scoons ensues, inaugurated by “an acknowledgment of battle” during which
they “slowly withdraw the sticks from their belts and hold them in front of each
other at eye level” (106). It is as if they too were about to pierce the surface
realism of the action thus far represented. Wheeler fulfills the role of the
voice-over, providing a commentary on the on-stage battle, and when Miss
Scoons triumphs by thrusting her stick in Lanx’s arm, Rabbit, still with his
back to the audience, dismisses the “film” he has just witnessed as “[t]errible”
and the “[c]orniest stuff [he] ever saw” (108). However, the camera, literally,
turns on them. As Miss Scoons and Lanx take up their positions on the edge
of the upstage platform, Wheeler and Rabbit undertake to “open up the
world” of the celluloid, while Wheeler tries in vain to connect to the outside
world from which they have just been released:
Wheeler: lanx! what’s the matter with you!

Rabbit: You’re on the silver screen, buddy. You’ve been captured in celluloid
and you’ll never get out. All they’re looking at now is a moving picture
show.
Wheeler: i’m a person! they can see me! they know who i am! miss
scoons! miss scoons! it’s me! your boss! miss scoons! look at me!
look at me! i’m over here!
(wheeler starts waving frantically at miss scoons and lanx but they only
smile and chew their popcorn.)
Rabbit: You better get outa’ here before you disintegrate right here on the
spot.
Wheeler: (turning on rabbit) I won’t disintegrate! i’m immortal! i’ll
always be remembered! Right this very minute! There’s people all
around me! Watching and remembering! As long as they’re watching I’ll
be remembered!
Rabbit: You’re dead, Wheeler. You’re dead and gone. (109–110)
The characters become as real as the green slime that oozes onto the stage
from the bundle depicting the “West” at the end of the play. Shepard flags
this connection in the stage direction: “(wheeler slowly unties the bundle.
As the bundle opens up, a slow, steady stream of green liquid, the color of their
faces, oozes from it onto the stage. rabbit and wheeler watch as they stand
there” (111). By comparing their faces with the slime, Shepard immortalizes
them in the world of the cartoon, for, as Frank D. McConnell argues:
The monsters in cartoons—all the characters in cartoons—are the only real

things to be seen in films. That is, when you watch a cartoon, you are seeing,
exactly and absolutely, what is in front of you: a projection of variously col-
ored shapes and lines moving at calculated, eye-fooling speed. “Real”-“reel”
is not a pun applicable to cartoons, since the cartoon allows no space, no
epistemological gap, between the two words: the reality is what is on the reel
and what exists nowhere else.60
Rabbit and Wheeler are frozen in the motion picture for, in the light of
McConnell’s words, there is no reality elsewhere.
The characters in this play become definitive Surrealist images; in the
close association of cinematography to photography, they are arrested in
a representation, relating to Breton’s definition of Convulsive Beauty in
L’Amour fou, which was so integral to Surrealism: “Convulsive Beauty will
be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magical-circumstantial or will not be.”61
Foster characterizes the theory of “fixed-explosive” as “uncanny primarily
in its im/mobility, for this suggests the authority of death, the dominant
conservatism of the drives”62:
The veiled-erotic, or reality convulsed into a writing, is a photographic

effect, but fundamentally it concerns an uncanny trace of a prior state, i.e.,
of the compulsion to return to an ultimately inanimate condition [ . . . ]. The
fixed-explosive, or reality convulsed in shock, must also be seen in these
terms; the subject suddenly suspended is again a photographic effect, but
here too its fundamental import is psychic: the shot that arrests one is an
uncanny fore-image of death.63
In their immobility in the world of celluloid, the characters transform into

gross manifestations of their corruption. Both Rabbit and Wheeler alter into
monstrous creatures with “slimy” green skin, fangs, and long fingernails in
line with the following dialogue:
Wheeler: I was created without my knowing. Same as you. Creation’s a

disease.
Rabbit: What are you talking about?
Wheeler: We’re dying here. Right now. In front of each other.
Rabbit: Just stay away from me, Wheeler!
Wheeler: I was turned into this beyond my knowing. I was spawned by a
city. I was leaked out. An Angel in disguise.
Rabbit: You’re nothing!
Wheeler: i’m something awesome! i’m finding out what it means! [ . . . ]
It’s a place of discovery. Things are uncovered here. Gold! Oceans! look
inside me!
Rabbit: That’s all been discovered.
Wheeler: Only the surface. We’re cracking the surface, Brown. [ . . . ]
We’re penetrating the flesh and bone. [ . . . ] We’re going straight through all
the paraphernalia. All the ponytails, all the jargon, all the Indian lore, all
the magic mumbo jumbo. Deeper than California! We’re going down,
Brown! We’re coming face to face with something deadly. (102–103)
The emphasis in the above dialogue is on the psychological precondition-

ing of man—“I was created without my knowing.” This notion mirrors
an equivalent sentiment as expressed by Buñuel in an interview with José

de la Colina and Tomás Pérez Turrent on the film The Milky Way (1969):
“Free will is nothing more than a simple whim! In any circumstance, I feel
that my thoughts and my will are not in my power! And my liberty is
only a phantom!”64 Yet the suggestion of a psychic molding by totalitarian
forces also invites comparisons with Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film version
of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. As well as the visual concentra-
tion on images of eyes in both films, the questions that this film raises
with regard to morality seem to be analogous with Buñuel’s equation of
Surrealism with “an aggressive morality based on the complete rejection
of all existing values.”65 The outward material manifestation of otherwise
internalized fantasy further cements the Surrealist implications of this play.
Yet the metamorphosis of the theatre into a “picture house” with its sub-
sequent association with, and evocation of, the dream world, also under-
scores this Surrealism. Following the discussion above, Rabbit insists that
“you can’t mix real life with the movies!” Wheeler consequently “goes into
convulsive laughter and starts to have a slight seizure” before exclaiming “the
movies! this is the movies!!” (103).
While Un chien andalou seems to emphasize the paradigmatic dimension
of the signified meaning over the syntagmatic by forcing the audience to
make connections between the seemingly unrelated vignettes, the syntag-
matic emphasis is also approached in a surreal manner. Writing on metaphor
and metonymy in film, Christian Metz argues that
metaphorical juxtapositions—“ideas,” sparks, incongruous encounters of

the sort the Surrealists liked [ . . . ] creat[e] not metonymy but the syntagm
[which] does not serve to fabricate or underline relations of proximity [ . . . ]
but to activate relations between elements coexisting in the discourse, and
ultimately [ . . . ] to exclude any juxtapositions coming from elsewhere.66
In terms of structuralist semiotic analysis, Buñuel also disrupts the syntag-

matic intertextual references or the cause and effect of paradigms inside the
film. However, his use of the “ faux-raccord ” (what Lyon refers to as “liter-
ally, false, match” in that the action suggested by the chapter titles is contra-
dicted by the actual progression/regression of time67) indicates that Buñuel
was still adhering to a filmic tradition. According to Lyon, the director’s use
of the “ faux-raccord ” illustrates “the inversion of one of the central narrative
devices of film-making. [ . . . ] [Buñuel] saw that the only way to approximate
the Surrealist concept of the spark or shock to be created from the juxtaposi-
tion of disparate realities was through the manipulation of purely cinematic
elements: time, space, and movement.”68 Although Buñuel’s titles suggest
otherwise, the action may appear disjointed and nonsensical but it still
advances sequentially through the film, albeit in the form of imagistic rather
than thematic progress. Thus, as Williams notes of Un chien andalou:
[the] transgressions of filmic conventions modeled on the distortions of the

unconscious in dreams or fantasies register as such only if the laws trans-
gressed are first established. In other words, a process at work in this film
tries to satisfy our conscious expectations of intelligibility. But this intelligi-
bility is only a semblance analogous to another agency of dream formation,
which Freud has described as secondary revision.
As Freud defines it, secondary revision is contemporaneous with the process
of dream formation. [ . . . ] Un chien andalou creates the illusion of obeying the
codes of filmic narrativity. But [ . . . ] it does so only to transgress them.69
Shepard also foregrounds the paradigmatic dimension in his use of film

as dramaturgy. But he equally complicates the syntagmatic; his play is not
a sequential chain of interacting signifiers within the dramatic tradition.
Meaning is produced by meta-theatrical references, more in line with cin-
ematic than dramaturgical tradition. The narrative in both plays is con-
structed by spatial rather than sequential syntagmatic relationships.
BUÑUEL’S LATER FILMS

This is also relevant in terms of Buñuel’s later films The Discreet Charm of
the Bourgeoisie (1972) and The Phantom of Liberty (1974). While Shepard
evokes the language of jazz improvisation in his approach to narrative, Juan
Roberto Mora Catlett, discussing Buñuel’s film, notes how the filmmaker’s
treatment of narration can be compared to musical arrangement, more pre-
cisely variations on a theme.70 Also, while Shepard’s Angel City contains a
film within a play, Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie contains
a play within a dream, within a film—despite the fact that the characters
may be unaware of the intended diegetic shift in both works. As in Un
chien andalou, both Buñuel’s later film and Shepard’s play employ an eclec-
tic bricolage of the real and the imaginary. The action is infused with the
dramatization of dreams in a narrative structure that seems secondary, and
sometimes a hindrance, to the imagistic free association. On the other hand,
the narrative seems preassembled solely to facilitate its subsequent collapse.
Marsha Kinder writes on The Discreet Charm:
As in Un chien andalou, th[e] emphasis on dreams makes us aware of the

tension between our immersion in raw perceptions and our drive toward nar-
rativization. Narrative enables us to select certain perceptions and arrange
them in elegant structures of meaning, but in this drive toward coherence
and closure we ignore many details—subordinating them as minor, casting
them as extras, or simply not perceiving them at all.71
Buñuel had included dream sequences in his 1950 film Los Olvidados (The
Young and the Damned) and Subida al cielo (Mexican Bus Ride) in 1952. In
his later films, prefigured by Belle de jour in 1967, the represented “reality”
becomes increasingly difficult to decipher from the “dream” world as is
the case in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. The premise of this film
relies on the thwarted attempts of a group of middle-class acquaintances
to dine together. Buñuel takes a basic social construct and problematizes
it to the extent that any attempts to fulfill this social obligation, essentially
to “break bread,” are ultimately deadly. Confusion over original plans, and
among other interruptions, the death of a restaurant owner at a nearby
establishment, the attempts of the hosts M. and Mme. Sénéchal to con-
summate their passion in the grounds of their home, the transformation of
the dining room into a stage with a full audience in Monsieur Sénéchal’s
dream, the arrival of a battalion of French army officers, and the arrest of
all three couples, all frustrate the characters’ plans to share a meal. Their
ultimate endeavor to dine together is interjected by a group of assassins
who murder the whole group, before one of the characters, Rafael, awakens
and we discover we have been watching a dream sequence. The film, which
won an Academy Award for the Best Foreign Language Film in 1972, could
be compared to Angel City in that the audience is experiencing dreams in
tandem with the dreamer. This concept is further complicated by the fact
that we are experiencing the director’s dreams also. In his autobiography,
Buñuel writes of a recurring dream in which he is expected to go on stage
to perform, yet he does not know the script.72 He also recalls a dream during
which he met his cousin Rafael, who had been dead for some time, on an
empty street:
“What are you doing here?” I ask him, surprised. “Oh I come here every day,”
he replies sadly. He turns away and walks into a house; then suddenly I too am
inside. The house is dark and hung with cobwebs; I call Rafael, but he doesn’t
answer. When I go back outside, I’m in the same empty street, but now I call
my mother. “Mother! Mother!” I ask her. “What are you doing wandering
about among all these ghosts?” I had this dream for the first time when I was
about seventy, and since then it’s continued to affect me deeply.73
The treatment of narrative in Buñuel’s penultimate film The Phantom of

Liberty (1974) also resonates with Angel City, released the same year as
Shepard’s play. In this film, meaning transfers to the viewer, not by tradi-
tional sequential imagery, but by intertextual relations, free association and
metafilmic hooks. Sound, for instance, as similarly used in The Discreet
Charm of the Bourgeoisie, again evokes the language of jazz analogy. The
story moves in unpredicted tangents, deviating from any core narrative
vein and the director flouts conventional realism by complicating meaning
rather than revealing it. Buñuel initially establishes a painterly premise by

positioning Goya’s painting The Third of May, 1808 as the first scene. The
narrative follows seemingly tertiary subplots—the initial dramatization of
Goya’s depiction of the French invasion of Spain is revealed to be a story read
aloud by a maid in modern-day France. The children in her care are given
“pornographic” playing cards by a pervert in the park, which are confiscated
by the girl’s parents on her return home. However, when the audience is
accorded a view of their contents, we see that they contain innocuous scenes
of French architecture. That night, the father of the girl experiences visita-
tions by a cockerel, an emu, and the postman and retells his experiences the
next day to the doctor, relegating all the action thus far to the dream world.
A nurse interrupts the appointment and requests time off so that she can
tend to her dying father. The narrative thus shifts and follows her to a hotel
where we experience the bizarre stories of her fellow guests, accounts that
include incest, Carmelite priests gambling with holy relics, and masochistic
flagellation. The most surreal scene of this film involves the dramatization
of a story, told by one of the nurse’s fellow hotel guests, a professor, to a
classroom of policemen, in which he sat with a group of fellow companions,
around a dining table, seated on toilets. The guests speak of food as though
the topic was vulgar and excuse themselves to dine, alone, in self-contained
cubicles. Julie Jones writes of the ending of this film, in which two policemen
are drafted in to stifle an unseen riot at a zoo:
The uprising with which the film ends, the cries once again of “¡Vivan las
caenas!” and the irrationality of the animals—and, by extension, of human
nature—suggest that this new revolution will be as retrograde as the force
with which it is met. The childish behavior of the grown men in the film
implies ultimately not the Oedipal stage—these are very big boys—but a
return to an earlier, more primitive stage. Buñuel himself commented that
if the film ends where it begins, “that’s not freedom, it’s death. Once the life
cycle is complete, it’s over.”74
To recall Foster’s words on “Convulsive Beauty” as a fundamental compo-

nent of Surrealist representation, “the shot that arrests one is an uncanny
fore image of death.”75 Both the characters in The Phantom of Liberty and
in Angel City remain trapped in their immutability, regressing rather than
progressing. Both works witness the degeneration of character to primitive
states. In Angel City, Lanx and Miss Scoons experience an anthropological
retrogression to Samurai warriors and later subsequently lapse into adoles-
cence. In The Phantom of Liberty, the men give in to sexual fantasies, disre-
gard conventional moral codes of conduct (a French officer desecrates the
cadaver of Doña Elvira in a church), a sniper randomly commits murder on
a street, and a young boy enjoys a sexual relationship with his aunt. Most
pertinently, the director himself is killed off in the first scene of the film,
(he plays the character of a monk who is executed, along with other Spanish
rebels by a Napoleonic firing squad).
CONCLUSION
Angel City and Un chien andalou are both concerned with the resignation
to impulsive desires. It is a self-indulgent capitulation that signals liberation
from societal oppression, yet there are also consequences to this surrender.
When the young woman vehemently rejects her pursuer in the later stages
of Un chien andalou by sticking out her tongue and leaving through a door
that seemingly teleports her to the seashore, she suffers for her defiance, as
the opening sequence of the film forecasts. The hallucinatory world of Angel
City certainly sanctions the access to primal states. As I have mentioned,
the regression of the characters of Lanx and Miss Scoons to adolescence at
the end of the play has relevance in terms of Lacan’s mirror-stage hypoth-
esis. But, as in Un chien andalou, desire proves to be ultimately disconcert-
ing when emancipated. Miss Scoons enters into a trance at the end of Act
One, a condition that suggests a connection with the unconscious and the
divulging of some inner truth. She speaks of impulsive action in esoteric
rather than palpable terms: “The urge to create works of art is essentially
one of ambition. The ambition behind the urge to create is no different
from any other ambition. To kill. To win. To get on top” (88). Yet her ambi-
tions are not her own. Lanx “recognize[s] the style” as akin to the scripts
of “Fritz Lang or early Howard Hawks” (89). (Lang’s films were an early
influence on Buñuel.) The play resounds with the postmodern mantra that
any attempt at originality is futile and ends in a request for the cessation of
speech, for death: “Just shut up, will ya?” (111). Mora Catlett, citing Freud,
notes that the majority of obstacles to the group dining together in The
Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie are associated with death.76 He asks “[c]ould
the main dramatic conflict of the picture be hunger against death and vio-
lence, or the libido opposing destruction?”77 Indeed, the same could be said
of the characters in Angel City who strive, albeit unsuccessfully, for tran-
scendence over death by fixity in the world of the celluloid: “Wheeler:
[ . . . ] I’m Immortal! I’ll Always Be Remembered!” (110). Buñuel’s Un
chien andalou, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and most palpably The
Phantom of Liberty link political and sexual revolution and these insurgences
are inextricably linked with a death drive. Buñuel once stated: “if it were
allowed to, film could be the eye of freedom. [ . . . ] The day that the eye
of the cinema really sees and lets us see, the world will go up in flames.” 78
This is because the world of celluloid signals the world of death, either in
the postmodern sense of “reality” as an accumulation of simulated images,

or, as I argue, in the Surrealist sense of immobility. This immobility signals
a return to a primordial and therefore inanimate state, which is the central
paradox of Surrealist mentality, the conflicting drives of Eros/Thanatos. By
positioning his characters first in the world of celluloid, and second in the
world of reverie, Shepard, like Buñuel, ultimately accelerates the death drive
and hastens their self-destruction, pertaining to the Surrealist fascination
with the absurd and the drive toward death. If Surrealism is centered on
the death drive then does photography and by extension cinematography,
as employed by Shepard in Angel City, not offer the definitive escape, the
somnolence of the dreamscape offering a further level of paralysis? For, as
Roland Barthes argues, the photograph signals “the return of the dead” 79
for “in it nothing can be refused or transformed.”80
Chapter 5
TONGUES, SAVAGE /LOVE,

AND THE WAR IN HEAVEN:
ANGEL’S MONOLOGUE:
JOSEPH CHAIKIN AND
SAM SHEPARD IN
COLLABORATION
INTRODUCTION
Joseph Chaikin asserted that his seated position for the premiere produc-
tion of Tongues at the Magic Theatre, San Francisco in 1978 was the result
of physical necessity.1 However, his stance—facing the audience, with his
lap covered and suggestive of invalidity—was in line with Hans-Thies
Lehmann’s conjecture that postdramatic productions are increasingly drawn
to “the metaphor of the world as a hospital or delusional world.”2 The stage
direction instructs that the speaker face the audience in a straight-backed
chair, with his knees covered by “a bright Mexican blanket (simple, traditional
design),” which “provides the only color” on the bare stage.3 The percussion-
ist, performed by Shepard himself and dressed in black, sat with his back
to both the audience and the speaker so that only his arms were visible as
they played the instruments. Eileen Blumenthal described the stage image
as “vaguely suggesting a multi-limbed Hindu god”4 while William Kleb
wrote: “Only Shepard’s bare, sinewy arms were visible as he reached out to
pick up and play the different instruments; his movements seemed stylized,
choreographed, and the effect was as though Chaikin were a four-armed
Vishnu telling his dreams.”5 The scenography, incorporating Hinduism,
Mexican ritual, and the dreamscape, suggested an attempt to communicate
with the primitive. In this arrangement, the image of Chaikin’s body is

deceptive. His arms are not his own; they are in a sense phantom limbs,
like the disembodied hands that comfort the dreamer in Beckett’s Nacht
und Träume (1983).
The imagery evoked in the initial imagery of Tongues introduces the
major focuses of this chapter: notably the Surrealism of Tongues (1978),
Savage/Love (1979) and The War in Heaven (Angel’s Monologue; 1985). All
cowritten by Shepard and Chaikin, the Surrealism of these pieces emerges
in production, in the suggestion of a disembodied voice, mediumship, the
failure of the body, and the powerful “voice” of Beckett that surfaces—
for Tongues was essentially a performance of Chaikin’s own personal “end-
game.” My analysis will initially investigate how language is used in these
plays. It is close to the Surrealists’ form of linguistic expression as advocated
in the first wave of Poetic Surrealism, as opposed to the aesthetic Surrealism
that emerged in painting. Contextually, this chapter will trace the influence
of Surrealism in these works by highlighting the significant contribution of
Surrealism to the artistic environment in which both writers honed their
crafts, notably the Off-Off Broadway alternative theatre scene of the 1960s.
This study will analyze the correspondence between Shepard and Chaikin,
published by Barry Daniels in 1994, which documents the creative impetuses
for their collaborations.
As an extension of this, this chapter considers the Surrealism that is an
evident context for these plays through Chaikin’s interest in the works of
Beckett. The influence of the Surrealist movement on Beckett’s work is still
an under-researched area. Yet Beckett’s conjectures on the arbitrariness of
language link his writings to Artaud’s theories on the role of speech in the
theatre and back to Breton’s discussion of the role of language in Poetic
Surrealism. A consideration of the influence of Surrealism on Beckett dem-
onstrates how his treatment of the disembodied voice has helped Shepard
and Chaikin to liberate language from the confines of communication. As
a result, imagistic expression can be achieved in accord with the Surrealist
emphasis on objective chance and pure psychic automatism. These plays
written by Chaikin and Shepard share with Beckett an interest in the dra-
matization of a thriving psyche removed from an ineffectual body/physi-
cality. Connectedly, I shall consider the conception of The War in Heaven
(Angel’s Monologue) in the context of language therapy, considering Joseph
Chaikin’s physical condition after a stroke rendered him aphasic in 1984.
THE OFF-OFF BROADWAY SCENE OF THE 1960S

According to J. L. Styan: “The line of ‘irrational’ theatre in this century
is recognizably from symbolist to Surrealist, from dada to the absurd, and
Joseph Chaikin and Sam Shepard 107
from the theatre of cruelty to the ‘alternative theatre’ of the 1960s.”6 The
Off-Off Broadway scene, in which Shepard found refuge on his arrival to
New York in 1963, was “a playwright’s heaven. [ . . . ] The only impulse
was to make living, vital, theatre which spoke to the moment.” 7 Stephen
Bottoms’s comments seem apt in light of the Surrealists’ appraisal of
objective chance. The Judson Poets’ Theatre, one of the key venues in
the development of the experimental theatrical scene in the New York
of the 1960s, chose Apollinaire’s Surrealist play Les Mamelles de Tirésias
(The Breasts of Tiresias), in a joint billing with Joel Oppenheimer’s The
Great American Desert, as its premiere production in 1961. The term sur-
réalisme originated when Apollinaire subtitled this play “drame surréal-
iste” and significantly Shepard’s Red Cross also premiered at the theatre
in 1966. According to Bottoms, “at Judson Church [ . . . ] one could see
the rich potential for combining poetry, music, dance, painting and film
in unusual ways, and Shepard actively participated in some of their work-
shops to devise cross-disciplinary ‘Happenings.’”8 Indeed, the Happenings
had strong links with the Surrealist notion of objective chance and with
the Theatre of the Absurd. Bigsby compares the Happenings to Surrealism
“in their concern with an interaction between the arts and the stimulation
of the sensibility through a series of juxtapositions.”9 Likewise, David G.
Zinder traces the ancestry of the Happenings back to the Surrealist move-
ment: “What André Breton referred to in 1938 as ‘un oeuvre de l’art éve-
nement’ was literally translated into the Happenings of the fifties. [ . . . ]
Theatre groups under the direction of Richard Schechner, Julian Beck
and Judith Malina, Peter Brook, Joseph Chaikin, and Jerzy Grotowski,
to mention but a few, sought a new form of theatre that utilized unde-
fined theatre spaces and either encouraged or manipulated audience par-
ticipation for the purposes of the production.”10 This artistic environment
nurtured Shepard’s writing and challenged the more refined realist the-
atrical preferences of Broadway. Julian Beck’s and Judith Malina’s Living
Theatre was instrumental in the development of this counterculture. The
Living Theatre’s mantra was firmly rooted in the theories on drama of
Artaud, who had been involved with the Surrealist movement from 1924
to 1926. Additionally, Julian Beck had heard Breton lecture on Surrealism
at Yale11 and, along with Malina, frequently socialized with Dalí. Both
Dalí and the Italian Surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico attended the
Living Theatre’s performance of The Connection by Jack Gelber, and Beck
and Malina visited Dalí in Paris and, according to John Tytell, spent the
evening discussing Luis Buñuel.12 Peter Brook wrote of the Living Theatre
in his seminal work The Empty Space (1968) that they “are continually
nourished by a very American humor and joy that is Surrealist, but with
both feet firmly on the ground.”13
In an interview with Richard Schechner, published in The Tulane Drama

Review in 1964, Chaikin deemed the Living Theatre “the most ambitious
and daring thing in New York,” though he found that “they never explored
sufficiently the actor’s own powers and the ensemble experience.”14 In the
mid 1960s, the Living Theatre went into exile as a touring group in Europe
after their premises were repeatedly closed down by the authorities for fail-
ing to comply with fire regulations. Joseph Chaikin subsequently set up the
Open Theatre, “open to all the currents and philosophies and politics which
mainstream theatre shut out.”15 Indeed, Shomit Mitter has highlighted the
similarities between Peter Brook’s dramatic approach and Chaikin’s inter-
rogation of inner and outer states of experience, quoting Brook’s words from
The Empty Space (1968):
We were trying to smash the apparently watertight divisions between the

private and the public man—the outer man whose behavior is bound by the
photographic rules of everyday life, who must sit to sit, stand to stand—and
the inner man whose anarchy and poetry is usually expressed only in his
words.16
Mitter relates that Chaikin’s Open Theatre took its name from a “commit-
ment to clearing passages between the inner and the outer, to resensitizing
performers to the influence of autonomous and therefore edifying orders
of experience.”17 Chaikin’s dramatic theories advocated “transformation”
and “inside/outside” techniques that proved immensely significant in the
development of Shepard’s playwriting. Callens’s description of these exer-
cises invites comparisons with Surrealism: “They allow[ed] the performers
to theatricalize the hidden impulses underneath the everyday, naturalist
façade, and, conversely, to explore new, unusual or unexpected layers of
consciousness [ . . . ].”18 Likewise, in Chaikin’s seminal text The Presence of
the Actor (1972), he wrote:
Ultimately, acting is to be able to speak in the tongues of the tortured, assas-

sinated, betrayed, starving parts of ourselves imprisoned in the disguise of the
“setup.” And to locate and liberate those voices which sing from the precious
buried parts of ourselves where we are bewildered and alive beyond business
matters, in irreducible radiance.19
Sam Shepard first met Joseph Chaikin at a dinner party in 1964, and
through this meeting, and the playwright’s relationship with the actress
Joyce Aaron, he became involved with the Open Theatre, contributing
pieces of writing to the multiauthored plays Terminal (1970), Nightwalk
(1973), and Re-Arrangements (1979). Shepard also met Jacques Levy at the
Open Theatre, who subsequently directed a number of the playwright’s
earlier plays notably Red Cross and Fourteen Hundred Thousand. Of their
collaborations, Levy reported: “One of us said the idea was to stay out of
the way of the writing: a metaphor for letting the unconscious or whatever
flow,”20 showing an early interest in exploring uncensored thought. Shepard
maintained his contact with Chaikin and the Open Theatre through writ-
ten correspondence while he was in London from 1971 to 1974 and they
continued to write to each other after he returned to California. These let-
ters provide insight into their literary influences, as well as the theatrical
objectives of their artistic collaborations. There was, as Leslie Wade articu-
lates, a new passion for experimentation evident in Shepard’s work on his
return to America in 1974:
In contrast to the conservative impulse evident in his London plays, his

efforts at the Magic exhibit a wayward, eruptive energy, propelled by a curi-
osity for new forms and modes of expression. This work also manifests a keen
fascination with the voices of the mind, the inchoate nature of the ego, and
the imagistic activity of preconscious /subconscious states.21
As Wade suggests, this new direction in Shepard’s writing is markedly evident

in Killer’s Head (1975),22 first performed at The American Place Theatre in
New York, directed by Nancy Meckler and performed by Richard Gere. The
play was quickly reprised at the Magic Theatre in a double bill with Action
(1974). Killer’s Head runs for approximately ten minutes in duration and
features the meandering monologue of a death-row convict called Mazon,
strapped into an electric chair, blindfolded, and barefoot. Yet his words belie
the reality of his physical circumstances. The play’s title emphasizes the
man’s guilt and problematizes the audience’s empathetic engagement with
the character. Rather than contemplating the inevitable, Shepard injects the
macabre into the banal, as Mazon muses over pickups, vans, and breeding
horses: “Oh yea, today’s the day I buy the pickup. [ . . . ] Six-cylinder, three-
quarter-ton bed, heavy-duty rear springs, three-speed column.”23 However,
his enthusiasm collapses in the light of his impending electrocution. In this
context, Mazon utilizes pretense as a coping mechanism, a means to coun-
teract the hideousness of his present circumstance. He summons the image
of the pickup as though he were appealing to the totemic potential of the
image to deliver him from his fate. Yet the myth of materialism fails him,
emerging as futile and sterile. In a particularly ironic twist, Mazon muses
that he will not need the “three-fifty V-8” power as he “[w]on’t be goin’ off
the road much” (381). His monologue is punctured by one whole minute’s
silence at one point, before the play ends, literally, with a jolt to the system:
The lights begin to dim very slowly and take a full minute to come to black.
Just as the lights reach black the chair ignites with an electric charge that
lights up MAZON’s entire body. He makes no sounds. The electric charge

is short, just long enough to take in the illuminated body, then back to
black. (383)
The minimalist setting, featuring the stream-of-consciousness narrative of

a physically restricted character, is particularly Beckettian, recalling both
Not I (1972) and the character of Hamm in Endgame (1957). The name of
the title character is also starkly reminiscent of the French Surrealist artist
André Masson, whose painting Beckett dismissed in “Three Dialogues”
in Transition 49 in December 1949. Beckett wrote “[he] bears the scars of
a confidence that must be painful to him” and describes him as “an artist
who seems literally scared of the ferocious dilemma of expression,” 24 apt in
the context of Mazon’s physical state. Leonard Wilcox considers language
in this play as the “other” that replaces the self: In this way “signification,
with its pop syntagms [ . . . ] encases [Mazon] in the symbolic and so removes
him from the real—in this case the reality of his imminent execution.” 25
Indeed the subject of his monologue actively rejects reality and suggests
the denial of the external circumstances of Mazon’s situation. Instead, we
are presented with the outward manifestation of an interior monologue(s),
a theatrical device that was to be recycled in the three works that Shepard
devised with Chaikin. The interiorized homilist nature of Killer’s Head
translates into a series of voices in Tongues and consequently becomes more
refined in Savage/Love, a work that blurs the lines between performance
and poetic recital. In The War in Heaven (Angel’s Monologue), an angel,
after falling to earth, recounts his experience in a fragmented speech, a
direct result of Chaikin’s aphasia, and an appropriate form through which
to address the angel’s sense of alienation from the world around him. The
emphasis on imagistic expression, instinctual yearning, dreams, the libera-
tion of the unconscious, voices emerging from the dead, and particularly
the disembodiment of the mind, freed from its carnal obligations, all have
a basis in Surrealist theory.
SHEPARD AND CHAIKIN IN COLLABORATION

Tongues was devised over a three-week period in May 1978 when Chaikin
travelled to work with Shepard in San Francisco, where the playwright was
writer-in-residence at the Magic Theatre. In a letter written the previous
year, however, Shepard discusses the production of his play Inacoma at
the Magic Theatre, a work that attempted to dramatize the mental state
of a comatose patient. In his director’s statement, Shepard wrote of the
inspirations for this ensemble piece: “All I could visualize was a hospital
bed, the coma victim and creature-characters. Then various scenes would
start popping up, all out of context and wandering in and out of different
realities.”26 Other influences for Inacoma include “vaudeville, circuses, the
Living Theatre, the Open Theatre and the whole world of jazz music, trance
dances, faith healing ceremonies, musical comedy, Greek tragedy, medicine
shows, etc.”27 However, the dramatization of a comatose state gave Shepard
room to explore an existence between life and death. It gave him “beauti-
ful license to explore the possibilities of a character in a dream, or trance
state.”28 During the collaborative process the group collectively read Dying
in an Age of Eternal Life by B. D. Colen, based on the Karen Ann Quinlan
case,29 and also consulted medical journals and a nurse’s manual from the
Baltimore Shock/Trauma Unit.30
Writing to Chaikin in 1977, Shepard notes that he is “still obsessed with
this idea that words are pictures and that even momentarily they can wrap
the listener up in a visual world without having to commit themselves to
revealing any other meaning.”31 Similarly, in a letter written the following
September, Shepard mentions to Chaikin an upcoming opportunity to work
with a theatre for the blind in San Francisco.32 Indeed, the work Shepard
explored while resident at the Magic Theatre was largely dominated by the
desire to free imagistic expression from the confines of aesthetic represen-
tation, to evoke a visual world through language alone. In a letter dated
January 1978, Shepard refers to The Second Ring of Power (1977) by Carlos
Castaneda, a Peruvian−American author who wrote extensively on shaman-
ism. Shepard particularly mentions the chapter on “The Art of Dreaming”:
“This has been an inspiration to me along the lines I’ve been working on,
which has to do with a feeling of separation between my body and ‘me.’”33
The reference to Castaneda’s text indicates an interest in the disembodied
voice, a quest for inner knowledge, shamanism, “doubling,” and an explora-
tion of death. According to Don Juan’s words as cited in this chapter, “the
awareness of our death [is] the only thing that could give us the strength to
withstand the duress and pain of our lives and our fears of the unknown.”34
This relates to issues explored by the Open Theatre with regard to mortality
which, in Chaikin’s words, saw theatre as a “the visceral confrontation with
the reality that one is living now and at some other time no longer living.”35
In the note to the published piece, which Shepard wrote in 1978, he charts
the ambitions for his collaboration with Chaikin:
We agreed on a piece to do with the voice. Voices. Voices traveling. Voices

becoming other voices. Voices from the dead and living. Hypnotized voices.
Sober voices. Working voices. Voices in anguish, etc.
[...]
The various voices are not so much intended to be caricatures as they
are attitudes or impulses, constantly shifting and sliding into each other,
sometimes abruptly, sometimes slowly, seemingly out of nowhere. Likewise,

the music is not intended to make comments on the voice but to support
these changing impulses, to make temporary environments for the voice to
live in.36
While Tongues primarily explores death, Savage/Love is a theatre piece about

love, which premiered with Tongues at the Eureka Theatre Summer Festival
in San Francisco on September 5, 1979. Chaikin had suffered from continu-
ing health problems after the staging of Tongues the previous year and in
letters to Shepard said that he “felt like a time bomb” and was “glad to be
alive.”37 However, both Shepard and Chaikin expressed an interest in work-
ing together again. Of their prospective collaboration, Chaikin wrote: “What
about one part/voice/section or something being about love and romance or
being left and turned away from, as a wandering-off voice.”38 In letters lead-
ing up to the conception of the piece, Chaikin recommended a variety of
texts to Shepard for consultation including works by Simone de Beauvoir,
Virginia Woolf, Kafka, Nietzsche, and, significantly, Søren Kierkegaard’s
Either/Or and The Informed Heart by Bruno Bettelheim. The reference to
Bettelheim signals an interest in psychoanalysis, while Chaikin’s reading
of Kierkegaard suggests an awareness of theories of existentialism, duali-
ties of existence, and the unreliable narrator. (E. F. Kaelin draws parallels
between this last aspect of Either/Or and Beckett’s transference of authorial
accountability.39) Savage/Love is more poetic than Tongues, consisting of 19
different headed sections or voices. Again, it originated in improvisation
when Chaikin spent three weeks with Shepard in San Francisco in 1979. In
the introduction to the play, which Chaikin wrote retrospectively in 1981,
he states:
We both felt that we wanted the piece to be readily identifiable, not esoteric.
We felt it should be made up of love moments that were as immediately famil-
iar to most people in the audience as they were to Sam and me. Although we
had known each other for many years, we had never talked about this subject.
When we began to talk and work, even though we each had very different
stories, we found that we shared many thoughts about the human experience
of love. We talked especially about the difficulty of expressing tenderness and
the dread of being replaced.40
THE BECKETTIAN INFLUENCE ON TONGUES

Tongues is Shepard’s most Beckettian play, solely concerned with the perfor-
mance of voices. Although an interest in Beckett can be evidenced through-
out his career, Shepard’s collaboration with Chaikin on this piece brings the
Beckettian “voice” to the fore. Chaikin was an experienced interpreter of
Beckett’s work, having played the role of Hamm in Beckett’s Endgame at

the Open Theatre in 1969. He also directed the play at Princeton University
in 1977 and at the Manhattan Theatre Club in 1979.
This connection to the Beckettian inevitably leads to Surrealism.
According to John Fletcher,
[Beckett’s] verse throughout his career shows the influence of Surrealist tech-
nique: metric anarchy, the precedence of the image over the sense, lines of
greatly varying length within the same stanza, and a tendency to construct
poems on the basis not of syntactical coherence but of associated imagery, the
association usually existing only in the mind of the poet.41
Samuel Beckett arrived in Paris in 1929, the year that Un chien andalou
received its premiere and the same year that Breton’s Manifeste du surré-
alisme (1924) was reprinted. The influence of Surrealism on the writer is
marked. In 1928, Beckett translated “The Fiftieth Anniversary of Hysteria”
by Louis Aragon and Breton, and sections of The Immaculate Conception,
which attempted to imitate the disjointed speech of the mentally ill.42 In
1932, Beckett translated the work of René Crevel, Paul Eluard, and Breton
for Edward Titus’s This Quarter and along with George Reavey, Brian
Coffey and others, acted as a translator for Thorns of Thunder (1936), a
collection of poems by Paul Eluard for which the Surrealist artist Max
Ernst created the cover design. Reavey was also responsible for publishing
Beckett’s novel Murphy in 1938 and Echo’s Bones in 1935. David Bradby has
particularly highlighted the similarities between Beckett’s first dramatic
endeavor Eleuthéria (1947) and the Surrealist play Victor ou les Enfants au
pouvoir (1929) by Roger Vitrac, who cofounded Théâtre Alfred Jarry with
Artaud.43 Daniel Albright has written on the influence of Surrealism in
Beckett’s writing, evident in the “Breton-like experiments in simulating
mental debility”44 in Watt, the “imprudently Bretonesque counterfactu-
alities” and his imagistic evocation of a “dead imagination.”45 Albright
deduces that “Beckett’s work took shape both according to the psychic-
automatic Surrealism of Breton and his followers, and according to the
original Surrealism of Apollinaire in which reality was violently seized in
the contrapuntal friction among the competing media of music, painting,
and discourse.”46 Albright also draws comparisons between the architec-
tural structures in Beckett’s texts from the 1960s and the landscapes cre-
ated by de Chirico and Dalí.
On the other hand, Bigsby outlines differences between Surrealism and
the absurd. He notes that the former is open to the potentialities of a reality
thus far rationed, while the absurd concerns itself with pessimistic images of
desperation that taunt our misconceived perceptions of reality,47 “distorted
images of an equally distorted world.”48 Bigsby likewise rejects comparisons

between Surrealism and Beckett’s dramatic oeuvre:
If the desert landscapes of Beckett’s plays are in some respects reminiscent

of Dalí’s, the nature of the irony is entirely different. Beckett’s characters
are mocked for assuming reality to be other than it is; Dalí’s for failing to
realize that it is far more than it appears to be. Beckett is not concerned with
the marvelous and the mysterious but with a harrowed realism. He taunts
spiritual renewal and existence as suffused with a potential which denies the
apocalyptic implications of the Absurdists. For the Surrealist, humanity,
commitment and even morality of a kind are not ironical illusions spawned
of desperation but valid responses to a world which is more expansive than
Beckett could acknowledge.49
Bigsby fails to acknowledge Beckett’s indebtedness to Surrealism in terms

of his solipsistic dramatization of unconscious thought processes, especially
in later plays such as That Time (1974) and Rockaby (1980). Also, the for-
mal mechanisms of Beckett’s writing extract from Surrealism, an inter-
est in automatism and in staging, not the “harrowed realism” that Bigsby
describes, but the collapse of the real. In his earlier plays, Beckett achieved
more imagistic expression by writing in a language that was not his own and
by translating other works from French to English. However, in later plays
such as That Time, Anna McMullan has argued that
precisely because of the lack of visual scenic material the faculty of seeing,
both that of the Listener and that of the audience, shifts from the outer “eye
of the flesh” to the inner eye of the imagination. The audience’s imagination
becomes the scene where the Listener’s memories are staged.50
Tongues mirrors That Time in its dramatization of an interior monologue,

void of visual stimuli, with surreal stage directions that disorientate the
audience and create an antinaturalistic mise-en-scéne. In That Time Beckett
directs that the LISTENER’S FACE, an “Old White face, long flaring white
hair as if seen from above outspread ” should appear “about 10 feet above stage
level midstage off center.”51 Similarly, in Tongues the presence of the percus-
sionist, whose arms appear as though they belong to the speaker, rejects the
possibility of a naturalist rendering of the text. Also, in Robert Cordier’s
1984 production of Savage/Love in Brussels, which performed the piece in
English and French and included scenes from other Shepard plays, the set-
ting featured “a gallery with slim pillars, to which the acting extended and
which appeared to function as ‘external location’”; thus “Chaikin’s ‘inside/
outside’ technique was even applied to the theatrical space.”52
The stage direction of Tongues suggests that Chaikin’s arms should

appear as though prosthetic. This confronts the audience with an image of
dismemberment, pertaining to the concept of lack. Indeed, in highlighting
the actor’s body as an active tool, no longer subordinate to other elements of
the dramatic staging, the body is utilized in a manner akin to that required
of the actors of Beckett’s late drama. Ulrika Maude has noted the presence of
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological theories on “bodily memory,”
signaled by suggestions of a phantom limb, in Beckett’s writing:
We are dealing with a bodily memory, an organic intelligence, whose appli-

cability reaches far beyond the experiences of mutilation. We are faced with
a phenomenon akin to repression, in which a traumatic occurrence leaves
the subject forever trapped in a past future which is no longer accessible to
him.53
In similar terms, Amy Lyford writes that “Breton’s “surreality” would be

used like a knife to separate hand from arm, to map out the structure of
Surrealist vision in terms of absence, something like a figure for the gap
between body parts or stages of medical treatment.”54 A passage in Savage/
Love seems to describe the very experience of prosthesis:
Sometimes I would almost reach

Something near my neck would move (107).
The speaker could also be describing the condition of anosognosia whereby

a patient is unable to recognize specific parts of their body, or is unaware
that a specific body part is diseased.55 Chaikin, Beckett, and Breton were all
recorders of a post (or pre)-traumatic experience—Breton trained as a physi-
cian, along with Louis Aragon at the Parisian military hospital of Val-de-
Grâce during the First World War and Beckett served the French Resistance
in World War Two and worked with the Irish Red Cross in Saint-Lô after
the war. On the other hand, Chaikin was facing his mortality owing to his
deteriorating physical health. The imagery of bodily fragmentation emerges
in Savage/Love: “The head would nod / While you spoke / I wasn’t sure
what it was saying” and in “I held my face together / My mouth on my
hand / then it dropped / my hands held each other” (197–198). Limbs and
organs recurrently appear independent of the body. Lyford has investigated
how the “aesthetics of dismemberment” informed Surrealist imagery as evi-
dent in Val-de-Grâce as “a place that represented bodily trauma in terms
that were as visual as they were physical or psychological,”56 distinctly the
trauma of the male body. Likewise, Eileen Blumenthal suggested of Tongues
that “the total stage picture suggested illness [ . . . ],”57 while Surrealism, as
Lyford points out, is fundamentally based on masculine bodily trauma.

Lyford notes that Breton’s hallucinatory vision of a “man cut in two,” as
documented in the first Surrealist manifesto, highlights the centrality of
dismemberment to Surrealism:
One night, before falling asleep, I perceived, clearly articulated to the point
where it was impossible to change one word, but distracted nonetheless by the
sound of many voices, a rather bizarre phrase [ . . . ] [a] phrase that seemed to
me insistent, a phrase dare I say it that was tapping at the window. [ . . . ] In
truth this phrase surprised me [ . . . ] it was something like: ‘There is a man
cut in two by the window’ but it could not suffer from any ambivalence,
accompanied as it was by the weak visual representation of a man walking
and truncated half-way up by a window perpendicular to the axis of his body.
No doubt it was about the simple standing up in space of a man who stood
leaning toward the window. But this window having followed the movement
of the man, I understood that I had to deal with a rather rare type of image
and that I had quickly no other idea than to incorporate it into my material
for poetic construction.58
The foundations of Surrealism seem to be equated with the experience of

carnal trauma. Throughout the Surrealist movement, the fragmentation of
body parts was a central aesthetic concern. Indeed, the fact that Chaikin
is armless in Tongues is particularly relevant in this regard. In the preface
to Max Ernst’s Surrealist collage novel La Femme 100 Têtes (1929), Breton
wrote that “Surrealism will be in any case a function of our willingness
to completely defamiliarize everything [ . . . ] right up to the point of defa-
miliarizing a hand by isolating it from an arm.”59 In Tongues the imagery
of disembodiment confronts the audience from the opening stage direc-
tion. Furthermore, Lyford posits that the “repetition of dismemberment in
Surrealist imagery—whether male or female [ . . . ]—figures the human body
as a sign of psychic mutilation, as traumatic experience incarnate.”60 Hence,
in the suggestion of mutilation, the stage image of Chaikin’s body symbol-
izes psychological trauma from the onset. Both the body, and the voice,
are rendered surreal. The language of disembodiment as symptomatic of a
deeper emotional anxiety also permeates Savage/Love. In the section titled
“Absence,” the speaker pines for a lover like a lost limb:
You who are not here

You who are missing in my body (103)
Likewise, in “Salvation,” love is described as capable of physical restoration:

“Now that I’m with you I’m saved / From being in parts.” As Callens writes
of “Opening,” paradoxically the closing section of the piece:
[ . . . ] the enamored body fights rational control, gets distorted under pres-
sure, shudders apart into separate limbs emitting contradictory signals, is
carried away by desire and finally restored and appeased by the other: “You
took my hand away from me / And everything stopped / From your fingers
I returned.”61
The imagery evoked recalls surreal incongruous juxtaposition and the sub-
version of anticipated sensory stimuli. Sight morphs into taste: “You had sort
of a flavor / The way you looked”; sight becomes speech: “And you said /
Look at me with your eyes.” In Savage/Love sight does not see. As in Un chien
andalou, the eye is rendered ineffective at capturing sensory experience.
In Tongues, the Beckettian “voice” emerges in the opening lines: “He was
born in the middle of a story which he had nothing to do with” (302). The
action begins in medias res and the words recall the initial lines of Beckett’s
Fizzle No. 4 (which Shepard recited at “An Evening with Patti Smith and
Sam Shepard” at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, on April 9, 2012) and Beckett’s
Not I. The former begins, “I gave up before birth, it is not possible otherwise,
but birth there had to be”62; while Not I begins with the lines: “ . . . .out . . . into
the world . . . this world . . . tiny little thing . . . before its time.”63 These open-
ing lines chart the birthing process as a malevolent affair, a release into an
imperfect universe from the security of the womb.
During the development of Tongues, Shepard and Chaikin also discussed
Beckett’s How It Is (1964), his translation of his 1961 text Comment C’est.
In a letter to Chaikin in 1978, Shepard wrote:
I got very influenced by your reading of How It Is by Beckett and took off in
a flurry of writing which I guess I’ll show you when you come out. It may not
be at all what you have in mind, but the sense I got from the reading of inner
voices engaged in different attitudes toward the body which is on a journey
is what really moved me. As though the body is a vehicle and the passen-
gers aren’t all that willing to be travellers—they have arguments, discussions
about their destination—take side trips—rest—get bogged down—then
continue—then get a glimmer of where they’re going.64
Shepard’s interest in “inner voices engaged in different attitudes toward the

body which is on a journey” stems directly from his reading of Beckett’s text.
In How It Is, an unidentified narrator lies in the mud and charts his exis-
tence through “bits and scraps,” a collage of unpunctuated words, images,
memories, and voices. The narrator seems at one stage to remember his own
birth: “[ . . . ] that kind mute screams abandon hope gleam of hope frantic
departure the cord around my neck the sack in my mouth [ . . . ].”65 The
phrases “invocation,” “old dreams,” and “scraps of an ancient voice in me
not mine” all appear on the first page and the voice tells the reader that
he will “quote a given moment long past vast stretch of time on from there
that moment and following not all a selection natural order vast tracks of
time.”66 It is strongly suggested that the speaker is attempting to chronicle
his existence, post birth and after death. One voice tells us in the opening
lines that “how it was I quote before Pim with Pim after Pim how it is three
parts I say it as I hear it.” The novel simulates the technique of “automatic
writing” but is structured according to a complex system of word play, pun-
ning, and deliberate segregation of the signified from the signifier. As Flore
Chevaillier writes:
in calling our attention to the signifying processes’ constant deferral of

meaning, Beckett reveals the essence-less quality of language theorized by
Derrida. The French version of the novel Comment C’est, [ . . . ] makes clear
the lack of interdependence between the signifier and signified, imply-
ing a possible failure of communication and the illusion of origin and
presence.67
Tongues likewise centers on the unreliability of language. In the opening

section a voice emerges, telling “Him” that he is already dead. But death
is deferred. Although he leaves his body, his life continues: “In the next
second he’s entirely dead/ In a second he forgets” (304). The silences are elo-
quent in this play. They are used in a manner akin to Pinter’s use of pauses,
which Peter Hall argues was adopted from Beckett’s manipulation of silence:
“I have always supposed that Pinter gained confidence in this technique
because of Beckett’s use of pauses. Certainly Beckett is the first dramatist to
use silence as a written form of communication.”68 Language is artificial in
this piece. We belong in silence which, as Hall suggests, is a means of com-
munication itself. In How It Is, the speaker waits for the “panting” to stop.
The second paragraph of the novel reads:
[ . . . ] voice once without quaqua on all sides then in me when the panting
stops tell me again finish telling me invocation [ . . . ]
The speaker’s voice can only come through in the silence: “the voice time
the voice it is not mine the silence time the silence that might help me
I’ll see do something something” (33). Likewise, the voice in Tongues,
in a section called “Invocation” and remarkably reminiscent of Beckett’s
words, proclaims “Between the breath I’m breathing / and the one that’s
coming / Something tells me now” (311). Language, or more specifically
words, seems to be an impediment to pure expression. This emerges in the
section in Tongues on hunger, which reiterates the incapability of language
to convey true meaning. Rather, as Rabillard argues in a discussion of the
earlier Icarus’s Mother, “the words spoken by the characters in the play are
the bearers of power, rather than of meaning.”69 Rabillard compares the
non-referential “small talk” in Icarus’s Mother to the phatic exchanges in
Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: “conversations [ . . . ] seem to be about noth-
ing, their only content becomes the very act of communication and the
conditions of exercise.” 70 Thus, the use of language removed from its des-
ignative origins functions as a comment on the conditions of the theatri-
cality of the drama itself, the drama as text written to be performed, and
the audience as witness to the performance. This could also be applied to
Tongues. In one section, two voices of different register courteously discuss
the possibility of going somewhere to eat and the effect recalls a swing-
ing pendulum. They both downplay their hunger, until it emerges that
they are both hungry; one of the speakers is ravenous while the other is
“always hungry” and “was just being polite” (309). Here, the pointlessness
of courtesy is being mocked in line with the Surrealists’ advocacy of the
rejection of societal formalities, reminiscent of Buñuel’s concerns in his
film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), a film that centers on
the thwarted attempts of a group of friends to share a meal together. In
Tongues, both the speakers are hungry but their voices betray them. The
voice deceives the body. The particularly famished speaker launches into a
discussion of his hunger and, in his soliloquy, “hunger” becomes a concrete
entity itself:
Nothing we find will satisfy it. Absolutely nothing. Whatever we find won’t
be enough. It will only subside. For a little while. It won’t disappear. It will
come back. (310)
Savage/Love revisits the theme of the failure of language. “Babble (1)” and
“Babble (2)” are stuttered pieces of nonexpression. The speaker is either deal-
ing with constant interruption or the words are sticking in his/her mouth.
The term “stuttering” can be linked with the primitive as the etymologi-
cal definition of “barbarian” descends from barbarus “akin to the Sanskrit
barbara, ‘stammering.’” 71 Similarly, in another section of Tongues, a speaker
struggles to find his/her voice, or more accurately to hear their voice. The
speaker’s very identity depends on their ability to communicate and to artic-
ulate their existence: “Before long I’ll be recognizable to all those around
me. I’ll be heard in my familiar way. [ . . . ] They’ll call me by my name. I’ll
call them. They’ll hear me saying their name.” (80–81). A voice of a new
mother emerges, describing how the sensation of childbirth is incomparable
to anything she had been told. Language has failed to prepare her for the
experience, one that she describes as free from pain, but also in terms of dis-
embodiment: “They told me what kind of pain I’d have” but “[n]othing they
told me was like this” (306). In a similar manner, Louis Aragon provided
an alternative definition to Surrealism in 1924 in “A Wave of Dreams” in
which he wrote:
The essence of things is in no way linked to their reality, there are relations
other than reality that the mind may grasp and that come first, such as
chance, illusion, the fantastic, the dream those various species are reunited
and reconciled in a genus, which is surrreality.72
This is significant in terms of the suggestion in Tongues of the fallible nature

of language. “As soon as you name it you kill it,” Shepard has stated. “There
is no question of naming and having it at the same time.” 73 Language is
again regarded with suspicion in the concluding voices that emerge in
Tongues. The content of the speeches are contradictory. A “pompous” voice
exclaims, “It’s not often, actually, that I find myself at a loss for words. But
in this particular instance I was left speechless” (316). In another, a speaker’s
demagoguery belies the subject of his oration: “I’m not here today to lay
down the law to you people. On the contrary” (316). The speaker’s words are
rousing but empty and cliché-ridden: “I’m here so that we can join together
in this struggle. So that we can unite” (316).
In its treatment of language, Tongues forges links with Surrealism and
Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. This connection is established by a fixation
with the fallibility of language, with the “real,” and the rejection of a tradi-
tional lineage of dramatic narration. Tongues channels Artaud’s theory that
words should not be granted greater status than other means of expression.
In The Theatre and its Double, Artaud writes:
It is not a matter of suppressing speech in the theater but of changing its role,
and especially of reducing its position, of considering it as something else
than a means of conducting human characters to their external ends, since
the theater is concerned only with the way feelings, and passions conflict
with one another, and man with man, in life.
To change the function of speech in the theater is to use it in a concrete
and spatial sense, combining it with everything in the theater that is spatial
and of significance in the concrete domain; —to manipulate it like a solid
object, one which overturns and disturbs things, in the air first of all, then
in an infinitely more mysterious and secret domain but one that admits of
extension, and it will not be very difficult to identify this secret but extended
domain with that of formal anarchy on the one hand but also with that of
continuous formal creation on the other.74
Artaud argued for the liberation of language from its communicative ori-
gins. His words evoke Breton’s discussion in the first Surrealist manifesto
on the ineffectualness of conversation to “allow the heart of the matter to

be plumbed.”75
Poetic Surrealism, which is the subject of this study, has focused its efforts up
to this point on re-establishing dialogue in its absolute truth, by freeing both
interlocutors from any obligations of politeness. Each of them simply pursues
his soliloquy without trying to derive any special dialectical pleasure from it
and without trying to impose anything whatsoever upon his neighbor.76
Breton also wrote on the obligatory disconnection of words from their

meaning as essential to automatist representation: “I shall even go so far as
to maintain that [language] instructs me and, indeed, I have had occasion
to use surreally words whose meanings I have forgotten.” 77
However, the disconnection of the signified from the signifier in Tongues
also evokes comparisons with an aphasic state. One voice in Tongues seems
to have particular defects in spoken expression: “Where—Let’s see—Is
this—Wait—Now—Listen—Now—No—” (306). Chaikin’s aphasic con-
dition greatly influenced the conception of The War in Heaven (Angel’s
Monologue) in 1985, a play that will be discussed in greater detail later in
this chapter. However, the deliberate assimilation of a neurological disor-
der as evident here can be contextualized within Beckett’s use of language,
which Benjamin Keatinge regards as a conscious attempt at “systemizing
confusion” 78 by imitating the deranged language of the insane, particularly
the “formal thought disorder” of schizophrenia. This is characterized by the
derailment of language and the absence of a unifying theme in self-expres-
sion. Tongues seems to satisfy as an example of a schizophrenic’s “poverty of
content of speech” that features “empty philosophizing” while
[o]ther abnormalities can include mutism of aphasia, monotonous delivery

tone and a phenomenon known as ‘clanging’, where the speaker leaps from
word to word on the basis of rhyme or phonological similarity rather than
logical sequence.79
These qualifying features of schizophrenia are all evident in Shepard’s and

Chaikin’s work. The defamiliarization of language brought about by the
aphasic state produces a disconnection between words and the self so that the
language produces a series of autonomous dream-like images. Thus, Breton,
Beckett, and Chaikin, whether simulated or genuine, replicated/adopted an
aphasic mindset in their respective approaches to language. Breton advocated
that the Surrealist utilize language in an aphasic manner. Likewise, Lyford
compares the Surrealist’s automatic writing to hysteria, and the Surrealist
technique of collage and the imagery of dismemberment in Surrealist art
as evident of a “postwar aestheticization of bodily trauma.”80 Her argument

questions whether after the body disintegrates, language remains, offer-
ing transcendence over the visceral world of the living. The War in Heaven
(Angel’s Monologue) furthers this idea, of which Martin Esslin wrote: “I can
attest to the fact that such a text does refer to an external reality, that it does
movingly enshrine its authors’ intentions—and that it is theatrical, of the
theatre, because of its deep human reality.”81
SURREALISM, MEDIUMSHIP, AND CORPOREALITY

Moreover, the emphasis on the writer as medium also connects Tongues to
the Surrealist manifesto. Breton documented the origins of Surrealism as
follows:
Completely occupied as I still was with Freud at that time, and familiar as
I was with his methods of examination which I had had some slight occasion
to use on some patients during the war, I resolved to obtain from myself what
we were trying to obtain from them, namely a monologue spoken as rap-
idly as possible without any intervention on the part of the critical faculties,
a monologue consequently unencumbered by the slightest inhibition and
which was, as closely as possible, akin to spoken thought.82
Chaikin described the expression he sought in Tongues in remarkably simi-

lar terms as “thought music.”83 The work dramatizes spoken thought, with
a musical dimension. The accounts of its creation suggest that Chaikin was
to act as a shaman, channeling voices that emerge from the subconscious.
Also, the references to Hinduism and ancient gods, implied by the sce-
nography, suggest a dramatic attempt to evoke the primitive. John Beattie
has drawn parallels between the origins of drama and spirit mediumship,
noting “the theatre [ . . . ] for a great part of history has been regarded,
not just as entertainment, but also as a powerful means of influencing
supernatural forces.”84 Beattie consequently posits that “correspondingly,
spirit mediumship is not just a form of religious undertaking, a way of
coming to terms with and influencing the spirit world; it is (or may be)
also a form of dramatic art in its own right.”85 Rather than a myriad of
different characters, the voices in Tongues are all to be released from the
self, further emphasizing Chaikin’s role as shaman. In a discussion of the
work, Shepard stated:
Joe and I approached the thing without any definite structure; all we knew
was that we wanted to construct a piece that had voices coming up, sort of
visiting a person. [ . . . ] I feel there are many voices in a person, many different
people in one person, so why shouldn’t they have a chance to come out?86
Similarly, the first period of Surrealism featured the epoch des sommeils
during which such members as Breton, René Crevel, Robert Desnos, Max
Morise, and Simone Breton used hypnosis to create sleep-like conditions so
that automatic images or writing could be produced without rational inter-
ference. Indeed, these trance sessions were of great importance to Breton
who documented the proceedings in 543 pages of notes from September to
October 1922.87 It is also important to note here that Breton referred to his
fellow Surrealists as “simple receptacles of so many echoes, modest recording
instruments” in the first manifesto. Correspondingly, Chaikin and Shepard’s
work was devised from an attempt to channel untapped or repressed “voices”
or “echoes” in line with the Surrealist mantra, which centered on the libera-
tion of uncontaminated expression void of conscious control. In an article for
Drama Review in 1977, Shepard describes his playwriting process in similar
mediumistic terms: “The picture is moving in the mind and being allowed
to move more and more freely as you follow it. [ . . . ] In other words, I’m tak-
ing notes in as much detail as possible on an event that’s happening some-
where inside me.”88 The stage direction for Tongues requires a set that, in
its minimalism, is in stark contrast to the kaleidoscopic visual extravagance
of Angel City. Chaikin, immobile, seated with a Mexican blanket covering
his legs, seems as though in preparation for sleep and for the dream state to
be released, or the voices of the dead to emerge. The setting immediately
invites comparisons with both a dream space and mediumship. Mel Gussow
experienced the premiere production of Savage/Love as “a restless, confused
erotic dream, ‘a post-bedtime story.’”89 In “Haunted,” the speaker questions
whether the object of his affection is but a figment of his imagination or a
spirit: “Are you visiting me / Am I dreaming you up (101). In both works the
diegetic space trumps the mimetic. This staging also conforms to Esslin’s
definition of the Theatre of the Absurd which
tends toward a radical devaluation of language, toward a poetry that is to

emerge from the concrete and objectified images of the stage itself. The ele-
ment of language still plays an important part in this conception, but what
happens on the stage transcends, and often contradicts, the words spoken by
the characters.90
Significantly, the first Surrealist manifesto emphasized verbal automatist

rather than visual expression, with painting only referenced in a footnote,
and dismissed as being too mediated. In “On Surrealism in its Living Works”
(1953) Breton wrote that
[i]t is a matter of common knowledge today that Surrealism, as an orga-

nized movement, was born of a far-reaching operation having to do with
language. In this regard it cannot be repeated too often that in the minds
of their authors the products of free association or automatic writing that
Surrealism brought forth in the beginning had nothing to do with any aes-
thetic criterion.91
Tongues can be viewed as a dramatization of Breton’s definition of “spoken

thought” because the accounts of its creation suggest that Chaikin and
Shepard were channeling voices, which emerge from the subconscious.
Likewise, Dawn Ades points out that the Surrealists did not use medium-
ship to seek out the voices of the dead but rather to summon “things which
are beyond the bounds of immediate reality but which can be revealed to
us by our unconscious or by our senses of heightened sensibility.”92 Indeed,
such is the case with Tongues; the voices exhumed are voices from within,
guttural voices from the psyche, which morbidly remind us daily of our
mortality and corporeal extinction. Rather than communicating with the
dead, Chaikin establishes a dialogue with his own death. Like Surrealist
poetry, the piece was devised as “an act of spontaneous creation,” connected
to Surrealism by its emphasis on the emancipation of the myriad “voices” of
the human psyche, its collaborative emphasis (Breton’s original automatist
texts were produced in collaboration with Philippe Soupault), and its con-
centration on imagistic rather than aesthetic representation. Rather than
“guiding one’s attention away from metaphysics, towards bodies and their
unambiguous, secular reality” as Robinson argues,93 Tongues relates, I con-
tend, to the failure of the body to produce sensory stimuli, which must be
produced by the mind instead.
But Shepard is indeed concerned with the carnal. He wrote in a program
note in 1971, “I like to yodel and dance and fuck a lot” and that “writing is
neat because you do it on a very physical level.”94 Yet this play explores the
contrary—physical inadequacy. “If I had the use of my body I would throw
it out the window,” says Beckett’s Malone.95 Likewise, a section in Savage/
Love represents a yearning for genuine connection rather than corporeal
proximity. In “How I Look to You” the speaker asks, “Which presentation
of myself / Would make you want to touch”; In “Beggar,” “Could you just
come near enough / So I could feel as though you might be able to hold me”
(100). Further on, in “Watching the Sleeping Lover,” the voice describes
physical intimacy as a poor substitute for emotional attachment: “Then
comes a longing/That I don’t understand” (105).
The limitation of the body lies in its temporality. Tongues explores death
in an egocentric manner, a topic that was particularly relevant in the light
of Chaikin’s ailing health. His physical deterioration suggested that he was
reaching the periphery of his mortal life and thus recalls the characters
of Beckett’s late plays. Anna McMullan’s interpretation of these figures is
particularly relevant: “Many of the personae of the late plays are ghost-like
figures who are ‘not quite there’ [ . . . ], but not entirely ‘gone’ either. They are
exiled between presence and absence, the present and the past, the mortal
boundaries of a life and what may lie beyond.”96 Chaikin’s body becomes
interwoven into the text. He is not performing his illness, he embodies it. He
thus becomes the ideal medium for communication with his own death as
he appears to the audience on the threshold of life. Hence, his performance
of a section titled “to One about to Die” is ironic. Stories, rituals, myths,
and conventions are evoked in an attempt to counteract the uncertainty
around death. Language/stories/narration appear to be ineffectual weap-
ons against the uncertainty of unknowing. However, a voice also emerges,
through Chaikin, from beyond the grave: “I’m writing you this today from
a very great distance. Everything here is fine” (314). Chaikin’s body acts in
this play as both medium and metaphor for death—although segregated,
the failure of the body is thus linked with the failure of language. As in
Beckett’s late plays, “the performance of the subject’s story is a rite of passage
that produces or imagines the ending of both story and life.”97 Chaikin’s
bodily performance is part of the narrative. As in Beckett’s plays, “the body
is [ . . . ] ‘a tissue of quotations’ haunted by its acquired grammar of move-
ment and legacies of cultural inscription.”98 Harris Smith has written about
the “physio-psychological aesthetic” in Shepard’s work, demonstrating how
the body acts as the “citadel of the self in the mental act of experiencing.”99
What ultimately emerges in these three works that Shepard devised with
Chaikin is the all-encompassing drive to counteract death by verbal self-
expression. Moreover, as Rabillard maintains, “[i]t is, of course even more
sustaining and affirming of the self if one’s speech, and the thought develop-
ing in it, are understood and accepted by another person.”100 Hence the role
of the audience in these works is paramount in ensuring that the speakers
are heard and thus has an active function in attaining the transcendence that
the characters so desperately seek. They are integrated into the theatrical-
ity of the performance itself. In the note accompanying Tongues, Shepard
wrote that the “various voices are not so much intended to be caricatures as
they are attitudes or impulses, constantly shifting and sliding into each other”
(300–301). Many of these are inauthentic. The transformations required by
the speaker recall the early experiments of the Open Theatre; but they are
also a feature of Surrealism, as Stengel posits:
If, like most Surrealists, Shepard’s highly theatrical canvas won’t stay still, if it
is flooded with transformations of characters, props, and situations, Shepard
is Lethally satirizing a society trapped into perceiving reality in terms of
either-or, black and white, rich and poor, good and evil, civilized America
and barbaric underdeveloped banana republic, without points of mediation
or contemplation between these extremes. Like a zen philosopher, Shepard

detests the dualism and dichotomization in western thought.101
However, death in these works is not an ending. A disembodied voice still

remains, removed from language, life, and the body. Thus, these pieces
are concerned with finding genuine expression among a chorus of decep-
tive voices. Shepard’s structuralist emphasis, his conjecture that by naming
something you destroy it, branches from, according to Callens, his striving
for authenticity of expression:
Shepard’s fascination with the tautology stems from his longing for authentic-
ity (the coincidence of outer and inner being) and from his holistic yearning
[ . . . ] [and] in his persistent concern with presence (psychoanalytic, transcen-
dentalist, musical, theatrical, etc) [ . . . ], with liminal states of being, or his
so-called ‘Surrealism.’102
At one stage in Tongues, a voice self-consciously laments its own loss: “It’s not
like I’m not ever going to find my voice again [ . . . ] It’s like a lapse” (307). Both
Tongues and Savage/Love revolve around efforts to distill the authentic expres-
sion, which emerges in the silences, when the “panting” and the performance
stop. These pieces are indeed Surrealist in their dedication to pure imagistic
expression, their explorations of an inner consciousness, and their interest in
the liberation of this consciousness from the physical realm. Tongues ends in a
pledge to learn a new language, one that is no longer reticulate with the body.
“Talk song” charts a reawakening, a new moment of realization, and new
modes of expression: “Tonight I’m learning its language” (318).
THE WAR IN HEAVEN (ANGEL’S MONOLOGUE)

In May 1984, Chaikin suffered a stroke during open-heart surgery and,
as a result, was diagnosed with a combination of Broca’s and Wernicke’s
aphasia.103 Wernicke’s aphasia denotes an impairment of receptive speech
while Broca’s area of the brain controls the memory of motor patterns of
speech.104 Directly before the surgery, he had been directing Waiting for
Godot in Stratford, Ontario, and had been rehearsing the role of King Lear
for an upcoming production of Shakespeare’s play at the Public Theatre,
New York. He had also been working with Shepard from February 1984 on a
new piece called The War in Heaven, sponsored by The American Repertory
Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts.105 Shepard and Chaikin had been
discussing another possible collaboration for years. As their correspondence
reveals, this was a period of emotional transition for Shepard: “It’s as though
I was swept up in a hurricane and landed in a foreign land.”106 In a letter to
Chaikin from 1982, Shepard suggested that the new piece should be one of
egocentric self-examination:
I have no idea of aesthetics—I’m just finding certain experiences—certain

states of mind very powerful lately, and I want to find a way to explore them
without naming them—almost as though they’re being discovered in the
moment. I realize this is a private kind of thing and lends itself to writing by
oneself and not to collaboration. I don’t, in any way, want to push you away
from the idea of doing something together because I think we need to go
further with what we’ve already started.107
In a similar vein, Chaikin expressed an interest in exploring “[m]etaphysical

questions,” “secrets,” “fears—what brings a sense of peril” in a letter from
September 1983.108 Significantly, he suggested approaching character in the
following terms: “Part Angel (in combat?). In other words some other sphere.
An invented character. Unearthly, maybe trapped in a prison” or “A person
with amnesia.”109 The final voice that emerges in The War in Heaven is
indeed one of a fallen angel in captivity. The theme seems metaphorically
apt in terms of Chaikin’s sudden transition into unfamiliar territory and his
disillusionment with his surroundings after his means of interaction with
the world as he knew it was eradicated. Jean-Claude Van Itallie, a playwright
who had been involved with the Open Theatre since near its foundation in
1963, also subsequently wrote two plays based on Chaikin’s recovery from
aphasia, The Traveller (1987) and Struck Dumb (1988). On The Traveller,
Gene A. Plunka writes:
Aphasia causes severe disruption to an individual’s hope for recovery because

language, the usual tool for coping (as in swearing or acting out frustrations),
has gone awry. Thus, the aphasic feels as if he or she is on a quest in a foreign
land or “otherworld” in which language must be reacquired in order to cope
psychologically.110
An interest in transitions and alienation were pressing concerns for Shepard

throughout his playwriting career, and Chaikin’s experiences recovering
from aphasia seemed to offer the apposite territory required for The War in
Heaven to be realized. Also, Shepard’s mother-in-law Scarlett Johnson has
suffered from a stroke and reactive aphasia in 1979. Thus, the playwright
was already familiar with this particular impairment. As a result of his con-
dition, Chaikin became an agent of liminality, his psyche imprisoned in
the shell of his body and estranged from the universe outside. His aphasia
offered the ultimate segregation between body and mind, the divorce of an
inner “self” from an unresponsive, deadened physicality because aphasia “is
a non-functioning of the association areas of the brain which interferes with
the transmission of the necessary messages to the organs of speech.”111 This

invites comparisons with Victor Egger’s concept of langage intérieure, which
posited that “all our thoughts are accompanied by a faint inward voice or
echo.”112 According to David Lomas, Egger’s theories were significantly
influential on Breton as they complemented his hypothesis that this inner
language correlated to the unconscious.113 In his liminal state, between life
and death, frozen in a failing body, Chaikin’s condition could be described
as somnambulistic, pertaining to the condition of the “inbetween” with
which he was persistently concerned. The imagery evoked in The War in
Heaven could thus be read as a hypnagogic hallucination, the liberation of
repressed desire accessed through a “sleeping” body, a medium for automatic
entry into the unconscious, the objective of all Surrealist inquiry.
As I have mentioned, Chaikin’s aphasia as an impairment of both recep-
tive and expressive language mirrors the deliberate divorce of the signified
from the signifier, evident in both Tongues and Savage/Love and reminiscent
of the Beckettian model of a radical devaluation of language. The War in
Heaven was originally intended for radio and was first broadcast on WBAI
radio on the January 8, 1984; however, Chaikin subsequently performed
The War in Heaven in San Diego the following year, directed by Steven
Kent, before touring with the piece both nationally and internationally
throughout the next decade. In a review of the piece for The Globe and Mail
in Toronto in 1986, Robert Everett Green describes how Chaikin performed
the words from an empty stage, reading from a music stand, recalling the
physical restriction of Beckett’s late characters.114 Robert Everett-Green
recorded an interview with Chaikin after a performance of the piece in
Toronto in 1986:
In conversation, the aphasia dogs him heavily, dragging down his thoughts,
and the words babble up slowly from his chest. “Thinking . . . too much
now . . . too bigemotionally now,” Chaikin says. He defers to Kent, who says
that, as the words have receded, Chaikin’s emotional sensitivity has grown tre-
mendously. Always passionately interested in engaging his audience, he now
grasps even more urgently for the messages of eyes, the eyes in the theatre.
“This theatre . . . better for that,” he says.115
The language in A War in Heaven is even more fragmented than the previous
two pieces since Chaikin’s aphasic syntax was incorporated into the work,
combined with the drafts already written at the workshop in Cambridge.
Roman Jakobson wrote that aphasic injury affects either metaphoric or met-
onymic command:
Every form of aphasic disturbance consists in some impairment, more or less

severe, either of the faculty for selection and substitution or for combination
and contexture. The former affliction involves a deterioration of metalin-

guistic operations, while the latter damages the capacity for maintaining the
hierarchy of linguistic units.116
Relatedly, Jakobson highlights the centrality of the metaphor to the

Surrealist movement:
The alternative predominance of one or the other of these two processes is

by no means confined to verbal art. The same oscillation occurs in sign sys-
tems other than language. A salient example from the history of painting is
the manifestly metonymical orientation of cubism, where the object is trans-
formed into a set of synecdoches; the Surrealist painters responded with a
patently metaphorical attitude.117
In The War in Heaven, Jakobson’s definition of a “contexture-deficient apha-

sia” or “contiguity disorder” can be deemed in the collapse of grammati-
cal syntax and fragmented sentence structure. In the case of the contiguity
disorder:
The syntactical rules organizing words into higher units are lost; this loss
called AGGRAMATISM, causes the deterioration of the sentence into a mere
“word heap,” to use Jackson’s image. Word order becomes chaotic; the ties of
grammatical coordination and subordination, whether concord or govern-
ment, are dissolved. [ . . . ] The type of aphasia affecting contexture tends to
give rise to infantile one-sentence utterances and one-word sentences. Only a
few longer, stereotyped, ‘ready-made’ sentences manage to survive.118
Jakobson describes a process of linguistic de-hierarchization, prefigured

in the angel’s words. Section of The War in Heaven appear in split, terse,
often monosyllabic verse, describing a desire for both continuity and ces-
sation. These are followed by more grammatically complicated sentences
that evoke surreal, albeit clichéd, imagery of Heaven. The entire monologue
is void of punctuation and often alternates between single-word lines and
lyrical sentences, yet Jakobson also notes the centrality of the metaphor to
lyrical poetry.119 He argues that the voice in lyric poetry reflects that of the
speaker, which mirrors “the brain’s function as the speaker’s ‘messenger’” as
the contiguity disorder relates to the brain’s inability to encode rather than
decode:120 Thus, in The War in Heaven, expression depends on metaphori-
cal paradigms that parallel Surrealistic expression by relying on imagistic
“encoding.” Furthermore, Chaikin suffered from a combination of Broca’s
aphasia where “the output is sparse, effortful (the patient struggles), dys-
arthic, dysprosodic, short-phrased and agrammatic” and Wernicke’s apha-
sia, where the patient has “fluent verbal output with normal word count
and phrase length [ . . . ] but there is difficulty in word finding and frequent
paraphasia (unintentional syllables, words or phrases during speech).”121
This is evident in the certain sections of The War in Heaven where we see
the scarcity of language and aggramatism of Broca’s aphasia juxtaposed with
features of Wernicke’s aphasia, especially in difficulties with word loca-
tion: (“ancient / old old old”), (“not killed / still going”), (“sometimes sex
together / fucking”). Other sections take the form of sentences but the words
are incongruous and are grammatically erroneous: “I can’t tell / maybe some
wonder” (169).
The title of the work invites comparisons with Milton’s Paradise Lost
(1667), which recounts in Book 5 and Book 6 the expulsion of Satan and
the rebellious angels from Heaven, and their subsequent banishment to
Hell. By identifying himself as a “fallen” angel, the suggestion abounds
that the speaker has upset God and that he too is an exile from Heaven.
In Milton’s text the overthrown angels are described as falling for nine
days122 while “[e]ternal wrath / Burnt after them to the bottomless pit.”123
In The War in Heaven the fourth stanza intimates that the speaker has
either left, or has been driven, from Heaven with fervor: “I know I crashed /
In these streets” (158). Earth and Hell are indistinguishable. The only clear
narrative the audience can extract from The War in Heaven features the
angel’s recollection of a past event when he was sent to earth to retrieve
the soul of a “very great,” “almost worshipped” man. Together with his
companions, the angel recounts how he waited for “the appearance / of
the dead man’s soul”124 for “another living soul / one other living soul” as
in Beckett’s Rockaby, but none appeared. The death of a patriarch suggests
an opportunity for regeneration. However, the description of this man as
soulless denotes an empty lineage or a polluted legacy. The angel, like the
soul of America, has become displaced. There are repeated suggestions of
a transformation of the ephemeral into the tangible throughout. One of the
“signs” of a soul, according to the angel’s words, is “the skin of the breath”
(167). Elsewhere, he describes how language creates reality. The words
suggest here that you can “speak” the angels into existence. However, the
repeated image in The War in Heaven is of rebirth, of being dead and alive
at the same time: “soul / not killed / at death / still going / dead alive” (173).
Near the end of the monologue the words speak of a soul that is “ancient /
old old old / before birth / even” (173).
The Beckettian voice still resonates in this piece; the suggestion of
death as a retreat toward birth and to a condition of preconsciousness
is particularly redolent of Beckett’s Molloy, who regresses to a child-like
state as he nears his death. The opening lines of The War in Heaven, listed
below, recall both Pozzo’s lines in Waiting for Godot: “they give birth
astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then its night once more”125
and Vladimir’s words “Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in

the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps.”126 They also
recall the opening lines of Beckett’s A Piece of Monologue: “Birth was the
death of him”127: “I died/ the day I was born” (158). On the other hand,
the stylistic repetition with variation invokes Beckett’s Rockaby. The voice
describes a place where time has been eradicated: “since then / there are
no days,” a place from which the speaker is disconnected: “I don’t know
what went wrong / I was a part of something” (158); “I’m not sure now /
how I fit” (159). The speaker suggests there is “so much more” to life
than our existence on earth offers there is, apparently, “so much more”
(159). The preceding words “earth / so tiny” (159) are also resonant of the
opening lines of Beckett’s Not I (1972) “ . . . .out . . . into this world . . . this
world . . . tiny little thing.”128 The angel has fallen from Heaven and is in
captivity on earth. As in the environment imagined in How It Is, there is
no light and no sound in the universe in which the speaker is being held
(164). The speaker speaks of being in a state of limbo (162). His speech
constantly oscillates between certainty and uncertainty about his/her sur-
roundings: “it’s true / I think it’s true (163).
In Tongues, Savage/Love, and The War in Heaven: Angel’s Monologue, the
boundaries between actor, character, and performer dissolve and the “atti-
tudes” that emerge are ones of pretense, role-playing, and an “acting-out”
of selfhood. In one section the speaker seems to recount an out-of-body
experience. In recalling Bishop Berkeley’s treatise “esse est percepi” (“to be
is to be perceived”), these words intimate that if the speaker can perceive
himself externally, then he exists. Proposing a psychological explanation
for out-of-body experiences, Susan J. Blackmore argues that our domi-
nant cognitive system of “reality” can, under stress, be eclipsed by alter-
native “models of reality,” constructed from information in memory and
imagination that the brain “thinks it should be seeing.”129 Thus, the brain’s
sensory simulation of its surroundings is a performance that becomes indis-
tinguishable from reality. Shepard’s performers perform their characters, a
concept certainly informed by the playwright’s early experiences with the
Open Theatre whose “transformation techniques” were molded on the ideas
expressed in Erving Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959).
Indeed, Albright sees the “staginess” of Beckett’s writing as indicative of his
Surrealist tendencies: “Beckett’s language, the language of a playwright and
an art critic, catches the perverse staginess, the vamp and cold camp of the
Surrealist movement.”130 On the issue of performativity in Shepard’s plays,
Harris Smith quotes Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind: “I am a function of
my recognition of myself, but this is a function of my recognition of others’
recognition of me,” hence “[r]ealization of a self is impossible without audi-
ence affirmation.”131 For Shepard’s characters, performance operates as an
act of self-avowal. Haris Smith quotes Marranca’s classification of Shepard’s

dramatis personæ:
Characters often engage in, “performance”: they create roles for themselves
and dialogue, structuring new realities. [ . . . ] It might be called aesthetics of
actualism. In other words, the characters act themselves out, even make them-
selves up, through the transforming power of their imagination.
Because the characters are so free of fixed reality, their imagination plays
a key role in the narratives. Not only the characters’ but the audiences’ too.
Shepard puts together the funkiest combinations of characters, in the most
unlikely of settings, and lets them react to one another, [ . . . ] testing in a sense
the audience’s capacity to perceive new structures of reality.132
This is most explicitly illustrated in The War in Heaven when the concrete
reality of the speaker seems to depend solely on the audience’s investment in
the dramatic action: “I can’t live/ without you imagining me (162). Shepard
(who structured the piece using material that he had developed with Chaikin
before his open-heart surgery) is here addressing the audience’s role in the
construction of “reality.” He tests the perimeters of the audience’s accep-
tance of, as I argue, this new surreality, which shifted the focus from mere
superficial realities.
Harris Smith acknowledges Shepard’s attempts to rewrite the limits
of reality in redirecting the audience’s gaze to a “more inclusive norm that
incorporates the abnormal,” what Harris Smith deems the “sur-Natural.”133
However, she evades comparisons with a Surrealist methodology as she argues
that Shepard’s plays “lack the essential elements of randomness and dream
that characterize the movement.”134 Yet, as I have demonstrated, these pieces
invite comparisons with the dream-state in their subjective emphasis on the
liberation of subconscious desires, among which the drive against death is
the most prevalent. Furthermore, as the rational collapses in Shepard’s plays,
a spontaneity emerges that is reinforced by the transformative techniques
required of the character, which, although clearly self-consciously circum-
scribed within the arena of performance, do have elements of randomness.
The presence of the writer is always evident in a Shepard play, but, like the
jazz riffs that the playwright evokes in plays such as Angel City and Suicide in
B-Flat the characters’ “performance” is enacted as random. Leslie A. Wade
argues “[t]hough Shepard began to eschew blatant Surrealism in his later plays,
his commitment to a jazz-style characterization remained firm, and even with
the realistic confines of his American family dramas his characters often seem
to fluctuate, to erupt, and to follow the reflexive urgings of their author’s
psyche.”135 I have demonstrated in chapter 3 the deceptiveness of Shepard’s
simulated “realism” in the family plays and Wade’s words demonstrate how
elements of the random do indeed impinge on, if not dictate, Shepard’s
dramaturgy. Shepard has described his process of writing as “an open-ended

structure where anything could happen as opposed to a carefully planned and
regurgitated event.”136 This suggests an unpredictability in conception. The
new “realities” Shepard creates rely on the imaginations of both the audience
and the characters. Indeed, Suicide in B-Flat (1976) opens with Pablo’s lines
“[t]rying to reconstruct the imagination of it,” as though giving voice to what
is required of the audience from the outset. Thus, the angel’s words in The
War in Heaven, “I can’t live without you imagining me,” present a desperate
fear of “the death of the imagination,” to invoke Ren Frutkin’s phrase, a fear
that Rutkin first sensed in Shepard’s Cowboys # 2 from 1967. These words also
recall Beckett’s short prose text Imagination Dead Imagine (1965).
CONCLUSION
As Shepard and Chaikin were influenced by Beckett, Beckett too was influ-
enced by Chaikin and his very last poem, written shortly before his death
“What is the Word” was dedicated to “Joe” Chaikin and mimicked his
aphasic speech impairment. The treatment of language in the works dis-
cussed in this chapter suggests an attempt to give expression to aphasia,
most literally in The War in Heaven, although an interest in the failure of
language and its constant deferral of meaning is evident in the works that
Shepard and Chaikin developed even before Chaikin’s stroke. This corre-
lates to Shepard’s continuous denial of meaning in his plays, a refutation he
has maintained throughout his dramatic writing career. Hence, Rabillard
links the phatic use of language in Shepard’s work to the performativity of
the characters whose self-affirmation depends on the active acceptance by
the audience of the dramatic process. Rabillard equates this with a quest for
“truth,” unachievable in “realistic” drama. Quoting Ubersfeld, she posits
that “the theatre of realism causes a ‘dénégation,’ for it creates an illusion of
‘real life’ but is, of course, unreal” for “when theatricality announces itself,
however, one accepts that it tells the truth.”137 Ubersfeld asserts that “theatre
has the status of the dream: an imaginary construction whose spectators
know that it is radically removed from the sphere of their daily existence”:
According to Freud we know that when you dream that you are dreaming,
the dream within another dream speaks the truth. Through a twofold denial,
the dream of a dream produces truth. Likewise theatre-within-the-theatre
does not convey reality but rather what is true, transforming the sign of illu-
sion and identifying as illusion all that is mounted on stage.138
Like “W” in Beckett’s Rockaby, Chaikin’s performance in The War in

Heaven resounds in an all resounding cry for “More.” More language, more
movement, more truth, and “another living soul / one other living soul [ . . . ]
another creature” to perform to.
An assessment of the influence of Beckett on Tongues, Savage/Love, and
The War in Heaven reveals a treatment of language as a simulation of aphasic
expression that reinforces the connections between these three pieces and
the Surrealists’ predilection for using words independent of their meaning.
Shepard’s interest in language pathology can be traced back to Beckett’s
“discrediting of reality,” which Benjamin Keatinge suggests “he adapted
for his own purposes from the Surrealists.”139 However, Chaikin’s Open
Theatre also explored the devaluation of language in the means of commu-
nication, seemingly replicating aphasic expression, prior to Chaikin’s stroke:
“Sometimes we move in silence or use words or phrases, rather than con-
nected sentences in a logical sequence.”140 The employment of the language
of disembodiment in these works denotes a segregation of the body from
the psyche. As a result, the speakers witness their own thought processes
and become spectators themselves, further agents in self-affirmation which,
as we have seen, depends on the presence of an audience for verification.
Thus, the speaker is in the position of the “in-between,” in a liminal space
between the “inside” and the “outside” a terrain long exalted and sought
after by Chaikin’s Open Theatre and by Shepard who, in a letter to Chaikin
in 1977 wrote: “I’m interested in the whole process of visualization. What
happens when we visualize pictures to ourselves—inside?”141 The process
of “visualizing pictures” implies a distancing from “inner speech” in tune
with the requirements of Surrealism since “[i]t was precisely the splitting of
the subject (a chiasmus) that Surrealism demanded the subject occupy, as a
spectator to their own thoughts.”142
However, the ultimate conclusion emerges in these works that language
cannot be removed from the body, its root source. There is an almost utopian
belief in Beckett’s writing, Breton’s treatises and in these plays that Shepard
conceived with Chaikin, that language can transcend corporeal existence.
Language ultimately emerges as empty, phatic; words dissipate and dissolve
in air without an ear to hear them. Language is inseparably bound to the
body: it too must disintegrate with corporeal decay. Tongues, Savage/Love,
and The War in Heaven all contain the suggestion that by retreating from
the physical world into the recesses of the mind, a dimension where lan-
guage cannot fail, they may approach, if it exists, a more authentic version
of “reality.”
Chapter 6
STATES OF SHOCK AND

SIMPATICO: PERFORMANCES
OF WASTE
INTRODUCTION
In its symbolic dramaturgy, catastrophic spectacularized imagery and strati-
fied layers of representation States of Shock (1991), Shepard’s response to the
Gulf War,1 illustrates a return to a more visibly identifiable Surrealist expres-
sion after the minimalist stage imagery of his works conceived with Joseph
Chaikin. On the other hand, the Surrealism of Simpatico (1994), which will
be discussed in the latter part of this chapter, although not as overt as States
of Shock, emerges in the play’s off-kilter realism, the episodic, collage treat-
ment of time, the physical manifestation of otherwise internalized anxiety,
the discrepancies of scale and time, the atmosphere of paranoia, and the
realization of fantasy.
STATES OF SHOCK IN CONTEXT

In States of Shock, Shepard extends his artistic vision from the microcosm
of the family, [his focus for much of the 1980s as evident in Fool for Love
(1983) and A Lie of the Mind (1985)], to the macrocosm of the American
psyche at large in an explicit rendering of United States military methods.
Subtitled “A Vaudeville Nightmare,” States of Shock premiered on April 30,
1991 at The American Place Theatre under the direction of Bill Hart. In
this play, Shepard’s fervently recycled exploration of the archetypal battle
between father and son is amplified. The character of the Colonel could
be any colonel, as his costume suggests—he is “dressed in a strange ensem-
ble of military uniforms and paraphernalia that have no apparent rhyme or
reason.”2 The war in the mimetic space of the “family” restaurant fuses
with the war of the diegetic domain to create a perpetual state of wartime.
Thematically, this play demonstrates an interest in the Surrealist concept
of the acte gratuit (gratuitous act), evident especially in the scenes of mas-
turbation and random violence. This play also extols the cult of the self,
a distinct feature of modern art, which is distilled into obsessive pursuits
in Surrealism.
Formally, Shepard creates a desecrated surreality in the scenography,
stage imagery, and in the nonnaturalistic performance of the body. He
denies the audience any sense of a meaningful temporality or spatial sequen-
tiality in this environment of ubiquitous wartime. Adorno, writing on
Beckett’s Endgame (a play which will be discussed as an influence on States
of Shock) states, “[a] bombed-out consciousness no longer has any position
from which it could reflect on that fact.”3 In Adorno’s words, a “bombed-
out consciousness” denotes a fragmented psyche, a prismatic processing and
rendering of experience. What Shepard dramatizes here is phenomenologi-
cal collapse, an experiential representation that Callens compares to the
“division” (détournement) theory of the Belgian Surrealist Marcel Mariën:
“a more radical appropriation [ . . . ], a reversal or reorientation of perspective
(action based or discursive), which refuses to settle down.”4 Thus, Surrealism
operates in this play both simultaneously in the instability of perspective
of the heterogeneous depiction of wartime and in the playwright’s and the
characters’ compulsive expurgation of the repressed, a direct result of the
legacy of militarism over time. In addition to exploring how Shepard com-
plicates perspective in the representation of wartime, this chapter will also
address how, in much the same way as two grotesque, dismembered beings
wrestle fruitlessly in Dalí’s painting Premonition of Civil War (1936), the
male characters in States of Shock are constantly grappling with transgenera-
tional trauma. This is a pressing concern for Shepard throughout his writing
career. As Shepard’s men are locked within cyclical systems of recrimina-
tion, any attempt at transgression seems futile. Such worthless expenses of
energy imply a performance of waste.
States of Shock is set in a typical American diner as the “Red Naugahyde”
(143) café upholstery required by the stage direction suggests. The Colonel
and Stubbs have come to commemorate the anniversary of the death of the
Colonel’s son, whom Stubbs apparently saved in battle by using his body
as a shield to protect the young man from ancillary fire. As a result, Stubbs
is wheelchair-bound, impotent (“My Thing Hangs Like Dead Meat!!!”
[150]), and he lifts his shirt to reveal a scar on his chest at intermittent peri-
ods throughout the play. They are served by an incompetent waitress, Glory
Bee, who struggles to balance the trays of food and drinks and who belts out
an old Billie Holiday song at one point as she cleans up the mess that the
States of Sho ck and Simpatico 137
characters gradually create. The war veterans are joined in the restaurant by
a cadaverous “White” couple, the White Man described as being in a “deep
state of catharsis” (143). The couple waits endlessly on clam chowder and
complains loudly when their fellow diners are served before they are, claim-
ing they are wasting precious time that could be spent shopping. When
they are finally served, Glory Bee dumps the clam chowder into the White
Man’s lap and, as he cleans himself, he begins to masturbate. Meanwhile,
the Colonel proceeds savagely to whip Stubbs in reprimand for smashing
his banana split with his fist, while Stubbs demands that the White Man
“[b]ecome a man!” (165). All the while, this absurd action escalates against
the backdrop of explosions from outside the restaurant. The final image
of the play is one that reinforces the theme of truculent rebellion for, as
the play itself could be read as a coup d’ état of civilized society, the lights
go down on Stubbs poised with his sword raised ready to decapitate the
Colonel who is now seated in the wheelchair.
GEORGES BATAILLE’S THEORY OF NONPRODUCTIVE EXPENDITURE

In his chapter on Shepard’s plays of the 1990s, Lesley A. Wade describes
the playwright’s work in terms of Bataille’s concept of “nonproductive
expenditure”:
His plays dramatize an impulse to overthrow or escape the dominant order—

all that goes under the aegis of the father (national mythologies, corporate
capitalism, stable identities, attachment to the nuclear family, and so on)—
and violence is frequently the outcome. [ . . . ] In defiance of constraining
social and identity structures he enacts a gesture of excessive expense, discharg-
ing an energy that defies mediation and utility. What we witness in a Shepard
play is often a spell-binding “performance of waste,” in which desperate char-
acters act to negate the economy of the father, inaugurating in its place an
order without equilibrium or any balance of exchange.5
Using Bataille’s premise of expenditure removed from utility, this chap-

ter will address both States of Shock and Simpatico within the hermeneutic
framework of “performance of waste.” Peter Boxall, quoting Jameson on
postmodern antimony, describes how waste is the inevitable by-product of
abundance and how they both amplify in symbiotic simultaneity:
The terms waste and abundance [ . . . ] betray a [ . . . ] kind of tendency to turn

into each other. [ . . . ] there is a peculiar and insistent Jamesonian identity
between the terms. We begin to glimpse this in the paradoxical proposition
that waste offers itself as a limit to abundance only to the extent that waste
itself becomes abundant. Waste cannot sustain itself in any simple sense as
the opposite of abundance, as the wasting or dwindling in which abundance

is threatened only by the dwindling—the wasting—that is its apparent ant-
onym, but also by abundance itself, by the massive, unlimited abundance of
the waste that abundance produces. Abundance becomes waste when waste
becomes abundant.6
In its political stance, States of Shock comments on the colossal squander-

ing of human life, capital, resources, and energy that war demands. The
Colonel articulates this: “It’s the loss, Stubbs. The loss. That’s what puzzles
me. How could we be so victorious and still suffer this terrible loss?” (167).
Bataille’s “The Notion of Expenditure” (1933) designates war, along with
luxury, mourning, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games,
spectacles, arts, and perverse sexual activity, as all indicative of unproduc-
tive expenditures.7 Bataille’s theories were fundamentally molded by a
Surrealist premise. Although he had a fraught relationship with Breton and
denounced the Surrealist movement in 1929 as idealist,8 Bataille extracted
from Surrealism an ongoing interest in the splintered psyche, believing that
“in terms of mankind’s interrogation of itself, there is Surrealism and there
is nothing.”9 Bataille based his economic theories on Marcel Mauss’s Essai
sur le don (1925), which focused on primitive societies that had considered
wealth in terms of the amassed quantity an individual was in a position
to give away—the Native American potlatch, for instance—rather than
the accumulated capital one had compiled to use at a future time. Bataille
argues that capitalism is based on a utilitarian foundation, which denies the
individual the right to consume according to one’s true desires and needs
in the present. In States of Shock, masturbation, the human and material
losses as a by-product of war, and consumerism are all examples of nonpro-
ductive expenditure. To Stubbs, “America ha[s] disappeared” (158). Wade
situates the self-destructiveness of Shepard’s writing in a capitalist frame-
work. Indeed, States of Shock, Shepard’s first critique of war-mongering since
Operation Sidewinder (1970), is also a scathing attack on consumerism. The
description of the cadaverous White Couple, dressed in “very expensive outfits
reminiscent of West Palm Beach” (143), associates the accumulation of wealth
with death.
In a strikingly similar manner to Bataille’s discourse, Gary Grant
has written of Shepard’s plays in terms of the theory of their “dissipative
structures,” a philosophy developed by the Belgian physical chemist Ilya
Prigogine in which “the form of an open system is maintained by a con-
tinuous dissipation of energy.”10 Grant compares this to the transforma-
tional quality and apparent contradictions in Shepard’s work, notably the
incompatibility between the “flow” of images necessary within the stage
system and Shepard’s scenographic exploitation of largely one-dimensional
iconography from popular culture. What Bataille and Grant suggest is the
inherent value of loss latent in the notion of nonproductive expenditure if
considered independently from the economic systems that produced it. This
is most blatantly illustrated in States of Shock when the Colonel implies that
they themselves, and the whole United States of America, are by-products
of humane acts associated with war, and thus the products and images of a
seemingly nonproductive pursuit:
As far out on a limb as circumstances might shove us we always have that

possibility of returning to our common sense. Our fairness. Even in the midst
of the most horrible devastation. Under the most terrible duress. Torture.
Barbarism of all sorts. Starvation. Chemical warfare. Public hangings.
Mutilation of children. Raping of mothers. Raping of daughters. Raping
of brothers and fathers. Executions of entire families. Entire generations of
families. Amputation of private organs. Decapitation. Disembowelment.
Dismemberment. Disinturnment. Eradication of wildlife. You name it. We
can’t forget that we were generated from the bravest stock. The Pioneer. The
Mountain Man. The Plainsman. The Texas Ranger. The Lone Ranger. My
son. These have not died in vain. These ones have not left us to wallow
in various states of insanity and self-abuse. We have a legacy to continue,
Stubbs. It’s up to us. No one else is going to do it for us. Here’s to them and
to my son. A soldier for his nation! (162)
The Colonel suggests here that Stubbs and he, both ex-veterans and sur-
rogate father and son, should continue the legacy of war, for if they were to
break this cycle, they would only “wallow in various states of insanity and
self-abuse.” In an obvious tongue-in-cheek manner, Shepard critiques the
alternative option, the decision to abuse each other in an endless state of
war that, if nothing else, preserves the memory of “the Mountain Man,” or
“ the Plainsman,” or “the Lone Ranger,” all hyper-masculinized and largely
fictional characters. The perpetuation of the battle between father and son is
deemed to be a national obligation. Indeed, to illustrate his theory on non-
productive expenditure, Bataille employs the archaic father/son opposition:
In the most crushing way, the contradiction between current social concep-
tions and the real needs of society recalls the narrowness of judgment that
puts the father in opposition to the satisfaction of his son’s needs. This nar-
rowness is such that it is impossible for the son to express his will. The father’s
partially malevolent solicitude is manifested in the things he provides for his
son: lodging, clothes, food, and, when absolutely necessary, a little harmless
recreation. But the son does not even have the right to speak about what
really gives him fever; he is obliged to give people the impression that for him
no horror can enter into consideration. In this respect, it is sad to say that
conscious humanity has remained a minor; humanity recognizes the right to

acquire, to conserve, and to consume rationally, but it excludes in principle
non-productive expenditure.11
In States of Shock, Stubbs is a surrogate son to the Colonel as the survivor

of the war that claimed his real son. However, the reliability of this scenario
is thrown into doubt by Stubbs’s assertion that the Colonel “invented” his
death and that the scar he obsessively reveals to the audience is the physical
manifestation of the void the Colonel’s absence left in him: “When you left
me it went straight through me and out the other side. It left a hole I can
never fill” (162). This would suggest that Stubbs is actually the Colonel’s
biological son, the possibility of which is further suggested by the Colonel’s
affectionate behavior: “COLONEL spits in his hand and smooths STUBBS’s
hair carefully” (146). Stubbs’s neurotic desire to tell his side of the story—
“When I was hit”—can be read in this light as an attempt to counteract the
aegis of the father as a pacifying impediment to the true needs of the indi-
vidual, which lie in prodigality rather than utility. The final image of the
play dramatizes this impulse as the action freezes on Stubbs with his sword
raised, ready to decapitate the Colonel. For Stubbs has already killed the
Colonel’s fantasy of the heroism of his dead son, and as a result, the Colonel
abandons him. The Colonel has deduced from “hearsay” that his son was
killed by “incoming auxiliary fire” (150) while his “defense continued to
pound from behind” so that “[t]here was nowhere to run” (151). Stubbs’s
description of events shatters the Colonel’s imagined scenario. In an absurd
interruption of behavioral patterns and reactionary norms, Stubbs describes
embracing the approaching missile, replete with the painted face of a “lizard
with smiling teeth,” that wounded him:
There was a face on the nose of the missile. They’d painted a face. You could
see it coming. A lizard with smiling teeth. A friendly lizard. It was seeking us
out. Hunting out warm bodies. It was glad it found us. You could tell. It was
happy to receive us. It could[n’t] care less who we were, but happy we were
human. Happy we weren’t concrete or another stupid building. Overjoyed
that we had skin and blood. We opened our arms to it. We couldn’t resist its
embrace. We were lovers when it hit us. We were in heaven. (170)
Following Stubbs’s admission, the Colonel begins to waltz with Glory

Bee around the stage. His rejection of Stubbs is prompted not only by the
younger man’s recollection of events, but also by his impotence: “No son
of mine has a ‘thing’ like that. It’s not possible” (172). However, as Stubbs
begins to recapture his virility while rolling on the floor with Glory Bee,
the Colonel finally concedes that he may consider adopting the boy, still
denying their blood relation. Stubbs finally recalls another interpretation

of events that imagistically associate the missile that punctured him with
the Colonel’s head, further cementing the possibility that Stubbs’s scar is
a physical embodiment of the emotional scars left by his father’s abandon-
ment and subsequent denial: “Your face, lying. Smiling and lying. Your bald
face of denial. Peering down from a distance. Bombing me” (181). Stubbs’s
final monologue, delivered on his knees, recalls Arthur Miller’s tragic All my
Sons (1947) and the sacrifice of a son for the sins of the father:
Your face of pure guilt. Squirming. Nothing to be done about that. No way of
tracing it. [ . . . ] Best way is to kill all the sons. Wipe them off the face of the
earth. Bleed them of all their blood. Let it pout down into the soil. Let it fill
every river. Every hole in this earth. Let it pour through every valley. Flood
every town. Let us drown in the blood of our own. Let us drown and drink
it. Let us go down screaming in the blood of our sons. (182)
This is a deliberate echo of the title of Miller’s play, yet this statement also
suggests a direct realization of Bataille’s identification of “the narrowness of
judgment that puts the father in opposition to the satisfaction of his son’s
needs,” taking it to its necessary extreme.
PHENOMENOLOGICAL COLLAPSE
In States of Shock, the levels of representation operate on mimetic, diegetic,
filmic, but also textual planes as the language of warfare is assimilated into
the text and contributes to the wasteful performance. For instance, the char-
acters toast “the enemy” (153) and the Colonel assures Stubbs that he’s “not
exactly a candidate for assassination” (153). The coexisting levels of repre-
sentation produce a Cubist scenography, in the vein of Picasso’s infamous
painting Guernica (1937), the most notorious antiwar statement ever pro-
duced by a visual artist and a key work in the history of Surrealism. With
this painting in mind, there is indeed a prismatic dimension to the stage
imagery of States of Shock in its spatial and imagistic superimposition of
the past onto the political wartime temporality of the present. The chrono-
logical, linear timeframe collapses to create an atmosphere of simultaneity,
disrupting normative patterns of cause and effect. The Colonel predicts this
disorientation, informing Stubbs:
We’re going to go back in time. You and me. Back to the field of battle.
We’re going to fix ourselves there just as surely as though we were standing
there today. Breathing the fire. Staring straight into the eyeballs of death
itself. (166)
The play opens with a projection of war clips onto an upstage cyclorama
depicting visual images of technological warfare that cover the entire back
wall, accompanied by live music, which builds in momentum:
In the darkness, the sounds of two live percussionists situated behind the
cyclorama, extreme right and left, opposite each other. Their driving rhythms
slowly build in intensity as the cyclorama takes on an ominous tone. The
cyclorama is lit with tracer-fire, rockets, explosions in the night. (143)
As the play develops, the Colonel reconstructs the events leading up to his
son’s death with miniature toy soldiers. This reenactment is met with an
explosion outside the restaurant. This in turn seems to prompt the video on
the cyclorama, which “explodes with bombs, missiles, and blown-up planes.”
However, “[t]his time, silhouetted against the panorama of light, stylized shapes
of tanks, infantry, and heavy artillery move from right to left, in the heat of
battle” (158). The discrepancies of scale and the deliberate yielding to the
threat of disorientation that such artistic license can produce are typical
Surrealist pursuits, equally evident in the photographs of Man Ray and Lee
Miller as in the anamorphic monstrous creatures of Dalí’s imagination.
Shepard’s theory that words are “tools of imagery in motion”12 material-
izes in this play. In the following exchange between the Colonel and Stubbs,
the imagery is rendered surreal as a direct result of the disruption of normal-
ized spatial distances in Stubbs’s description of events; the words themselves
prompt further inconsistencies in scale:
Colonel: [ . . . ] Where were you standing in the battlefield? Where was

my son?
Stubbs: Behind.
Colonel: (pointing to a spot on table): Here?
Stubbs: Far away. Long ago. When they said—it would all be over.
Colonel: Who said?
Stubbs: When they said it would all be done in a day.
Colonel: Who?
Stubbs: Long, long ago. When they said he would be removed.
Colonel: When who said who would be removed?
Stubbs: The enemy.
Colonel: Where were you standing, Stubbs!
Stubbs: Far, far, away. (156–157)
There are similarities to an aphasic defect of expression here. In a simi-

lar vein to Bataille’s notion that we should consider the effect that words
produce rather than their “meaning,” Shepard wrote that “the organization
of living, breathing words as they hit the air between the actor and the
audience actually possesses the power to change our chemistry.”13 Shepard

acknowledged (but dismissed) comparisons with Surrealism: “Still, the
critical assessment of this kind of event is almost always relegated to the
categories of symbolism or ‘Surrealism.’ [ . . . ] In other words, it’s removed
from the living and dedicated to the dead.”14 The playwright here seems to
designate Surrealism as a dead art. Yet there is no doubt that his treatment of
language correlates not only to Bataille’s focus on the productive capabilities
of language, but also to Breton’s endeavor to free words from their com-
municative responsibilities, and significantly to Artaud’s venture to extract
from language its catalytic potential to stimulate action.15 For example,
when Stubbs throws a tray, glass, and pills off right, this is met with “A loud
crash of dishes [ . . . ] off right, more like an explosion” (173). Or, when the
Colonel slams his fist on the table, an explosion is audible “offstage in the
distance” (152). Shepard cultivates the action on imagistic rather than narra-
tive grounds, as is the case in Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou (discussed in
chapter 4). As a result, the action of this play approaches Freud’s definition
of the uncanny. It engages the “effacement of the boundary between fantasy
and reality [which] occurs when something is experienced as real which up
to this point was conceived as imagined . . . when a symbol enacts a sublation
of signifier into signified or an effacement of the distinction between literal
and figural.16 Situating the symbolic interplay of States of Shock within a
postmodern context, Callens traces the symbolic substitution of imagery in
Shepard’s play back to Bataille’s premise: “Like the gift and sacrifice in the
primitive and precapitalist economies from which Baudrillard took his inspi-
ration (e.g., the Native American potlatch) and like Lyotard’s libidinal, playful
economy, symbolic exchange, by being excessive and wasteful, ignores the
imperative of use value.”17
THE SURREAL STAGE IMAGERY OF STATES OF SHOCK

States of Shock premiered on April 30, 1991, at The American Place Theatre
under the direction of Bill Hart. The set for this production featured “two
tables, dressed with the familiar American roadside diner salt shakers and glossy
menus [which] seemed to be floating out of time and out of space [ . . . ] enveloped
by a concave movie screen.”18 Rosen’s description of the spatial ambiguity of
the set predicts the subsequent breakdown of naturalism as the play pro-
gresses. The stage collapses in States of Shock in a particularly Artaudian vein,
especially in staging both physical disintegration (of the elements of the set
design as well as the psychological collapse of the mind) and the aftereffect
of ruin. Writing on Surrealism in theatre, David G. Zinder argues that “[t]he
stage of disintegration yielded to Artaud’s visions of tremendous primitive
power born of a freedom that had once existed, but which had socialized
and rendered impotent.”19 Zinder’s definition of the immobilizing or sti-

fling effects of socialization that curtail a “primitive power” recalls Bataille’s
treatise on the irreconcilability of “current social conceptions and the real
needs of society” in “The Notion of Expenditure.” Artaud and Bataille
both recognized how “conscious humanity has remained a minor” and that
to “acquire,” “conserve,” and “consume rationally”20 ultimately ignores the
inherent benefits to be discovered in nonproductive expenditure. However,
Zinder’s detection in Artaud of impotency as a direct result of socializa-
tion and a subsequent attempt to reclaim an extinguished power has obvi-
ous resonance in this play. Stubbs claims throughout States of Shock that
his “Thing Hangs Like Dead Meat,” repeatedly asserting that he cannot
achieve an erection. Zinder perceives a surreal premise in Artaud’s writing
that refers to physical, sexual, and irrational “raging forces of disintegration”
that have particular significance in terms of Shepard’s writing:
For the raging forces of disintegration are physical, sexual, beyond reason
and even beyond the senses. [ . . . ] The body and all its saps are one with the
mind and all its flights of images. And Artaud was seeking, above all else,
a concreteness for both, a corporeality of the spirit, an incarnation—in real
physical space—of the deepest spiritual powers that Man possesses, a solid
palpable manifestation of the almost unimaginable combination of human
mind and matter, one that contains both, yet is other than either one.21
In earlier Shepard plays such as Angel City (1976) and True West (1980) the
physical disintegration of the stage imagery mirrors the mental collapse of
the mind. Indeed, the scenographic catastrophe of States of Shock and the
seemingly wasteful performance recall both Beckett’s endeavor to give shape
to the increasingly ephemeral, and his literal creation of a dramatic waste-
land. As Emilie Morin writes:
[Beckett’s] preoccupation with the philosophical and structural problems

posed by ideas of abstraction appears in its most concise form in “Three
Dialogues with George Duthuit,” in which he famously argues that the
modern painter (and, by extension, the modern artist) should turn away
from expressivity and choose instead “[t]he expression that there is nothing
to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express,
no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to
express.22
According to Morin, Beckett’s theories of representation were informed by

similar exploration in the visual arts, notably the treatises on the privileg-
ing of expression and emotion over the figurative in Kandinsky’s On the
Spiritual in Art.23 In its apparent minimalist focus, this is perhaps most
graphically realized in Beckett’s Breath (1969) a definitive performance of

waste, which consists of two recorded “ faint brief cries” and a stage, “littered
with miscellaneous rubbish.”24 In a similar vein, Richard Gilman, in his intro-
duction to Shepard’s Plays 2, describes the playwright’s fascination with dirt
or “dreck,” mentioning Shepard’s set for 4-H Club “littered with paper, cans,
and various trash” and the stage direction for The Unseen Hand which calls
for an “old Chevrolet convertible, bashed and dented, no tires [ . . . ] garbage,
tin cans, cardboard boxes, Coca-Cola bottles and other junk.”25 However, in
a movement away from abstraction to the “Happenings” phase of painting
and sculpture, Gilman sees this stage debris as evidence of the influence
in Shepard’s work of “collage in the manner of Johns and Rauschenberg,
and the mixed-media experiments of the latter artist with John Cage and
others.”26 Both Morin and Gilman recognize the interdisciplinary nature
of Beckett and Shepard’s writing and argue that both writers look to the
visual arts in their creation of a stage aestheticism that seeks to give form
to formlessness. Yet the readymade aspect of the stage imagery in States of
Shock could also extend to the text, “littered” as it is with Americanisms and
slang: the Colonel’s requests for a “Maker’s Mark” whiskey or a “Fighting
Cock” bourbon (replete with implications about the performative nature of
masculinity), or his constant cataloguing of desserts—a Milky Way, a peach
cobbler, a key lime pie, hot fudge, banana splits, all distinctly American deli-
cacies. The writing seems saturated by brand names “thrown” into the text
and redundant and wasteful in their incapacity to satisfy hunger.
Certainly, the characters of Stubbs and the Colonel could be interpreted
as Shepard’s versions of Beckett’s Clov and Hamm, except that Shepard situ-
ates his characters in the midst of the apocalypse rather than in its wake.
The servant and master pairing is a development of a similar characteriza-
tion in Shepard’s Seduced (1978), the playwright’s fictitious dramatization
of the American tycoon Howard Hughes. The opening exchange in Seduced
between Henry Hackamore as the fictionalized Hughes and his servant Raul
is obviously borrowed from Endgame (1957). Henry is incapacitated, albeit in
a Naugahyde dentist’s chair rather than a wheelchair, and like Hamm, seems
to be in constant pain. His pedantic fussing over the positioning of a palm
tree directly relates to Hamm’s direction to Clov that his chair be placed
“[b]ang in the center”27 of the room in Endgame and he seems more concerned
with the internal visions that his mind produces—“Pictures, Raul. Pictures!
Every shift of the body brings a new wave”28 —than the external world,
which is hidden from view by a “ jet-black velour curtain.”29 Undeniably,
Henry’s statement to Raul, “I was seeing things before you were born. Before
I was born I was seeing things,”30 is particularly Beckettian in manner.
Somewhat similarly, in States of Shock, the unidentified White Couple
evoke immediate comparisons with the “Very White” faces of Beckett’s
Nagg and Nell. Like Hamm, the Colonel controls the language in States
of Shock and, thus, the fiction—Stubbs accuses him of fictionalizing his
death, which suggests that he is in fact the Colonel’s son. Likewise, Stubbs’s
repeated attempts to narrate his side of the story throughout the play, “[w]hen
I was hit,” are dismissed by the Colonel. Stubbs’s endeavors to replicate a
“truthful” reconstruction of the scenario in which he was shot are met with
anger, as the infuriated Colonel rejects facts as insignificant:
Stubbs: I was hit in silence

Colonel: (slamming table with his fist): that makes no difference!!
(An explosion offstage in the distance. Pause. Silence. They stare at each other
[ . . . ]) (152)
This play also demonstrates the Surrealist fascination with the “acte
gratuit” a “gratuitous act,” especially evident in the White Man’s flagrant
and public masturbation: “The white man’s cleaning of his lap slowly turns
into masturbation as white woman continues eating oblivious” (164). As
the scene progresses and the Colonel’s whipping of Stubbs intensifies, the
“white man keeps masturbating through this and gradually reaches a climax
as white woman continues to eat” (165). Gide’s term refers to an ostensibly
random crime, unprovoked and committed for its own sake, what Robert
Hughes describes as “an enigmatic and seemingly unmotivated, though
physically intense, disruption of normal social behavior.”31 Gratuitousness
itself insinuates squander and dissipation. However, according to Bataille,
seemingly gratuitous sexual acts are only considered pathological when pro-
duced in a society that is solely concerned with the utility of expenditure.
If this emphasis on efficacy is removed, and the merits of nonproductive
expenditure are given credence, then such acts take on a sacred form and
satisfy the individual in the present without concern for accumulation. For,
as Bataille argues,
If I am no longer concerned about “what will be” but about “‘what is,” what
reason do I have to keep anything in reserve? I can at once, in disorder, make
an instantaneous consumption of all that I possess. This useless consumption
is what suits me, once my concern for the morrow is removed.32
In Shepard’s play, we see a similar endorsement of consumption in the

indulgent masturbation and the very act of eating dessert, a luxury in itself.
The White Man’s self-stimulation is set in direct mocking opposition to
Stubbs’s impotency, whose physical inadequacy is ridiculed by the phallic
imagery of the banana-splits, which literally appear to the audience to be
on fire with inappropriately large candles: “[ . . . ] silhouetted against the
panorama of light, stylized shapes of tanks, infantry, and heavy artillery move
from right to left, in the heat of battle. glory bee enters again, from right,
balancing the two banana splits with an even larger candle burning in the
center of each one” (158).
COMPARISONS WITH RADICAL PERFORMANCE

ART OF THE 1970s
Masturbation itself is an archetypal “performance of waste.” Robert Hughes
traces the origins of some of the more radical performance art pieces of the
1970s American art scene back to the Surrealist acte gratuit:
Few cultures in history have been so obsessively preoccupied with the merely
personal as ours, and the last twenty years are littered with the debris of
attempts to claim for the exposure of the self—unmediated except by its pres-
ence in the “art context”—the conceptual dignity which is the property of
art. Every kind of petty documentation, psychic laundry list, and autistic ges-
ture has been performed, taped, pinned up, filed, and photographed. Every
sort of odd act, from lurking below a ramp in a gallery and masturbating to
fantasies about the people walking overhead (Vito Acconci) to patterning
one’s body with sunburn (Dennis Oppenheim) has come into art on the coat-
tails of the Surrealist acte gratuit. They are hardly imaginable as art without
their Surrealist ancestry.33
Here, Hughes highlights the uncensored subjectivity at the heart of

Surrealism, the cult of the self, which is particularly relevant to Shepard’s
writing. He links Surrealism to the work of Vito Acconci, a performance
artist whose work was mainly produced in reaction to the Vietnam War.34
Acconci’s Seedbed was a performance piece from 1971 at New York’s
Sonnabend Gallery, during which the artist lay under a wooden ramp and
masturbated while spectators (or participants) walked overhead. Over eight
hours of this endurance work, Acconci voiced imagined fantasies about the
audience into a microphone that was amplified through speakers into the
gallery. The work raised questions about the nature of consumption and lit-
erally dislodged the traditional hegemonic position of the artist as producer
and the audience as consumer. In Seedbed, the audience’s very presence ful-
filled the requirements of the piece, yet the artist was the only receiver of
pleasure and the audience’s physical attendance was exploited purely for this
means. Thus, the very sound, or thought, of an audience, rather than the
sight of them (as conventional in a theatre, perhaps), prompted Acconci’s
masturbatory indulgence. With its emphasis on the audience’s role in the
fulfillment of performance, Seedbed resonates with Shepard’s dramatic
oeuvre. The fact that Stubbs cannot achieve an erection for much of States
of Shock suggests an end to the cycle of transgenerational trauma in the
implication that he cannot conceive. However, Seedbed recalls the White
Man’s masturbation scene in States of Shock, and, in the light of Bataille’s
concept of nonproductive expenditure, at the end of Acconci’s performance
the gallery floor was smeared with semen in a transgressive gesture that defi-
antly interrogated the very question of decorum, especially in the art gallery
context. This piece is hence another “performance of waste” with the direct
waste product of the activity left in the gallery space.
In an act that mirrors States of Shock’s aesthetic exploration of various
levels of presentation and (re)presentation, in 2005 Marina Abramović
re-performed a series of seminal performance works from the 1960s and
1970s titled Seven Easy Pieces, including Acconci’s Seedbed. Hughes traces
the influence of the “gratuitous act” of Surrealism through the Happenings
of the 1960s to developments in performance art of the 1970s:
The idea of the “gratuitous act” [ . . . ] was transmuted into numerous kinds
of art-gesture: self-laceration or irrational confrontations, solipsistic perfor-
mances and, earlier in the 1960s, happenings, which were in effect Dada-
Surrealist assemblages occurring in real time with strong overtones of absurdist
theatre. 35 (Emphasis mine)
Hughes’s reference to self-laceration is directly related to the performance

pieces of Marina Abramović during the 1970s. Indeed, the bodily imagery
of States of Shock, although surreal, situates it in the realm of performance
art. In a review of the premiere of the play at The American Place Theatre,
Rosen describes John Malkovich’s performance in terms of the farcical:
Whether miming the climbing of a wall, balancing coffee cups, slurping up a

banana split, whipping a surrogate son, leaping for joy when he found a bottle
of painkillers, or suggesting an escape to Mexico while dancing a marimba,
there was no stopping him. His broad slapstick performance lifted this play’s
weighty metaphors off the ground, like a tornado.36
Malkovich pushed the performance beyond the naturalistic into the arena
of mime, and, indeed, the stage direction for his movements approaches
the absurd: “He begins to move randomly around the stage, balancing the
glass on the tray. He spins and turns, leaps in the air, making a ridiculous
dance out of his demonstration as GLORY BEE watches” (170). Likewise,
Shepard stipulates that Glory Bee’s balancing act as she tries to carry first
the coffees and then the banana splits to her customers should be “pains-
taking” (148). Her actions thus upset the laws of orthodox temporality.
Glory Bee’s role is tightly choreographed in this play, firstly during her
balancing act: “GLORY BEE enters from right, very slowly, balancing two
cups of coffee on her tray which she is having great difficulty with. Coffee keeps
sloshing over the edge of the cups as she stares intensely at them and moves
inch by inch toward the COLONEL and STUBBS in the booth” (147). Her
“performance” recalls the performance artist Orlan’s “slow motion walks”
from the 1960s in which she would walk as slowly as possible from one part
of her home city Saint-Étienne, to the other. The waltz scene also suggests
the farcical—(“COLONEL dances GLORY BEE over to STUBBS and sets
the tray, glass, and pills down on STUBBS’s lap, then dances off again with
GLORY BEE in his arms”; 173)—as does the following physical comedy:
“STUBBS suddenly stands on wobbly legs, trying desperately to keep his balance.
[ . . . ] STUBBS stands again, gripping an arm of the wheelchair, then letting go
and tottering badly as though about to fall flat on his face” (174).
FURTHER ANALYSIS
In terms of Surrealism and the thematic expurgation of the repressed, the
“family” restaurant in States of Shock is a space where characters can purge, or
self-indulgently revisit, their obsessive compulsions. The Colonel and Stubbs
are “celebrating” the anniversary of a death, as opposed to a birthday, while
the very occasion of an anniversary itself suggests habitual remembrance and
reenactment. According to Bataille, glory depends on degradation.37 This is
ironic in terms of the humiliation Glory Bee is subjected to as the Colonel
and Stubbs exploit her body as a surrogate for their desire. Luis Buñuel’s
film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) has thematic links with
States of Shock in that its plot follows the thwarted attempts of a group of
friends to share a meal together. Both film and play feature the death of the
manager of a restaurant (as Glory Bee informs the White Woman in States
of Shock [160]). Buñuel’s film likewise features the physical manifestation of
otherwise interiorized obsessions, with layers of dream imagery suggesting
an oneiric treatment of experience. This play also approaches surreality in
a manner akin to A Delicate Balance (1966) by Edward Albee, a playwright
who arguably introduced Surrealism to the American stage.38 Indeed, Esslin
argues that Albee’s work “comes into the category of the Theatre of the
Absurd precisely because his works attack the very foundation of American
optimism.”39 “With A Delicate Balance (1966),” Esslin writes, “Albee
returned to a more realistic setting which, however, is also deeply redolent of
mystery and nameless fears.”40
There are suggestions in States of Shock of a dreamscape, prompted by the
subtitle of the play as a nightmare—the Colonel informs Stubbs that he is
dreaming, “[w]ildly hallucinating again” (181). Shepard distills the macro-
cosm of the Gulf War to the microcosm of the battle between father and son.
War is normalized within this space. The characters exist in an atmosphere

where the vocabulary of war is sanctioned and normative behavioral pat-
terns have been overthrown. The White Man claims that Glory Bee “ought
to be shot” (155) for her incompetence. The film on the cyclorama mirrors
the Colonel’s compulsion to revisit the events that lead to his son’s death
and in this vein, the projected images could be read as a concretization of
the images produced by the Colonel’s mindset. Thus, the imagery of States
of Shock dramatizes in tangible form, the otherwise interiorized mindset of
a traumatized psyche. The events, as the Colonel imagines them, eclipse
the reality of their surroundings so that it is impossible to separate the past
from the present. The play disintegrates on both a temporal and spatial level.
Shepard brings prior experience to the fore and makes it part of the objective
reality of the stage event. The previous chapter of this book examined how
the Surrealists’ technique of collage and their imagery of dismemberment
could be read as indicative of what Lyford refers to as “postwar aestheticiza-
tion of bodily trauma.”41 In States of Shock, this emerges in Stubbs’s bodily
decrepitude (his very name suggests amputation)—he is impotent and lame,
and refers to his physicality in terms of disembodiment: “The middle of
me is all dead. The core. I’m eighty percent mutilated. The part of me that
goes on living has no memory of the parts that are all dead. They’ve been
separated for all time” (152).
There is an inevitability in Shepard’s work of classical Greek propor-
tions. In this light, any revolution against the inexorable seems wasteful.
This desecration may lead Callens, in relation to States of Shock, to conclude
the following: “Unfortunately, the play’s spectacular critique of male macho
behavior can also be seen as its valorization and evidence of the ineradica-
bility of Shepard’s male-centered, counter-culture stance in opposition to
the patriarchal order.”42 As we have seen in Angel City, Shepard’s characters
constantly reenact a performance of waste in their role as perpetual perform-
ers; thus they consume their own identities by degenerating into the roles of
spectators. As performers, in what Bert O. States calls the “representational
mode,”43 they are witness to the performances of others and thus occupy
the same domain as the audience. As explored in the previous chapter, the
audience’s role is paramount in achieving the self-verification the characters
so desperately seek. In an interview for The Paris Review, Shepard highlights
the importance of the audience:
There’s no room for self-indulgence in theatre; you have to be thinking about

the audience. Joe Chaikin helped me understand this. He used to have this
rehearsal exercise in which the actors were supposed to play a scene for some
imaginary figure in the audience. He would say, “Tonight Prince Charles is
in the audience. Play the scene for him.” Or, “Tonight a bag lady is in the
audience.”44
Wheeler exclaims in Angel City that “[w]e must help them devour them-
selves or be devoured by them.”45 This could equally relate to the father−son
relationship in States of Shock. The purgation of the father figure (Colonel)
appears fruitless in that Stubbs is left with the same obsessions and inse-
curities inherited from the masculine bloodline and has fulfilled an
Oedipal myth without any retribution. According to David G. Zinder,
Artaud’s work qualifies as “a twentieth-century version of Aristotle’s con-
cept of catharsis.”46 Indeed, Richard Kearney, in his article on catharsis
in Joyce, Shakespeare, and Homer, writes that the deadly cycle of patri-
cide in Shakespeare’s Hamlet “only comes to an end when Hamlet himself
becomes the sacrificial symptom of cyclical acting out and exposes the
wound in his own body where the sword entered.”47 In States of Shock,
Stubbs becomes this “sacrificial symptom of cyclical acting” in his com-
pulsive urge to reveal to the audience the scar on his chest from when he
was wounded in battle. Apparently, Stubbs attempted to save the life of the
Colonel’s son by trying to block the artillery fire with his body: “STUBBS
blows his whistle again and abruptly lifts his shirt to the armpits, revealing a
massive red scar in the center of his chest” (145). The war wound is a physi-
cal manifestation of posttraumatic stress, but it also indicates paucity and
lack. The fact that the Colonel was not present at this traumatic event
qualifies his memory as, to quote Kearney, “inexperienced experience”:48
“Only you can verify this because you were there, Stubbs. I’m just going on
hearsay” (151). Stubbs’s actions denote a desire to have the audience bear
witness to the scars of his trauma and to acknowledge his pain, once again
recalling Bishop Berkeley’s treatise: esse est percepi (to be is to be perceived).
As with Shepard’s collaborations with Chaikin, Stubbs’s behavior could
be read as an acknowledgment of the audience’s presence. Both Stubbs
and the Colonel (when he takes up Stubbs’s position in the wheelchair)
stare straight ahead, facing the audience. Thus, the boundaries between
actor, character, and performer dissolve and the “attitudes” that emerge
indicate pretense, role-playing, and an “acting-out” of selfhood. States of
Shock expands on the performative nature of Shepard’s men—they need an
enemy to measure their strength against:
Stubbs: (holding his cup high). to the enemy!

Colonel: Exactly. without the enemy we’re nothing!
Stubbs: (toasting) without the enemy we’re nothing!
Colonel: Exactly. Where would we be today without the enemy?
Stubbs: I don’t know . . . where would we be?
Colonel: the enemy has brought us together!
Stubbs: the enemy has brought us together!
Colonel: Exactly right. Now, there’s no point in pouring your heart out to
strangers, Stubbs. [ . . . ] We’ve got a history. Nobody knows that better
than you and me. Best a stranger can do is pretend and we’re both past
that, aren’t we, Stubbs?
Stubbs: (toasting). we’re both past that!
Colonel: That’s the truth of it. Pretending is not for us. What we’re after is
the hard facts. The bare bones. (153)
The characters’ search for “the bare bones” signals their search for truth,
that elusive core substance of which Shepard’s men are forever in pursuit. As
the play ends, the Colonel has psychologically retreated to the scene of the
battle. He again reiterates his need for a “partner”:
If they come from air, sea, or land, we’ll cut them off at the pass. We’re invin-
cible, Stubbs. There’s no doubt about it. Invincible! (STUBBS begins to rise to his
feet.) Stubbs? You’re right behind me, aren’t you? You’re right where I imagine
you to be? You’re not turning tail? Burying your face in the sand? Crying for
mother? Put your back up against me, Stubbs, so I can feel you. Press your
spine into my spine. [ . . . ] The sacrifice needs a partner. You understand that,
don’t you? [ . . . ] We’re in this together. (183)
THE FINAL SUR-REALITY OF STATES OF SHOCK

In States of Shock, the Colonel says to Stubbs that “[a] catastrophe has to be
examined from every possible angle” (152). Shepard has realized this in the
creation of climatic warfare that relies on multiple layers of spectacularized
representation to create a sense of panic, one that is amplified when met
with the nonchalance of the White Couple. In perhaps the most Surrealist
stage image of the play, when a metal busboy’s wagon of loaded gasmasks
appears on stage unannounced, the characters ignore it (178). Up until
now the war has occurred offstage but the arrival of the gas masks on the
stage designates the family restaurant as a warzone. As the play closes, any
possibility of a naturalistic interpretation becomes unfeasible as the White
Woman, Glory Bee, and Stubbs all don gas masks. The White Man starts
singing “Good Night Irene” with Glory Bee and the White Woman join-
ing in, a song that references suicidal tendencies and the unrequited love
of a woman only available to the speaker in his dreams. Callens compares
the casual manner in which this play concludes with the surreal black and
white photographs of Edward Weston, notably his Civilian Defense (1942)
and Civilian Defense II (1942).49 The photographs depict Charis, Weston’s
wife, in postures that oscillate between ennui and provocation, yet her apa-
thy seems completely incongruous with the suggestions that her gas mask
conveys. The gas mask is a definite emblem of twentieth-century militancy.
Georges Limbour argued in an essay “Eschyle, le Carnaval et les Civilisés,”
published in Documents, Bataille’s Surrealist art magazine, in 1930, that
the gas mask was the Western equivalent of the primitive masks worn by
tribal societies:
Because if religion, the cult of the dead, and the festivals of Dionysos turned
the mask into a sacred, ritual ornament among the various ancient peoples,
we too have our own religion, our own societal games, and consequently our
own masks. Only the general standardization of our age requires that we all
wear the same one.”50
Rosalind Krauss writes of the gas mask as “what modern imagination had
dreamed to replace the head of man,” noting that “this substitute calls to
mind not higher stages in the evolution of the species but much, much
lower ones,” in particular the insect.51 In Weston’s photographs his wife’s
nakedness suggests a hyper-vulnerability and a sensuality that associates
eroticism with violence. In light of Krauss comparison, Charis’s appear-
ance alludes to the praying mantis, the definitive symbol for femininity
in Surrealist art. The donning of gas masks is an action that anticipates
demolition, and in Weston’s photographs, Charis’s naked body intention-
ally invites the destruction that the gas mask foreshadows, disrupting
normative patterns of cause and effect in much the same way as Stubbs
recalls embracing the advancing missile in States of Shock. Callens associ-
ates this bizarre interpretation with Shepard’s plays and with the Surrealist
movement:
Weston’s surreal photographs frequently derive their disturbing, evocative

power from the disjunction of found or combined everyday objects, which
seem to push the limits of reality. Shepard’s plays operate through a simi-
lar aesthetic, conspicuously so in the junk and the Lobster Man of Cowboy
Mouth (1971) whose surreal hybridity resembles that of Charis in “Civilian
Defense,” but still undeniably so in the apparently realistic plays. (166)
The final image of States of Shock could also be compared to the pho-
tographs of the Hygienic Dress League, a performance art duo based in
Detroit. Created by a husband and wife team of street artists, Dorota and
Steve Coy, as a corporation solely invested in self-promotion as an artis-
tic statement, The Hygienic Dress League parody the advertising indus-
try and consequently consumer culture by photographing themselves in
various locations around the city, as well as spray painting murals onto
urban spaces. There has also been a recent emergence, distinctly in Detroit,
of a new phenomenon in photography called “ruin porn,” as exemplified
by Matthew Christopher’s photograph When Sorrow Comes taken in the
dilapidated Wilder State Hospital. Christopher’s photograph recalls Hans-
Thies Lehmann’s assertion that postdramatic productions are increasingly
drawn to “the metaphor of the world as a hospital or delusional world.”52

Indeed, Christopher writes of his “ruin porn” photographs that “these pic-
tures document physical conditions that are the direct consequences of
failed economics.”53 By revealing the artistic merit to be found in failed
economics and by offering the waste products of our capitalist society for
consumption through art, Christopher’s images are a direct artistic response
to Bataille’s premise.
SIMPATICO
Writing about Shepard’s plays from the 1990s, Wade also references Bataille’s
theory of nonproductive expenditure in terms of Simpatico (1994). This play
contains a Surrealist anarchy in its antiestablishmentarian impulse, in line
with Bataille’s economic theories. Simpatico premiered at the Joseph Papp
Public Theatre in New York in 1994 and received its British premiere at the
Royal Court Theatre in London the following year. Described by Stephen
Holden as the “long, reflective epilogue” to True West, it centers on the
reunion between the two protagonists, Vince and Carter, who enact a rever-
sal of roles as the plot develops, similar to the case of Lee and Austin in
Shepard’s earlier play. Set amid horse racing circles, the play focuses on the
reunion between Vince and Carter, the masterminds behind a fraudulent
scheme 15 years earlier, involving the switching of thoroughbreds and out
of which they made a large amount of money. When Simms, “a man who
used to hold a very high position out West”54 uncovered the scam, Vince
and Carter framed him by photographing him in “pornographic” positions
with Rosie, Vinnie’s ex-wife and Carter’s current one, resulting in Simms’s
dismissal. Carter is now a wealthy horse breeder in Kentucky who pays
Vinnie “hush money” (218), which the latter has squandered on alcohol and
women. The play opens on the two men in Vinnie’s flat, “a cheap, ground-
floor apartment on the outskirts of Cucamonga,” where Carter has come to pay
Vinnie off once and for all. At the beginning of the play, Vinnie is living in a
state of squalor, “a sink piled with dirty dishes [is] against the stage-right wall”
and “a pile of dirty clothes [are] at the foot of the bed, on the floor” (189). Vince
has descended from a state of relative prosperity to financial ruin. He tells
Carter that he was arrested the previous week for “Trespassing,” “Invasion of
Privacy,” and the “Harassment” of a woman named Cecilia whom he met in
a bar and who thinks that Vinnie is a detective. Cecilia is a woman he seems
to have all but invented:
A thought came into my head as soon as I saw her and I’ve never had this kind
of thought before. I said to myself: “If I could have this woman—I would
never ask for anything else again in my whole life.” [ . . . ] And a miraculous
thing occurred. [ . . . ] She came straight over to me. As though I’d conjured
her up. Sat down right next to me and smiled. Just like she was answering my
little prayer. (197)
Vinnie’s description here sanctifies Shepard’s dramatic theory that words

should be used as “living incantations and not as symbols.”55 As is repeatedly
the case in Shepard’s drama, words summon the ensuing action. However,
Vinnie’s admission sends Carter into a state of frenzy, especially when he dis-
covers that Vinnie has “lent” Cecilia some of the compromising photographs
of Rosie with Simms as “proof” that he is a detective. “One little slip-up like
this and the whole thing can come unraveled” (198), he admonishes.
The plot of the play approaches the absurd when Carter goes to visit
Cecilia to retrieve the incriminating photographs and to talk to her, at
Vinnie’s request, about the charges she has (supposedly) made against him.
Carter discovers that Vinnie has been feeding him lies; Cecilia never made
any allegations against Vinnie, and, furthermore, they met at a Safeway
supermarket where Cecilia was bagging groceries for him, rather than in
a bar. Moreover, the audience never discovers what the photographs con-
tain. This recalls the confusing manner in which “pornographic” photo-
graphs in Luis Buñuel’s film The Phantom of Liberty (1974), when revealed
to the audience, appear to be mere unassuming pictures of French archi-
tecture. However, by alienating the audience in this manner, Simpatico
also recalls the early Surrealist play The Odyssey of Ulysses the Palimped
(1924) by Roger Gilbert-Lecomte in which long passages were included in
the text to be read silently by the actor during the performance.56 Matters
are further complicated when Vinnie travels to meet Simms, who is now
living under the pseudonym Ryan Ames, to offer him the photographs,
not in exchange for money, but so that he can assist in the acquittal of
Simms’s condemnation. Simms incredulously asks if Vinnie’s venture is
one of honor: “Don’t tell me you’re a man of honor? The last of a dying
breed? Is that possible, Mr. Webb?” (249). Honor, according to Bataille,
is a mere example of a principle that is situated beyond the perimeters of
utility and pleasure and is thus often “hypocritically employed in schemes
of pecuniary interest.”57 Bataille’s writings on honor render Vinnie’s entire
endeavor as wasteful. Simms does not want revenge; he has moved on and
is at peace with his new life for, just as Bataille advocated, “loss can be a
powerful elixir” (251).
The absurdity of the plot of Simpatico also extends to the antinaturalistic
scenography. As per the stage direction, the set for Vinnie’s apartment does
not reference the outside world: “The windows look out into black space. No
trees. No buildings. No landscape of any kind. Just black” (189). The play is set
between various locations in California and Kentucky and the characters’
seamless movement between these states suggests, from the onset, a disregard
for laws of spatial temporality. As Bottoms notes, “Vinnie himself is mys-
teriously transported (teleported?) from California to Kentucky in less time
than it takes Carter to drive between San Dimas and Cucamonga.”58 Bizarre
imagery also infiltrates the text: Cecilia arrives at Simms’s office inappro-
priately dressed for the Derby seven months too early. Simms’s reaction to
Cecilia verges upon hyperbole: “You don’t understand what kind of storm
you’ve begun to arouse inside me. I mean—I must be visibly shaking. Am
I shaking? Can you see me shaking?” (292). His behavior, fueled by liquor,
matches his enthusiasm: “SIMMS crawls toward her with his tongue lapping
out” (293). The play contains numerous examples of physical manifesta-
tions of interior anxiety. When they first meet, Cecilia suspects that Carter’s
neck pain is symptomatic of “something much bigger” (229). Cecilia feels as
though she is suffocating as Simms’s flirtation and evasion of the matter of
the photographs escalate (300). Her beauty also provokes a physical reaction
in him: “You’re so unbelievably beautiful it makes my mouth dry” (303).
This sense of a bodily reaction to mental pressure is most fully realized in
the final scene. Vinnie has taken over Carter’s position from the beginning
of the play: “CARTER is lying in VINNIE’s bed in T-shirt, boxer shorts, socks
on, wrapped up tightly in blankets with the shakes. His teeth are chattering and
he rolls slightly from side to side” (306). Carter is convinced he is dying, his
legs have stopped working, his back is freezing up and he is breaking out in
cold sweats. However, Vinnie is remarkably unsympathetic: “I need my bed.
Do you understand that? I need my bed now. This is my bed” (309).
In a review of Shepard’s recent play Heartless (2012), Hilton Als notes
the prominence of the bed motif in Shepard’s body of work, mentioning the
“fucked-up bed” in Cowboy Mouth (1971), Geography of a Horse Dreamer
(1974) and Fool for Love (1983).59 There are also bedridden or reclining char-
acters in Buried Child (1978), A Lie of the Mind (1985), Red Cross (1966),
La Turista (1967), Curse of the Starving Class (1977), and Inacoma (1977),
among others. According to Als, “[d]reams, sex, imprisonment: the beds
in Shepard’s works are a stage within a stage.”60 Als’s interpretation of a
“stage within a stage” reiterates the performativity of Shepard’s characters as
earlier discussed. In Vinnie’s bed, Carter retreats to an infantile state, con-
vinced he is approaching death; hence the stage is set for his “performance.”
If we consider Vinnie’s indignant response to losing his bed in the light
of Als’s analysis of the bed motif in Shepard’s writing, it becomes evident
that, rather than genuine concern for his friend, Vinnie’s sole concern is the
reclaiming of his bed, the stage: “There’s only one bed. And that’s mine”
(319). Indeed, this relates to the struggle for territoriality over the stage space
in earlier plays such as True West. It is only when Vinnie claims a new role,
and a new stage—that of the detective—that he relents and leaves Carter
to it. However, as in Angel City and States of Shock, Vinnie comes to occupy
the same territory as the audience, one of surveillance, a movement that cor-
respondently implicates the audience in the action of the play:
VINNIE. Surveillance. I’m working on a new case. It’s a great feeling to

embark on a case. It fills me with purpose. I’m my own man again. I move
wherever I want to. I answer to no one. I cut through backyards and they never
even know I’m there. I see it all, Carter. I’m a witness to it all. [ . . . ] (320)
In line with Bataille’s theory of nonproductive expenditure, the overriding

message of this play can be deduced from Simms’s contention that “loss can
be a powerful elixir” (251). However, Carter’s winnings and earnings ulti-
mately result in his diminution to a state of absolute loss. According to Wade,
Carter’s actions exemplify Bataille’s theories in the following manner:
Simpatico replays the standard Shepard dynamic that propels his male charac-
ters to radical postures or states of consciousness that rend communal bonds.
Recalling Bataille’s concept of non-productive expenditure, we see Shepard
orchestrating, through Carter especially, the overthrow of the productive
economy and the utilitarian ethic that measures social interaction according
to a calculus of accumulation. Carter undertakes a performance of waste—
jettisoning the rewards and retributions of Kentucky—and proceeding to a
state of absolute loss. Carter declares to Vinnie, “I’m going to disappear” (92),
and, shivering under his blanket, on the floor in Cucamonga, Carter has, on
some level, succeeded.61
Indeed, in his concern with the consumption of waste as a means of dilut-

ing the onus placed on reinvestment, it is interesting that Bataille uses the
example of horse racing to illustrate the principles of loss evident in competi-
tive games:
In various competitive games, loss in general is produced under complex con-

ditions. Considerable sums of money are spent for the maintenance of quar-
ters, animals, equipment, or men. As much energy as possible is squandered
in order to produce a feeling of stupefaction—in any case with an intensity
infinitely greater than in productive enterprises. The danger of death is not
avoided; on the contrary, it is the object of a strong unconscious attraction.
[ . . . ] Immense crowds are present; their passions most often burst forth
beyond any restraint, and the loss of insane sums of money is set in motion in
the form of wagers. [ . . . ] Beyond this, various modes of unproductive expen-
diture can be linked, depending on the circumstances, to great competitive
spectacles, just as elements moving separately are caught up in a mightier
whirlwind. Thus horse races are associated with a sumptuary process of social
classification [ . . . ].62
Bataille’s description of “elements moving separately” that become “caught

up in a mightier whirlwind” relates to what Bottoms perceives as a movement
away from the shackles of determinism in this play to “an exploration of the
webs of connection and entrapment which people weave for themselves.”63
Indeed, Carter and Vince are solely responsible for their own fall from grace,
rather than the self-destructive nitroglycerin in the patrilineal bloodline of
Curse of the Starving Class, for instance. While Bottoms sees this play as
indicative of a shift in Shepard’s writing from existential isolation to a con-
cern with “how to live knowing that one cannot truly be separate even if one
wants to be,”64 Wade, as his discussion of Simpatico above demonstrates, sees
in this play the well-recycled motif in Shepard’s writing of a severance of
communal bonds. Indeed, in his disintegration to a state of isolation, alcohol-
ism and bodily decrepitude, Carter morphs into the role that Vinnie enacted
at the beginning of the play. The cracks in Carter’s successful demeanor are
compared to economics and connected to the falling stock market:
Vinnie: [ . . . ] How is business these days?

Carter: Market’s down. The Arabs have dropped out of the game.
Vinnie: But the Japs—the Japs are coming on strong.
Carter: Not strong enough.
Vinnie: The rich are clamping down! (201)
However, Bataille’s description of the “stupefaction” that emerges from

unproductive ventures, “with an intensity infinitely greater than in produc-
tive enterprises,” is echoed in Simms’s belief in the productivity of loss. He
has taken a philosophical approach to the public ignominy that he was sub-
jected to, and in retrospect, views it as an opportunity to reinvent himself:
“Why is blood more appealing than re-birth? Is it the color? The satisfaction
of seeing it out in the open? Bursting free of its fleshy boundaries?” (247).
The comparison between the blood imagery in Simpatico and Curse of the
Starving Class should be noted here. Simms’s words question the value that
we attribute to blood, to familial ties, and suggest the intrinsic benefit to be
gained from a rejection of this. Reinvention may have worked for Simms but
it has proved an unproductive pursuit for Vinnie: “I’ve changed my name a
dozen times and nothing came of it. I’ve moved all over the place. I was in
Texas for a while, remember? Arizona. Nothing came from any of it. I just
got—further and further—removed” (219). The detective role gives his life
purpose and at the end of the play he sets off to buy a new bottle of Black
Bush bourbon, fulfilling the perpetual cycle of masculine alcoholism and
self-destruction that seems predestined for Shepard’s men. Furthermore,
Simms’s account of the bloodlines of thoroughbreds is a further insinuation
of the fruitlessness of deviation from ancestral ties: “The glaring truth is that
every single solitary thoroughbred horse in the world—living or dead—and
all those foals to be born are, in one way or another, related by blood. From
the glue factory to the winner’s circle—each and every one of them car-
ries some common factor, minuscule as it may be” (290). Elsewhere, Simms
attributes Cecilia’s good looks to her bloodline: “Not your fault. It’s genetics.
All in the genes. We’ve nothing to do with it. It was decided generations
ago. Faceless ancestors. The curvature of your hips. You can’t possibly take
credit for that now, can you?” (295). Despite Simms’s obvious sexual objec-
tification of Cecilia, Joseph Canby of the New York Times interpreted this
character as “the play’s benign conscience.”65 If so, then the conscience of
the play somberly reiterates, in opposition to Simms’s advocation of self-
reinvention, that any departure from genetic inescapability is a profligate
enterprise, a performance of waste.
CONCLUSION
In a feature on the work of the artist Andreas Slominski, Adam Jasper uses
Bataille’s theories to illustrate the importance of motive in the artist’s work
and how “the principle of ‘maximum effort for minimum effect’ effectively
throws our normal mode of efficiency on its head.”66 Slominski’s infamy
arouse from exhibiting animal traps as art work, not as readymades which
render the object at hand useless and instead relegate it to the realm of
kinetic sculpture (as is the case with Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel [1913] for
instance), but as sculptures that simultaneously function as traps and traps
that also work as sculpture. In Slominski’s work the conceptual motive
behind the artwork trumps the produced effect. For his Imprint of the Nose
Cone of a Glider (2005), the artist brought a 40-foot-wingspan glider into
the Serpentine Gallery in London as the show was being installed, purely
to press it against a piece of pink polyurethane, which was to be exhibited
as the sole evidence of such a laborious endeavor. Adam Jasper writes of the
“eroticism of waste and the mordant humor” in Slominski’s art, a distin-
guishable trait also in Shepard’s drama. Situating Slominski’s work within
the context of Bataille’s economic theories, Jasper writes:
To escape the eventually catastrophic cycle of reinvestment, profit must be

consumed, either through luxuries, war or sexual reproduction. Art, as the
fetishism of fetishism, is the ultimate luxury. The best working definition we
have of it is “stuff that is useless.” And taken to its logical conclusion, the best
artwork is the one that produces the smallest possible return in proportion to
the resources invested.67
Indeed, Slominski’s exhibition at the Metro Pictures Gallery in New York

in 2012 was titled Sperm and consisted of a largely sparse exhibition space
with human and animal semen displayed throughout. In one room, san-
dals were splattered with the semen of a Black Panther—Sperm of a Black
Panther (2012); another contained the Sperm of Two Pilots above haystacks
on the gallery wall. The exhibition also included Sperm of a Black Man and
a White Man and Sperm of a 14-year-old Cowboy. It would be reductive
to consider Shepard’s vast body of work as a masturbatory, self-indulgent
fantasy on the part of the playwright with variations on the same Oedipal
fantasies of patricide and autonomy void of ancestral influence, (especially
in light of the imagistic, hallucinogenic Technicolor quality of his earlier
plays and the dramatically slick, contemporarily au courant nature of rock
plays such as The Tooth of Crime). However, one can see understand why
Wade might infer that “[f]or the greater part of Shepard’s writing, an ado-
lescent sensibility prevails.”68 Wade considers Shepard’s fame as born out
of “his high-octane explorations of the American male psyche, conveyed
in dazzling spectacles of ego anarchy.”69 A 14-year-old cowboy, perhaps?
Shepard has admitted that he began writing in the first place in pursuit of
fatuity: “The reason I began writing plays was the hope of extending the
sensation of play (as in ‘kid’) into adult life.” 70 Harris Smith’s labeling of
Shepard’s work as a “[b]aedeker to modern American male neuroses” seems
to ignore the fact that Shepard’s characters are locked in a ceaseless state
of performance; they are their neuroses and nothing else, their world is
their stage and their performances are wasteful because of their pointless-
ness. Yet Shepard’s sophisticated manipulation of dramatic conventions in
plays such as States of Shock and Simpatico belie an adolescent approach
to theatre. Moreover, his plays reveal a refined disruption of naturalism,
one that generates a throbbing paranoia in an environment that the audi-
ence expects will escalate into a climatic crescendo. Instead, Shepard’s plays
dissipate into the darkness of the theatre space in the same manner that
his hallucinatory plays appear. In an interview with Playboy magazine in
1984, Shepard stated that he had never “written a play that looks like a
play,” that “[t]hey look more like apparitions.”71 Shepard’s plays function
as Surrealistic visions and a reconsideration of these works in light of this
Surrealism counters the criticism directed at the playwright for failing to
deliver satisfactory endings. They are intended to disappear in the same
manner as they appear and their evasion of reconciliation heightens their
hallucinatory quality. Furthermore, a consideration of Simpatico and States
of Shock under the theoretical framework of Bataille’s notion of nonproduc-
tive expenditure, rescues Shepard’s writing of the 1990s from accusations
of a mere salvaging of overcultivated ground. Bataille’s theories, as “the
author of the only extant textbook of Surrealist macroeconomics,” 72 allow
us to consider the plight of Shepard’s characters in another light. For, as

Bataille writes,
there is nothing that permits one to define what is useful to man. [. . . . ] a

human society can have, [ . . . ] an interest in considerable losses, in catastro-
phes that, while conforming to well-defined needs, provoke tumultuous depres-
sions, crises of dread, and in the final analysis, a certain orgiastic state.73
As catastrophe, whether personal or political, acts as the stimulus in

Shepard’s plays for “tumultuous depressions [and] crises of dread,” it follows
that his characters are in perpetual pursuit of this elusive orgiastic state.
Yet, to return to Wade’s detection in the Shepard play of a rejection of the
“aegis of the father (national mythologies, corporate capitalism, stable iden-
tities, attachment to the nuclear family, and so on),” the futility of this effort
is tragically undermined by the characters’ own insurmountable, and self-
devouring, antiestablishmentarianism. For, according to Bataille,
[t]o the small extent that a man is incapable of yielding to considerations that
either are official or are susceptible of becoming so, to the small extent that he
is inclined to feel the attraction of a life devoted to the destruction of estab-
lished authority, it is difficult to believe that a peaceful world, conforming to
its interests, could be for him anything other than a convenient illusion.74
SMEs as the Unknown Stakeholder
Chapter 7
Conclusion:
Through the 1990s
and Beyond
FROM THE 1990S AND INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Through the 1990s and beyond, Shepard’s plays have developed the themes
discussed in this book and have continued to exploit automatist techniques
and promote uncensored thought, connected to improvisation, chance, and
spontaneity. When the World Was Green (A Chef ’s Fable) was cowritten with
Chaikin for an arts festival held in conjunction with the 1996 Olympics
in Atlanta. The play focuses on the story of an anonymous incarcerated
“Old Man,” in prison for a murder he was destined from birth to commit,
owing to an ancient familial dispute, which occurred generations previously.
The play is structured around a series of interviews that take place between
the Old Man and a young enthusiastic woman. The play’s setting theat-
rically alludes to the fact that the Old Man has been imprisoned by his
destiny and the themes center on the reemergence of the repressed and the
malignancy of patrilineal inheritance. In Eyes for Consuela (1998), Shepard
creates a dramatic dreamscape based on Octavio Paz’s surreal short story
“The Blue Bouquet” in which a “Gringo” character called Henry moves
to Mexico after leaving his wife in Michigan. The play begins with the
appearance of a Mexican girl, Consuela, described as though “in a world
of her own” while “[h]er movements seems to belong to some strange dream
ritual.”1 Henry then wakes from a nightmare, throwing doubt on the reality
of the entire situation. The absurdity intensifies when Henry is captured by
Amado, a Mexican native, who is on a mission to deliver “a bouquet of blue
eyes”2 to Consuela. The allusions to eye gouging and disembodiment and
a consequent Freudian reading of fetishism and the threat of emasculation,
together with the oneiric rendering of experience, are all common tropes of
Surrealism.
The Late Henry Moss (2000) resurrects the theme of male sibling rivalry
as explored in True West. The play features an absent father figure, ironi-
cally present as a corpse in the first act, recalling the unconscious Weston
spread-eagled on the kitchen table in Curse of the Starving Class. This earlier
play is also referenced in the imagery of the restocked refrigerator at the
end of The Late Henry Moss. On the other hand, The God of Hell (2004)
recalls preceding works such as Operation Sidewinder, The Unseen Hand and
States of Shock as a political satire replete with absurdist humor. Shepard’s
Kicking a Dead Horse (2007) is starkly Beckettian in content, a contem-
porary Western adaptation of Waiting for Godot. The play was written for
Stephen Rea as Hobert Struther, “an urban businessman who has suddenly
decided to rough it” who is left stranded and “kicking a dead horse” on the
open prairie. Hobert longs for a sense of elusive “Authenticity,” yet his
quest is in vain owing to the metatheatricality of the play as saturated in
references, not only to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, but also to Krapp’s Last
Tape, Endgame, and Not I. Yet it also satisfies a Surrealist agenda as dreams
magically manifest into existence:
I don’t think I can think of God

Then dream something up.
A bright—shining—sunny—day.
That might work.
The lights bump up abruptly to a bright yellowish
prairie daylight.3
Elsewhere, Hobart asks, “[w]hat wild and woolly part of the imagination
dropped me here?”4 The premiere of Ages of the Moon (2009) again featured
Rea, this time alongside Seán McGinley as two old friends Byron and Ames
who reconnect after Ames’s partner evicts him for being unfaithful. This
play extends and continues Shepard’s thematic concerns with identity, the
impact of the past on the present, the destructive nature of masculinity, and
existential contemplations of man’s place in the universe. The characters
muse over the moon just as Krapp delights in the word “Spool” seeking sol-
ace in each other’s company from the pain in their lives. Theirs is an unfa-
miliar world—“Where is this?” asks Byron, “[d]oesn’t feel like home to me.”5
Ames and Byron in Ages of the Moon seem to be matured versions of Chet
and Stu in Cowboys with their tête-á-tête tomfoolery, their existential mus-
ings, and the abeyance of time. In the earlier play the threat of annihilation
was constantly on the horizon, first, in the form of disease, specifically dia-
betes, which, Chet warns Stu, can creep up on you when you least expect it,
Conclusion 165
second, in the shape of the threat of the imaginary Indians, and last the rays
of the sun, which prove equally as hazardous to their existence. In the later
play, the fear of annihilation is justified as both men are entering into the
twilight of their lives. On the ending of the play, John Lahr wrote for The
New Yorker that “[t]he falling darkness plays as the declivity of Shepard’s life
and love,”6 reflected in Ames’s words:
Ames: [ . . . ] but what I’m trying to say is, we haven’t got all that much time
left. Here. The two of us. That’s all I’m saying. It’s not so complicated.
SHEPARD AND IRELAND
In recent years, both Shepard and his plays have had a strong presence in
Ireland. Kicking a Dead Horse and Ages of the Moon were both commis-
sioned by Ireland’s National Theatre, the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Curse
of the Starving Class was staged at the Abbey in 2011, directed by Jimmy
Fay and overseen by Shepard himself. That same year, the playwright was
actively involved in the Abbey Theatre’s New Playwrights Program, acting
as a mentor for new writers and participating in a fundraising concert for
the scheme with Patti Smith in April 2012. Shepard’s recent collaboration
with Ireland’s national theatre prompted the following glib remark about
the current director of the Abbey, Fiach Mac Conghail from an Irish Times
journalist in 2013:
Mac Conghail has been called out for the crime of name-dropping on Twitter.
There’s obviously a bit of a bromance going on with his pal Sam Shepard, as
the Abbey director can’t contain himself when the playwright and pension-age
heartthrob is in town.7
The very staging of the world premieres of three new plays in recent years by
a playwright who still markets himself as a Cowboy, on Ireland’s National
Stage suggests an incongruity, a surrealism of context as well as content.
In an interview with GQ Magazine in 2012 Shepard revealed that he still
refuses to use a computer, the internet or an email address and that his
children ridicule him as a result: “They just kind of laugh at me, like I fell
off the horse a long time ago.”8 In November 2013, Shepard premiered his
new play A Particle of Dread (Oedipus Variations) in collaboration with Field
Day Theatre Company at the Playhouse Theatre in Derry, again starring
Stephen Rea, suggesting another unearthing of the buried since all of his
plays could be described as haunted by the Oedipus complex. Yet, at a pub-
lic reading by the playwright in December 2012, on the evening before he
was conferred with an honorary degree at Trinity College Dublin, Professor
Nicholas Grene referred to him as “our own Irish playwright.” Likewise,

Professor Stephen Watt argues for a consideration of Kicking a Dead Horse in
the context of contemporary Irish literature, and includes a discussion of the
play in his monograph on Beckett and Contemporary Irish Writing (2009).
In a lecture at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in December
2012, Fiona Loughnane, associate lecturer at the National College of Art and
Design, Dublin (NCAD), spoke about the French Surrealists’ admiration for
the Irish playwright J. M. Synge and his dramatization of the domestic space
as a site for an interrogation of the unconscious. Indeed, the Surrealists lauded
Ireland for its seemingly irrational leanings and its perceived free spirit. It
seems that much of what attracted the Surrealists to Ireland has also appealed
to Shepard. The presence of Shepard’s writing on the Irish contemporary
stage is noteworthy and Ireland has also had a strong presence in Shepard’s
body of work. Heartless (2012) opens with a banshee’s scream, an ominous
omen in Irish mythology forecasting a death. The scream is described by one
of the characters as “nightmarish” and possibly belonging to the Irish matri-
arch of the family, Mable Murphy who, according to her daughter Sally, has
“been screaming for decades.”9 From these allusions, the audience is made
explicitly aware from the onset that they have entered irrational territory. The
play contains references to the Marquis de Sade alongside textual homages
to Beckett; the following lines belong to Sally (who has a mysterious scar
running down the center of her torso) and recall Beckett’s words in Proust as
quoted in the introduction of this book: “Some things just come out without
our knowing, don’t they? Ancient burning things. Catastrophes.”10 The play
opens with a quotation from Eugéne Ionesco, alluding to Absurdism; this is
reflected in the irrationality of the action, which, when combined with the
bizarre imagery suggests the surreal—an ostensibly dumb nurse, Liz, enters
the second act with bleeding feet, Sally’s sister Lucy appears stoned on her
mother’s medication, characters break spontaneously into haunting songs,
and Roscoe, the only male character in the play has a fit “in a nervous, spo-
radic mannerism, as though on the brink of a nervous breakdown.”11 At the
beginning of the second act, the stage directions reveal that Liz has a similar
scar to Sally but that this should not be made explicit to the audience: “This
should be such a sudden, visual flash that the audience wonders if they’re
seeing things.”12 Shepard expects the audience to question the reality of the
situation they perceive. Her scar suggests that Liz is the reincarnation of a
young murdered girl who donated her heart to Sally. Similarly, Hilton Als
identifies a surrealism of the language in a review of the play: “Shepard is
working new linguistic ground here, with a sparse text that’s no less surreal
than A Lie of the Mind but has more space and silence between its lines.”13
Shepard’s earlier plays also contain references to Ireland. In Geography of a
Horse Dreamer, the character of Cody, played by Stephen Rea at the premiere
Conclusion 167
production in 1974, is directed to adopt a “slightly Irish” accent near the end
of the first act, “as though he’s been inhabited by a spirit.”14 In Angel City,
Miss Scoons adopts the persona of an Irish nun,15 and in A Lie of the Mind,
Ireland is heralded as a “motherland” where the mother and daughter duo
of Lorraine and Sally16 retreat to escape the male-dominated “fatherland” of
America. Lorraine proposes that they burn their house down and escape to
County Sligo in Connaught where “[e]verybody knows everybody” and
“[t]hey’re real friendly folk.”17 Sally wonders if their Irish ancestors will still
be alive. Lorraine’s reply contains allusions to a “catastrophe” in the past,
mirroring Sally’s words in Heartless:
People don’t just all die. They don’t just all up and die at once unless it’s a
catastrophe or somethin’. Someone’s always left behind to carry on. There’s
always at least one straggler left behind. Now we’ll just ask around until we
find out who that is. We’ll track him down. And then we’ll introduce our-
selves. It’s not gonna be that difficult a task.18
Bearing in mind the topological inaccuracies of her prediction, her task may
be more difficult than she predicts—Sligo is a county in the West of Ireland
with a population of nearly 20,000 people and not the “little tiny village”
that Lorraine envisages. Nevertheless, Lorraine’s words allude to the theme
of inheritance and ancestry, and her quest to investigate her own derivation
is rare in Shepard’s male-saturated dramatic landscape. It is interesting that
Ireland is heralded in Shepard’s plays as a romanticized premodern sanctuary
to “revert” to and, in the case of the plays discussed above, the “true origin”
or perhaps the “True West” of the female characters. In this sense, the West
of Ireland functions in this play in a similar manner to the American West as
a site of authenticity. Drawing connections between both “Wests,” Eamonn
Wall refers to the historical work of Richard’s White:
Writing on the difference between local and national representations of
the American West, White has noted:
The creation of an imagined West by those who lived in a place and sought
to bond themselves to it seems readily understandable, but the creation of an
imagined West by those who lived outside the West and have few or no ties to
the place itself is more mysterious. Yet it is the critical issue, for the nationally
imagined West has been far more powerful than the locally imagined West.
It has, when necessary, put local traditions to its own uses and shaped local
myths in its own image.19
Wall adds that “In the Irish context, we can add international to national
and agree that White’s thesis holds true.”20 This is further indication of the
instability of the realism that Shepard educes. Such a sense of regression
and the probing of deviation suggest the Surrealist retreat to the site of the
unconscious, as Shepard’s evocation of Ireland evokes the fantastical rather
than surrendering to realistic credibility. As Luke Gibbons has noted of
Shepard’s writing, “[t]hings that have not happened, the failure of ideals,
exert more influence on the present than the pressures of the past itself. In
A Lie of the Mind, Lorraine looks to Sligo on a map of Ireland as the source
of her roots, though she has never been there, and is even surprised to find
it on a map of Ireland.”21
However, such a probing of Irish ancestry also has a racial dimension.
In Diane Negra’s edited collection The Irish in Us she writes of a commodi-
fied Irishness and “investigate[s] the ideological implications of the ways
that Irishness has become particularly performative and mobile at the
millennium.”22 In the same collection, Catherine M. Eagan claims “in cel-
ebrating their Irishness, Irish Americans are also finding a way to celebrate
their whiteness.”23 However, Shepard is not an Irish American thus verifying
Negra’s statement that “[w]ith a greater level of permission now given to claim
heritage amidst the cultural romance of identities, Irishness has emerges as
an ‘a la carte ethnicity’ the ideal all-purpose identity credential.”24 She also
writes that the “expectations of diaspora tourists that Ireland’s present is
always their past are less and less sustainable in contemporary Dublin or
Galway, yet homeland fantasies may now no longer require an actual home-
land visit.”25 In this way Ireland becomes a simulacrum, a myth of origin
that provides a tailor-made historical context, which is particularly relevant
in terms of Shepard’s probing of issues of authenticity. Shepard seems to be
harnessing Ireland’s history. In a recent interview about A Particle of Dread:
Oedipus Variations, Shepard’s most recent play, the writer described Ireland
as synonymous with its past: “You guys have thousands of years behind you.
We, as European Americans, have—what—400 years? That’s all we’ve got.
Four hundred years to mess around in history, whereas you’ve got thou-
sands. If, being Irish you’re carrying around a thousand years of history, you
potentially have in you knowledge that we don’t have. The history shapes
you. You go way back.”26 I conclude with the suggestion that at present,
Dublin offers the same stimulation for Shepard that it presented to Beckett
as inspiration for a Surrealist treatment of experience. For, according to Eoin
O’Brien, the Surrealism of Beckett’s writing originates from his experiences
of Ireland’s capital city:
[ . . . ] much of the apparently surrealistic in Beckett’s writing is linked, some-

times very positively, sometimes only tenuously, with the reality of exis-
tence, and much of this existence emanates from memories of Dublin, a
world rendered almost unrecognizable by Beckett’s technique of denuding
his landscape and its people (while also annihilating time) in his creation of
the “unreality of the real.”27
Conclusion 169
CONCLUSION
This book has interrogated the many strands of Surrealism that Sam Shepard
has drawn on and redefined in his theatre. It has explored the impossibility
of pure unconscious thought, which relies, in Shepard’s case, on realism
so that a Surrealist expression can deconstruct it. Shepard’s redefinition of
automatist techniques results in a release of impulsive drives and primor-
dial instincts, which create an “internal” reality opposed to logic or ratio-
nality, challenging perceived civility. This puts pressure on the realism of
the dramatic landscapes that Shepard generates. In his work, the past is
habitually superimposed on to the present. Subsequent manifestations of the
absurd emerge creating a theatrical space that tests the limits of rationality.
Furthermore, this book has explored the hallucinatory, dreamlike imagery
that emerges both in the text and in the production of his plays, inviting
comparisons with Surrealist visuals.
Linked to Beckett’s existentialism, the notion of male identity and a quest
for a life-affirming selfhood are perhaps Shepard’s most pressing concerns.
Shepard has in recent years enjoyed a renaissance as a film actor, deliver-
ing critically acclaimed performances in, among others, Killing Them Softly
(2012), Mud (2012), August: Osage County (2013), Out of the Furnace (2013),
and most recently in Cold in July (2014). However, there are thematic simi-
larities in the roles that he chooses, favoring a brooding (often alcoholic)
war-veteran, patriarchic prototype. In his writing, Surrealist imagery has
granted the playwright the necessary leeway to interrogate this in a way
that realism does not. This allows his dramatic imagery to span generations
of ancestral lineage, as is the case in the following section of Buried Child,
for instance, where Vince’s reflection can conflate with the ghosts of his
American ancestry. The passage explicitly relates to Dawn Ades’s definition
of the Surrealist image as “born by the chance juxtaposition of two different
realities.”28
I could see myself in the windshield. My face. My eyes. I studied my face.

Studied everything about it. As though I was looking at another man. As
though I could see his whole race behind him. Like a mummy’s face. I saw
him dead and alive at the same time. In the same breath. [ . . . ] And then his
face changed. His face 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. Changing. Clear on back to faces I’d never seen
before but still recognized.29
This study has examined Shepard’s early work as crystallizations of images

that explore the origin of identity, to his family plays that assume a decep-
tive realist guise in order to deliver Surrealist expression. Through his “rock”
plays and his collaborations with Chaikin to his plays from the 1990s,
Shepard’s drama constantly refuses to surrender to naturalism. He pilfers
both his own consciousness and that of the collective American experience
for the repressed. This book has demonstrated how the foregrounding of the
Surrealism in Shepard’s work can significantly elucidate our understanding
of his experimental approach to drama. The lack of closure in Shepard’s
work reflects his eschewal of linear narration in favor of a more susceptible
transmission of experience. There is no ending for Surrealism because, as
Hughes reminds us, “Surrealism never realized its desired intentions; the
kingdom of the imagination is no nearer than the kingdom of the saints.”30
The same can be said for Shepard’s dramatic pursuit. His description of the
compulsion to express, as quoted in relation to his early plays as “survival
kits” at the very beginning of the first chapter, has equal resonance now in
the context of Shepard’s prolific literary output. His dramatic writing seems
to mirror his male characters’ pursuit of subjectivity and their need to forage
their childhoods, their ancestry, their American mythologies, for some indi-
cation and verification of selfhood, an eternal pursuit that will undoubtedly
extend infinitely into the future as into the past.
Notes
Introduction
1. Michiko Kakutani, “Myths, Dreams, Realities—Sam Shepard’s America,”
New York Times, January 29, 1984, 26.
2. Bernard Weiner, “Sam Shepard’s Buried Child—a Major, Bitter New Play,”
San Francisco Chronicle, August 6, 1978, 19.
3. Susan Harris Smith, “Estrangement and Engagement: Sam Shepard’s
Dramaturgical Strategies,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 3.1
(Fall 1988): 79.
4. Bonnie Marranca, “Alphabetical Shepard: The Play of Words,” in American
Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard, ed. Bonnie Marranca (New York:
Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1981), 15.
5. Ibid.
6. Sam Shepard, interview with Gwynne Watkins, “Sam Shepard Gives a Rare
Interview, Thinks Safe House Could’ve Been Better,” GQ Magazine, June 11,
2012. Accessed January 31, 2013. http://www.gq.com/entertainment/tv
/blogs/the-stream/2012/06/sam-shepard-interview-safe-house.html.
7. In Gay Gibson Cima, “Shifting Perspectives: Combining Shepard and
Rauschenberg,” Theatre Journal 38, no. 1 (1986): 68.
8. Stephen J. Bottoms, The Theatre of Sam Shepard: States of Crisis (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 25.
9. Michael Almereyda, “Sam Shepard: The All American Cultural Icon at 50,”
Arena, May/June 1994, 69.
10. Samuel Beckett, Tal Coat, in dialogue with Georges Duthuit, Proust
and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: John Calder, 1999),
103.
11. Sam Shepard, States of Shock in Sam Shepard: Plays 3 (London: Methuen
Drama, 1996), 152.
12. Samuel Beckett, Proust, in Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit
(London: John Calder, 1999), 13.
1 Surrealism and Sam Shepard’s

Early Plays: 1964–1967
1. Pete Hamill, “The New American Hero,” New York 16 (1983): 98.
172 Notes
2. Sam Shepard, Icarus’s Mother in Sam Shepard: Plays: 1 (London: Methuen,

1996), 75. (All subsequent references to the play will be incorporated into
the text.)
3. In Michael Almereyda, “Sam Shepard: The All American Cultural Icon
at 50,” Arena (May/June 1994): 66.
4. Ibid., 90.
5. Christopher Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American
Drama: Volume Three, Beyond Broadway (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1985), 224.
6. Almereyda, “Sam Shepard,” 69.
7. Bradford R. Collins, “Modern Romance: Lichtenstein’s Comic Book
Paintings,” American Art 17 (2003): 77.
8. Ibid., 79–80.
9. Luther S. Luedtke, “From Fission to Fusion: Sam Shepard’s Nuclear
Families,” in New Essays on American Drama, ed. Gilbert Debusscher and
Henry I. Schvey (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989), 143.
10. Pamela M. Homer and Lynn R. Kahle, “A Social Adaptation Explanation
of the Effects of Surrealism on Advertising,” Journal of Advertising 15
(1986): 50–51.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., 80.
13. Salvador Dalí, “The Moral Position of Surrealism,” in Oui: The Paranoid-
Critical Revolution, ed. Robert Descharnes (Boston: Exact Change, 1971),
112.
14. Sam Shepard, Red Cross, in Sam Shepard: Plays 1 (London: Methuen,
1996), 139–140. (All subsequent references to the play will be incorporated
into the text.)
15. Dalí, “The Moral Position of Surrealism,” 112.
16. Ibid., 116.
17. Salvador Dalí, “The Rotting Donkey,” in Oui: The Paranoid-Critical
Revolution, ed. Robert Descharnes (Boston: Exact Change, 1971), 116.
18. Ibid., 118.
19. Ibid., 119.
20. Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Routledge, 1991),
17–18.
21. Ibid., 17.
22. Ibid., 19.
23. Sam Shepard, Fourteen Hundred Thousand, in Sam Shepard: Plays 1
(London: Methuen, 1996), 120. (All subsequent references to the play will
be incorporated into the text.)
24. In Lydia Goehr, “Hardboiled Disillusionment: Mahagonny as the Last
Culinary Opera,” Cultural Critique 68 (2008): 16.
25. Ibid., 8.
26. In Goehr, “Hardboiled Disillusionment,” 5.
27. Ibid., 3–4.
28. Bertolt Brecht, Journals: 1932–1955 (New York: Routledge, 1996), 84.
Notes 173
29. In John Willett. The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht: A Study from Eight Aspects
(London: Methuen, 1967), 173.
30. Sam Shepard, La Turista, in Sam Shepard: Plays Two (London: Faber and
Faber, 1997), 262.
31. Sam Shepard, The Holy Ghostly in Sam Shepard: Plays 1 (London: Methuen,
1996), 203.
32. Sam Shepard, interview with Kenneth Chubb et al., “Metaphors, Mad
Dogs and Old Time Cowboys” in American Dreams: The Imagination of
Sam Shepard (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications), 193.
33. Ellen Oumano, Sam Shepard: The Life and Work of an American Dreamer
(London: Virgin, 1987), 13.
34. Sam Shepard, interview with Carol Rosen. Sam Shepard: A Poetic Rodeo
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 243.
35. Jennifer Mundy, “The Art of Friendship,” in Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia,
ed. Mundy (London: Tate Publishing, 2008), 43.
36. David Hopkins, “Male Poetics,” in Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia, ed.
Jennifer Mundy (London: Tate Publishing, 2008), 81.
37. RoseLee Goldberg, Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1979), 52.
38. Sam Shepard, The Rock Garden in Plays 1 (London: Methuen, 1996), 41.
(All subsequent references to the play will be incorporated into the text).
39. Sam Shepard, Motel Chronicles (San Francisco: City Lights Book, 1982), 53.
40. Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London:
John Calder, 1965), 67.
41. Shepard returned to the theme of childbirth for his 1974 play Little Ocean,
directed by Stephen Rea, his only play featuring an all-female cast.
42. Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change (New
York: McGraw Hill, 1991), 422.
43. Ibid., 45.
44. Sam Shepard, A Lie of the Mind in Plays 3 (London: Methuen, 1996),
80–81.
45. Luedtke, “From Fission to Fusion: Sam Shepard’s Nuclear Families,”146.
46. Dalí, “The Rotting Donkey,” 118.
47. Ibid.
48. Willett, The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht, 172.
49. David J. DeRose, “Sam Shepard as Musical Experimenter,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard, ed. Matthew Roudané (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2002), 233.
50. Ibid., 77.
2 Myth, Ritual, and a Search for

Selfhood: 1969–1972
1. Hank Hine, Pollock to Pop: America’s Brush with Dalí (St Petersburg:
Salvador Dalí Museum Publication, 2005), 26.
174 Notes
2. Sam Shepard, Cowboy Mouth, in Fool of Love and Other Plays (New York:
Dial Press, 2006), 157.
3. Susan Harris Smith, Masks in Modern Drama (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984), 13.
4. Michael Almereyda, “Sam Shepard: The All American Cultural Icon at
50,” Arena (May/June 1994): 69.
5. Harris Smith, Masks in Modern Drama, 13.
6. Christopher Innes, Avant Garde Theatre (New York: Routledge, 1993), 26.
7. Jean Baudrillard and Philippe Petit, Paroxysm: Interviews with Philippe
Petit, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1998), 49.
8. Sam Shepard, Operation Sidewinder, in Sam Shepard: Plays 1 (London:
Methuen, 2002), 258. (All subsequent references to the play will be incor-
porated into the text.)
9. Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman
(New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 142.
10. Ibid.
11. Wayne Stengel, “The Inside Outside World of Sam Shepard’s La Turista,”
Publications of the Arkansas Philological Association (1987): 49.
12. Leonard Wilcox, “Modernism vs. Postmodernism: Shepard’s The Tooth of
Crime and the Discourses of Popular Culture,” Modern Drama 30, no. 4
(December 1987): 570.
13. Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (New York: Vintage Books,
2004), 22.
14. Sam Shepard, The Unseen Hand, in Sam Shepard: Plays 1 (London:
Methuen, 2002), 10. (All subsequent references to the play will be incorpo-
rated into the text.)
15. Ron Mottram, Inner Landscapes: The Theater of Sam Shepard (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 1984), 70.
17. Sam Shepard and Patti Smith, Cowboy Mouth, in Fool for Love and Other
Plays (New York: Dial Press, 2006), 147. (All subsequent references to the
play will be incorporated into the text.)
18. Stephen Watt, Beckett and Contemporary Irish Writing (Cambridge:
19. Ibid.
20. Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change
(London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 241.
21. Stengel, “The Inside Outside World of Sam Shepard’s La Turista,” 55.
22. Michael Gould, Surrealism and the Cinema: Open Eyed Screening (New York:
Barnes, 1976), 16.
23. Sam Shepard, Shaved Splits in The Unseen Hand and Other Plays
(Indianapolis/New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), 172–173. (All subsequent
references to the play will be incorporated into the text.)
24. Natalya Lusty, Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Hampshire: Ashgate,
2007), 51.
Notes 175
25. Gould, Surrealism and the Cinema, 21–22.

26. Ibid., 22.
27. Ibid., 21.
28. Ibid.
29. Sam Shepard, The Tooth of Crime, in Sam Shepard: Plays 2, intro. Richard
Gilman (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 230. (All subsequent references
to the play will be incorporated into the text.)
30. Bottoms, The Theatre of Sam Shepard, 69.
31. Antonin Artaud, The Jet of Blood in Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, ed.
Susan Sontag (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 75.
32. Ibid., 73.
33. Christopher Innes, Holy Theatre: Ritual and the Avant Garde (New York:
34. Antonin Artaud, “The Theatre of Cruelty: First Manifesto,” in Modern
Theories of Drama: A Selection of Writings on Drama and Theatre, 1840–
1990, ed. George W. Brandt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 190. Emphasis
mine.
35. Bottoms, The Theatre of Sam Shepard, 61.
36. Peter Collier and Edward Timms, Visions and Blueprints: Avant-Garde
Culture and Radical Politics in Early Twentieth-Century Europe (Manchester:
Manchester UP, 1988), 44.
37. Michael Smith, “Theatre: Cowboys and The Rock Garden,” Village Voice,
October 22, 1964, 13.
38. Roger Caillois, “The Function of Myth,” in The Edge of Surrealism: A
Roger Caillois Reader, ed. Claudine Frank (Durham: Duke UP, 2003),
119.
39. Michael Richardson, introduction to The Absence of Myth by Georges
Bataille (London: Verso, 1994), 14.
40. Carol Rosen, “Emotional Territory: An Interview with Sam Shepard,”
Modern Drama 36 (1993): 5.
41. Christopher Bigsby, “David Mamet: All True Stories,” in Modern American
Drama 1945–2000, ed. Christopher Bigsby (New York: Cambridge UP,
2000), 200. Emphasis mine.
42. In Gerard Weales, “The Transformation of Sam Shepard,” in American
Performing Arts Publications, 1981), 41.
43. Georges Bataille, “The Absence of Myth,” in The Absence of Myth: Writings
on Surrealism, ed. Michael Richardson (London: Verso, 1994), 48.
44. Richardson, introduction to the The Absence of Myth, 13.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid., 14.
47. Roland Barthes, “Myth Today,” in A Roland Barthes Reader, ed. Susan
Sontag (London: Vintage, 1993), 131.
48. Ibid., 119.
49. Ibid., 118.
50. Shepard, “Metaphors, Mad Dogs,” 202.
176 Notes
51. Jeanette R. Malkin, Verbal Violence in Contemporary Drama: From Handke

to Shepard (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), 207.
52. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double (New York: Grove Press,
1997), 72.
53. Don Shewey, Sam Shepard (New York: Dell, 1985), 89.
54. Bruce W. Powe, “The Tooth of Crime: Sam Shepard’s Way With Music,”
Modern Drama 1 (March 1981): 16.
55. Ibid., 17.
57. Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (London: Routledge, 1994), 74.
58. Patti Smith, Just Kids (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 180.
59. Shewey, Sam Shepard, 78.
60. Ibid., 185.
62. Sam Shepard, interview with Kenneth Chubb et al., “Metaphors, Mad
Dogs and Old Time Cowboys” in American Dreams: The Imagination of
Sam Shepard, ed. Bonnie Marranca (New York: Performing Arts Journal
Publications), 201.
63. Wilcox, “Modernism vs. Postmodernism,” 568.
65. Wilcox, “Modernism vs. Postmodernism,” 570.
66. Ibid., 572.
67. Gregory W. Lanier, “The Killer’s Ancient Mask: Unity and Dualism in
Shepard’s The Tooth of Crime,” Modern Drama 36, no. 1 (March 1993): 58.
3 Surrealism and Sam Shepard’s Family

Plays: Representing Gender
1. James F. Schlatter, “Some Kind of a Future: The War for Inheritance in the
Work of Three American Playwrights of the 1970s,” South Central Review
7, no. 1 (1990): 60.
2. Sam Shepard, True West, in Sam Shepard: Plays 2, intro. Richard Gilman
(London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 3–4. (All subsequent references to the
3. Quoted in Stephen J. Bottoms, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (Cambridge:
4. Charles R. Lyons, “Shepard’s Family Trilogy and the Conventions of
Modern Realism,” in Rereading Shepard: Contemporary Critical Essays on
the Plays of Sam Shepard, ed. Leonard Wilcox (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1993), 118.
5. Brian Bartels, “Sam Shepard’s Master Class in Playwriting,” The Missouri
Review 30, no. 2 (2007): 85.
6. Leslie A. Wade, Sam Shepard and the American Theatre (Westport, CT:
Praeger, 1997), 94. Emphasis mine.
Notes 177
7. Sam Shepard, Buried Child, in Sam Shepard: Plays 2, intro. Richard Gilman
(London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 63. (All subsequent references to the play
will be incorporated into the text.)
8. Johan Callens, Dis/Figuring Shepard (Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2007), 47.
9. Quoted in John Dugdale, File on Shepard (London: Methuen Drama,
1989), 39.
10. Robert Coe, “Saga of Sam Shepard,” The New York Times Magazine
November 23, 1980, carton 4, folder 4.55. Coll. BANC MSS 81/184 c,
The Magic Theatre Records, Bancroft Library, University of California,
Berkeley.
11. Nancy Meckler, quoted in the San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle,
September 14, 1980 by Bernard Weiner, carton 4, folder 4.55. Coll. BANC
MSS 81/184 c, The Magic Theatre Records, Bancroft Library, University
of California, Berkeley.
12. Callens, Dis/Figuring Shepard, 47.
13. Richard Halpern, Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2006), 2.
14. Clarissa J. Ceglio, “Complicating Simplicity,” American Quarterly 54, no. 2
(2002): 301.
15. Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant (London: Pan Books, 1980), 217.
16. Una Chaudhuri, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (Ann
Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1995), 109–113.
17. Ibid., 110–111.
18. Silvano Levy, “René Magritte: Representing Iconoclasm,” in Surrealism:
Surrealist Visuality, ed. Silvano Levy (Edinburgh: Keele UP, 1997), 15.
19. Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 178.
20. Ibid.
21. Katherine Conley, “Safe as Houses: Anamorphic Bodies in Ordinary
Spaces: Miller, Varo, Tanning, Woodman,” in Angels of Anarchy: Women
Artists and Surrealism, ed. Patricia Allmer (Munich: Prestel, 2009), 50.
22. Paula Lumbard, “Dorothea Tanning: On the Threshold to a Darker Place,”
Woman’s Art Journal 2, no. 1 (1981): 52.
23. Anneleen Masschelein. “A Homeless Concept: Shapes of the Uncanny in
Twentieth-Century Theory and Culture,” Image & Narrative no. 5 (2003).
Accessed 21/08/2014, http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/uncanny
/anneleenmasschelein.htm.
24. Ibid.
25. Ernst Fischer, “Writing Home: Post-Modern Melancholia and the Uncanny
Space of Living-Room Theatre,” in Psychoanalysis and Performance, eds.
Patrick Campbell and Adrian Kear (London: Routledge, 2001), 119.
26. Ibid., 47–48.
27. Lynda Hart, Sam Shepard’s Metaphorical Stages (New York: Greenwood
Press, 1987), 69.
28. Sam Shepard, interview with Newsweek Magazine on July 26, 1976,
carton 4, folder 4.54. Coll. BANC MSS 81/184 c, The Magic Theatre
Records, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
178 Notes
29. Sam Shepard, Curse of the Starving Class, in Sam Shepard: Plays 2, intro.
Richard Gilman (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 135. (All subsequent
references to the play will be incorporated into the text.)
30. Edwin Wilson, “Sam Shepard: Bleeding in Red, White and Blue,” The
Wall Street Journal, April 3, 1980, carton 4, folder 4.55. Coll. BANC MSS
81/184 c, The Magic Theatre Records, Bancroft Library, University of
California, Berkeley.
31. Wade, Sam Shepard and the American Theatre, 98.
32. Richard Eder, New York Times, March 3, 1978, carton 4, folder 4.55. Coll.
BANC MSS 81/184 c, The Magic Theatre Records, Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley.
34. Ethan Hawke. Quoted in The New Yorker, September 10, 2012. “The
Theatre: Mother Knows Best: The Women Take Control in Heartless” by
Hilton Als, 106.
35. Shepard’s mother-in-law Scarlett Johnson and his close friend and collabo-
rator Joseph Chaikin suffered strokes respectively in 1979 and 1984 and
were rendered aphasic as a result. Chaikin’s aphasia is discussed in detail in
chapter 5. Shepard seems to have used both of these instances as inspiration
for Beth’s character.
36. Sam Shepard, A Lie of the Mind, in Sam Shepard: Plays 3 (London: Methuen
Drama, 1996), 10. (All subsequent references to the play will be incorpo-
37. Susan Gubar, “Representing Pornography: Feminism, Criticism, and
Depictions of Female Violation,” Critical Inquiry 13, no. 4 (1987): 723.
39. Ibid.
40. James Penner, review of Fool for Love by Sam Shepard, Theatre Journal 52,
no. 1 (2000): 117.
41. Sam Shepard, Fool for Love, in Fool for Love and Other Plays (New York:
Dial Press, 2006), 19. (All subsequent references to the play will be incor-
porated into the text.)
42. Robert Asahina, “The Real Stuff,” The Hudson Review (Spring 1984)
carton 4, folder 4.57. Coll. BANC MSS 81/184 c, The Magic Theatre
Records, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
43. Ibid.
44. Mottram, Inner Landscapes: The Theater of Sam Shepard (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 1984), 153.
Drama: Volume Three—Beyond Broadway (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1985), 148.
46. Wendy Lesser, “True Shepard,” The Threepenny Review 4 (1981): 18.
47. Robert Coe, “Saga of Sam Shepard,” New York Times Magazine, November
23, 1980, carton 4, folder 4.55. Coll. BANC MSS 81/184 c, The Magic
Theatre Records, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
Notes 179
48. Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama, 170.

Emphasis mine.
49. David Savran, A Queer Sort of Materialism: Recontextualizing American
Theatre (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2003), 134.
50. Jonathan P. Eburne, Surrealism and the Art of Crime (New York: Cornell
UP, 2008), 4.
51. Naomi Greene, “Antonin Artaud: Metaphysical Revolutionary,” Yale French
Studies 39 (1967): 193.
52. Peter L. Hays, “Child Murder and Incest in American Drama,” Twentieth
Century Literature 30 (1990): 443.
53. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 234.
54. Freud, Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages
and Neurotics (New York: Vintage Books, 1946), 7–8.
55. Ibid., 17.
56. Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts, trans. William Archer (Charleston, SC: Bibliobazaar,
2007), 88.
57. Ibid., 90.
58. Robert W. Corrigan, “The Sun Always Rises: Ibsen’s Ghosts as Tragedy?”
Educational Theatre Journal 11, no. 3 (October 1959): 171.
59. Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 79.
60. Sam Shepard, The Holy Ghostly, in Sam Shepard: Plays 1 (London: Methuen,
the text.)
61. Charlotte Stokes, “Surrealist Persona: Max Ernst’s ‘Loplop, Superior of
Birds,’” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 13, no. 3/4
(1983): 231.
62. Rudolf E. Kuenzli, “Surrealism and Misogyny,” in Surrealism and Women,
ed. Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf Kuenzli, and Gwen Raaberg (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1993), 19.
63. Natalya Lusty, Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Hampshire: Ashgate,
2007), 8.
64. Ibid., 9.
65. Kuenzli, “Surrealism and Misogyny,” 17.
66. Robert J. Belton, “Speaking with Forked Tongues: ‘Male’ Discourse in
‘Female’ Surrealism?” in Surrealism and Women, ed. Mary Ann Caws,
Rudolf Kuenzli, and Gwen Raaberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1993), 10.
67. Sue Taylor, “Hans Bellmer in The Art Institute of Chicago: The Wandering
Libido and the Hysterical Body,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies
22, no. 2 (1996): 151.
68. Sam Shepard, The Tooth of Crime, in Sam Shepard: Plays 2, intro. Richard
Gilman (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 246. (All subsequent references
to the play will be incorporated into the text.)
70. Ibid.
180 Notes
71. David Savran, “The Sadomasochist in the Closet: Sam Shepard, Robert
Bly, and the New White Masculinity,” in A Queer Sort of Materialism:
Recontextualizing American Theatre by David Savran (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 2003), 147.
73. Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and its Discontents (Connecticut: Martino
Publishing, 2010), 77 n.1.
74. Bonnie Marranca, “Alphabetical Shepard: The Play of Words,” in American
Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1981), 31.
75. Savran, “The Sadomasochist in the Closet,” 145.
76. Ibid., 148.
77. Brenda Murphy, “Shepard Writes about Writing,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Sam Shepard, ed. Matthew Roudané (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2002), 134.
78. Susan Bennett, “When a Woman Looks: The ‘Other’ Audience of Shepard’s
Plays,” in Rereading Shepard: Contemporary Critical Essays on the Plays of
Sam Shepard, ed. Leonard Wilcox (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993),
171.
79. Lynda Hart, “Sam Shepard’s Spectacle of Impossible Heterosexuality: Fool
for Love,” in Feminist Rereadings of Modern American Drama, ed. June
Schleuter (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1989), 224.
80. Conley, “Safe as Houses,” 1.
81. Ibid., 11.
82. Kuenzli, “Surrealism and Misogyny,” 19.
84. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross Dressing and Cultural Anxiety
(New York: Routledge, 2011), 94.
85. In Bennett, “When a Woman Looks,” 176.
86. Florence Falk. “Men without Women: The Shepard Landscape,” in
American Dreams: The American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard,
ed. Bonnie Marranca (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications,
1981), 99.
87. Marranca, “Alphabetical Shepard,” 31.
88. James A. Schlatter, “Some Kind of Future: The War for Inheritance in the
Work of Three American Playwrights of the 1970s,” South Central Review 7,
no. 1 (1990): 61.
89. Hughes, The Shock of the New, 255.
90. Sam Shepard, La Turista, in Sam Shepard: Plays Two (London: Faber and
Faber, 1997), 262.
91. Patti Smith, “Jag-Arr of the Jungle,” published in CREEM, January 1973.
93. Susan Gubar, “Representing Pornography: Feminism, Criticism, and
Depictions of Female Violation,” Critical Inquiry 13, no. 4 (1987):
722–723.
Notes 181
94. Ibid. Emphasis mine.

95. Ibid., 723.
96. Lusty, Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, 134.
97. Ibid., 135.
98. Lusty, Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, 135–136.
99. Ibid., 131.
101. Stephen Watt, “Simulation, Gender, and Postmodernism,” Perspectives on
Contemporary Literature 13 (1987): 80–81.
102. Ibid.
103. The influence of the plays of Beckett on Shepard’s theatre will be analyzed
in greater detail in chapter 5.
105. Carla J. McDonough, Staging Masculinity: Male Identity in Contemporary
American Drama (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997), 38.
106. Ibid.
4 A Comparative Study of Sam Shepard’s

Angel City and Luis Buñuel and
Salvador Dalí’s Un chien andalou
1. Michael Almereyda, “Sam Shepard: The All American Cultural Icon at
50,” Arena, May/June 1994, 69.
2. Christopher Bigsby, “Blood and Bones Yet Dressed in Poetry: The Drama
of Sam Shepard,” Contemporary Theatre Review 8, no. 3 (1998): 29. Emphasis
mine.
3. Linda Williams, Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 55.
4. Ibid., 70–71.
5. Ibid., 65.
6. Ibid., 68.
7. Ibid., 72.
8. Ibid., 73.
9. Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier, trans.
Celia Britton et al. (London: Macmillan, 1982), 58.
10. Ibid., 59.
11. Peter William Evans and Isabel Santaolalla, Luis Buñuel: New Readings
(London: British Film Institute, 2004), 1–2.
12. Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (London: Routledge,
1997), 82.
13. James Knowlson. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York:
Grove Press, 1996), 425.
14. Susan C. W. Abbotson, “Sam Shepard: A Bibliographic Essay and
Production Overview,” in The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard, ed.
Matthew Roudané (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 307.
182 Notes
15. Charlotte Chandler, I, Fellini (New York: Random House, 1995), 21.
16. Sam Shepard. Geography of a Horse Dreamer, in Fool for Love and Other
Plays (New York: Dial Press, 2006), 280. (All subsequent references to the
17. Joel Schechter, review of Angel City by Sam Shepard, Educational Theatre
Journal 26, no. 3 (1974): 401.
18. Sam Shepard, The Rolling Thunder Logbook (London: Sanctuary, 2005),
175.
19. Ibid., 177.
20. Ibid., 15.
21. Michael J. Gilmour, The Gospel According to Bob Dylan: The Old, Old Story
of Modern Times (Louisville, KY: John Knox, 2011), 12.
22. Ibid., 13.
23. Sam Shepard, Angel City, in Fool for Love and Other Plays (New York: Dial
Press, 2006), 62. (All subsequent references to the play will be incorpo-
Drama: Volume Three—Beyond Broadway, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1985), 76.
25. Shepard, Rolling Thunder Logbook, 98.
26. Ibid., 44.
27. Quoted in Stephen J. Bottoms, The Theatre of Sam Shepard: States of Crisis
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), 126.
28. Patrick J. Fennell, review of Angel City by Sam Shepard, Educational
Theatre Journal 29.1 (1977): 112.
29. Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 19.
30. Sam Shepard, interview with Newsweek Magazine, July 26, 1979, carton
4, folder 4.54. Coll. BANC MSS 81/184 c, The Magic Theatre Records,
Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
31. Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Routledge,
1991), 52.
32. Jack Undank, “The Violence of Signs,” review of Un Chien Andalou by
Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, The French Review 50, no. 3 (1997):
486–487.
33. Toby Silverman Zinman, “Shepard’s Theatre of the First Wall,” Theatre
Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 514.
34. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film Theory
and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen
(New York: Oxford UP, 1999), 836.
35. Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema, 67.
36. Ibid., 68.
37. Florence Falk, “The Role of Performance in Sam Shepard’s Plays,” Theatre
Journal 33, no. 2 (1981): 183–184.
38. Ibid., 184.
39. This recalls Joyce’s words “roll away the reel world, the reel world, the reel
world” (64.25) in Finnegans Wake, a book he described as an “imitation of
Notes 183
the dream-state” as quoted in Don Gifford, Zones of Re-Membering: Time,

Memory, and (un)Conscious (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), 109.
40. Juan Roberto Mora Catlett, “Buñuel, the Realist: Variations of a Dream,”
in Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, ed. Marsha Kinder
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 44.
41. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Herfordshire: Wordsworth,
1997), 15.
42. Ibid., 5.
43. Falk, “The Role of Performance in Sam Shepard’s Plays,” 183.
44. Undank, “The Violence of Signs,” 487.
45. Ibid., 486.
46. Luis Buñuel, My Last Breath, trans. Abigail Israel (London: Jonathan Cape,
1985), 104.
47. Marsha Kinder, “The Nomadic Discourse of Luis Buñuel: A Rambling
Overview,” in Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, ed.
Marsha Kinder (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 5.
48. Ross Wetzsteon, “Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth,” in American
Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard, ed. Bonnie Marranca (New
York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1981), 135.
49. Kinder, “The Nomadic Discourse of Luis Buñuel,” 9 and n.16.
50. In Gwynne Edwards, A Companion to Luis Buñuel (Woodbridge: Tamesis,
2005), 26.
51. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 17.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid., 16.
54. J. F. Pagel, C. Kriatkowski, and K. E. Broyles, “Dream Use in Film
Making,” Dreaming: Journal of the Association for the Study of Dreams 9,
no. 4 (1999): 248. Emphasis mine.
55. Sylvie Drake, “Sam Shepard: A Play for Every Life Style,” Los Angeles Times,
October 21, 1979, 62.
56. André Breton, “As in Wood,” The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist
Writings on the Cinema, ed. Paul Hammond (San Francisco: City Lights,
2000), 73–74.
57. Elizabeth H. Lyon, “Luis Buñuel: The Process of Dissociation in Three
Films,” Cinema Journal 13, no. 1 (1973): 46.
59. Ibid., 50–51.
60. Frank D. McConnell, The Spoken Seen: Film and the Romantic Imagination
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1975), 17.
62. Ibid., 25.
63. Ibid., 28.
64. Ibon Izurieta, “Performativity in Buñuel’s The Phantom Liberty and The
Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” Modern Language Review 103, no. 3
(2008): 754.
65. Buñuel, My Last Breath, 107.
184 Notes

67. Lyon, “Luis Buñuel,” 48.
68. Ibid.
69. Williams, Figures of Desire, 100–101.
70. Mora Catlett, “Buñuel, the Realist,” 46–47.
71. Kinder, “The Nomadic Discourse of Luis Buñuel,” 20.
72. Buñuel, My Last Breath, 93.
73. Ibid., 94–95.
74. Julie Jones, “‘Long Live Death!’ The End of Revolution in Luis Buñuel’s
The Phantom of Liberty,” Cinema Journal 42, no. 4 (2003): 72–73.
76. Mora Catlett, “Buñuel, the Realist,” 56.
77. Ibid.
78. Jones, “Long Live Death!” 73.
79. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard
Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 9.
80. Ibid., 89.
5 Tongues, Savage/Love, and The War in

Heaven: Angel’s Monologue: Joseph
Chaikin and Sam Shepard in Collaboration
1. Eileen Blumenthal, “Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaikin: Speaking in
Tongues,” in American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard, ed.
Bonnie Marranca (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1981),
142–143.
2. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby
(Oxon: Routledge, 2006), 166.
3. Sam Shepard, Tongues in Sam Shepard: Plays 2, intro. Richard Gilman
(London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 302. (All subsequent references to the
4. Blumenthal, “Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaikin,” 136.
5. William Kleb, “Shepard and Chaikin Speaking in Tongues,” Theater 10
(Fall 1978): 66.
6. J. L. Styan, Modern Drama in Theory and Practice. Volume 2. Symbolism,
Surrealism and the Absurd (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981), 156.
7. Stephen J. Bottoms, “Sam Shepard and Off-Off Broadway: The Unseen
Hand of Theatre Genesis,” in The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard,
ed. Matthew Roudané (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 35.
8. Ibid., 30.
9. Christopher Bigsby, Twentieth Century American Drama, Volume 3. Beyond
Broadway (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), 46.
10. David G. Zinder, The Surrealist Connection: An Approach to a Surrealist
Aesthetic of Theatre (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Press, 1980), 127.
Notes 185
11. John Tytell, The Living Theatre: Art, Exile and Outrage (London: Methuen
Drama, 1997), 13–14.
12. Ibid., 263.
13. Peter Brook, The Empty Space (Middlesex: Penguin, 1980), 70–71.
14. Joseph Chaikin, “The Open Theatre,” The Tulane Drama Review 9 (Winter
1964), 196.
15. Obituary, n.a., The Guardian, June 26, 2003 [http://www.guardian.co.uk
/news/2003/jun/26/guardianobituaries1].
16. Shomit Mitter, “Inner and Outer: ‘Open Theatre’ in Peter Brook and Joseph
Chaikin,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 3 (Fall 1988): 48.
17. Ibid., 54.
18. Johan Callens, Dis/Figuring Sam Shepard (Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Land,
2007), 129.
19. Joseph Chaikin, The Presence of the Actor (New York: Theatre Communica-
tions Group, 1991), 130–131.
20. Ellen Oumano, Sam Shepard: The Life and Work of an American Dreamer
(London: Virgin, 1986), 52.
21. Leslie A. Wade, Sam Shepard and the American Theatre (Westport: Praeger,
1997), 78.
22. Ibid.
23. Sam Shepard, Killer’s Head in Sam Shepard: Plays 1 (London: Methuen,
the text.)
24. Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (London:
HarperCollins, 1996), 387.
25. Leonard Wilcox, “Modernism vs. Postmodernism: Shepard’s The Tooth of
Crime and the Discourses of Popular Culture,” Modern Drama 30, no. 4
(1987), 562.
26. Sam Shepard, “Directors Statement,” in carton 4, folder 4.55. Coll. BANC
MSS 81/184 c, The Magic Theatre Records, Bancroft Library, University
of California, Berkeley.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Karen Ann Quinlan was a 21-year old from Pennsylvania who had been
left in a comatose state after her brain was deprived of oxygen following a
collapse at a party in 1975. Her parents launched an extensive legal battle
over her “right to die” and the case opened up a controversial discussion on
euthanasia in the United States at the time.
30. William Kleb, “Sam Shepard’s Inacoma at the Magic Theatre.” Theatre 9
(Fall 1977): 59–64.
31. Sam Shepard, Mill Valley, California, May 23, 1977 in Joseph Chaikin and
Sam Shepard: Letters and Texts, 1972–1984, ed. Barry Daniels (New York:
Theatre Communications Group, 1994), 18.
32. Ibid., 35.
33. Ibid., 40.
186 Notes
34. Carlos Castaneda, The Second Ring of Power (London: Hodder and
Stoughton, 1977), 227.
35. Theodore Shank, American Alternative Theatre (London: Macmillan,
1982), 39.
36. Sam Shepard, Tongues in Sam Shepard Plays:2 (London: Faber and Faber,
1997), 300–301.
37. Ibid., 48.
38. Ibid., 57.
39. E. F. Kaelin, “On ‘Form’ and ‘Content’: An Essay in Meta-Criticism,”
review of Existential Thought and Fictional Technique: Kierkegaard, Sartre,
Beckett, by Edith Kern, Boundary 2 1 (1973): 735.
40. Joseph Chaikin, “Introduction to Savage/Love,” in Joseph Chaikin and
Sam Shepard: Letters and Texts, 1972–1984, ed. Barry Daniels (New York:
Theatre Communications Group, 1994), 107. (All subsequent references to
the play will be incorporated into the text.)
41. John Fletcher, Samuel Beckett’s Art (London: Chatto and Windus,
1967), 25.
42. Daniel Albright, Beckett and Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2003), 10.
43. David Bradby, Beckett: Waiting for Godot (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2001), 22.
44. Albright, Beckett and Aesthetics, 11.
45. Ibid., 12.
46. Ibid., 10.
47. Christopher Bigsby, Dada and Surrealism. (London: Methuen, 1972),
79–82.
48. Ibid., 80.
49. Ibid., 81–82.
50. Anna McMullan, Theatre on Trial: Samuel Beckett’s Later Drama (London:
Routledge, 1993), 49.
51. Samuel Beckett, That Time in Samuel Beckett: The Complete Dramatic
Works (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), 388.
52. Callens, Dis/Figuring Sam Shepard, 148–149.
53. Ulrika Maude, Beckett, Technology and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2009), 13.
54. Amy Lyford, “The Aesthetics of Dismemberment: Surrealism and the Musée
du Val-de-Grâce in 1917,” Cultural Critique 46 (Autumn 2000): 53.
55. S. Pridmore, “Download of Psychiatry, Chapter 26,” Last modified October
2010, accessed 02/10/2012 16.57.
56. Ibid., 65.
58. André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” in Manifestoes of Surrealism,
trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: Universtiy of
Michigan Press, 1972), 21–22.
59. André Breton, “Avis au Lecteur,” preface to Max Ernst’s La Femme 100
Têtes, quoted in Lyford p. 53.
Notes 187
60. Lyford, “The Aesthetics of Dismemberment,” 56.

61. Callens, Dis/Figuring Sam Shepard, 133.
62. Samuel Beckett, Fizzle 4, in Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose
1929–1989 (New York: Grove Press, 1995), 234.
63. Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber,
2006), 376.
64. Daniels, 43.
65. Samuel Beckett, How It Is (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 39.
66. Ibid., 3.
67. Flore Chevaillier, “‘Something Wrong There’: Punning in Comment C’est”
Journal of Modern Literature 31 (2008): 134.
68. Peter Hall, “Directing the Plays of Harold Pinter,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Harold Pinter, ed. Peter Raby (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2001), 148.
69. Sheila Rabillard, “Sam Shepard: Theatrical Power and American Dreams,”
Modern Drama 30, no. 1 (1987): 60.
70. Ibid., 61.
71. This point was suggested to me by Prof Anthony Roche and was clari-
fied by Dhirendra Verma’s Word Origins (New Delhi: Sterling Paperbacks,
1998), 35.
72. Matthew Gale, Dada and Surrealism (New York: Phaidon, 2006), 222.
74. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double (New York: Grove Press,
1997), 72.
75. André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” in Manifestoes of Surrealism
(Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1972), 34.
76. Ibid., 35.
77. Ibid., 34.
78. Benjamin Keatinge, “Beckett and Language Pathology,” Journal of Modern
Literature 31 (2008): 87.
79. Ibid., 90.
80. Lyford, “The Aesthetics of Dismemberment,” 65.
81. Quoted in Daniels, 154.
82. Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 22–23.
84. John Beattie, “Spirit Mediumship as Theatre,” RAIN (Royal Anthropological
Institute News) 20 (June 1977): 2.
85. Ibid.
86. Robert Goldberg, “Sam Shepard: Off Broadway’s Street Cowboy,” Rolling
Stone College Papers, (Winter 1980): 44; quoted in Daniels, 27.
87. David Lomas, “‘Modest Recording Instruments’: Science, Surrealism and
Visuality,” Art History 27, no. 4 (2004): 638.
88. Sam Shepard, “Language, Visualization and the Inner Library,” in
American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard, ed. Bonnie Marranca
(New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1981), 215.
89. Callens, Dis/Figuring Sam Shepard, n.8 141.
188 Notes
90. Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (London: Penguin, 1991), 26.
Emphasis mine.
91. Breton, “On Surrealism in Its Living Works,” 297.
92. Dawn Ades, “Dada and Surrealism,” in Concepts of Modern Art: From
Fauvism to Postmodernism (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003), 126.
93. Marc Robinson, “Joseph Chaikin and Sam Shepard in Collaboration,” The
Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard, ed. Matthew Roudané (Cambridge:
94. In Marc Robinson, The Other American Drama (Baltimore and London:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 77.
95. Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable, trans.
Patrick Bowles and Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove, 1965), 218.
96. Anna McMullan, Performing Embodiment in Samuel’s Drama (London:
Routlegde, 2010), 105–106.
97. McMullan, Performing Embodiment in Samuel’s Drama, 108.
98. Ibid., 108.
99. Susan Harris Smith, “Estrangement and Engagement: Sam Shepard’s
Dramaturgical Strategies,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 3,
no. 1 (Fall 1988): 80.
100. Rabillard, “Sam Shepard,” 66.
101. Wayne Stengel, “The Inside Outside World of Sam Shepard’s La Turista,”
Publications of the Arkansas Philological Association (1987): 54–55.
103. Gene A. Plunka, “Staging Aphasia: Jean-Claude Van Itallie’s The Traveller.”
Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 1 (1991): 5.
104. Aleen Agranowitz and Milfred Riddle McKeown, Aphasia Handbook for
Adults and Children (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1970), 17.
105. Daniels, 111.
106. Ibid., 120.
107. Ibid., 117.
108. Ibid., 121.
109. Ibid., 126.
110. Plunka, “Staging Aphasia,” 6.
111. Agranowitz and McKeown, Aphasia Handbook for Adults and Children, 7.
112. Lomas, “‘Modest Recording Instruments,’” 629.
113. Ibid., 630.
114. Daniels, 186.
115. Robert Everett-Green, “Chaikin Speaks in the Voice of an Angel,” The
Globe and Mail (Toronto), June 13, 1986, in Daniels, 186–187.
116. Roman Jakobson, Studies on Child Language and Aphasia (The Hague:
Mouton, 1971), 67.
117. Ibid., 70.
118. Ibid., 63–64.
119. Ibid., 84–85.
120. Ibid., 84.
121. Pridmore, “Download of Psychiatry, Chapter 26,” 9.
Notes 189
122. John Milton, Paradise Lost (Los Angeles: Indo-European Publishing,

2010), 140.
123. Ibid.
124. Ibid., 167.
125. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot in The Complete Dramatic Works
(London: Faber and Faber, 2006), 83.
126. Ibid., 85.
127. Samuel Beckett, A Piece of Monologue in Samuel Beckett: The Complete
Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), 425.
128. Samuel Beckett, Not I in Samuel Beckett: The Complete Dramatic Works
129. Susan J. Blackmore, “A Psychological Theory of the Out-of-Body
Experience,” Journal of Parapsychology 48 (September 1984): 208.
130. Albright, Beckett and Aesthetics, 22.
131. Smith, “Estrangement and Engagement,” 79.
132. In Smith, “Estrangement and Engagement,” 71–72.
133. Ibid., 73.
134. Ibid., 71–84.
136. Sam Shepard, “Language, Visualization and the Inner Library” in American
Dreams 214.
137. Rabillard, “Sam Shepard,” 67.
138. Anne Ubersfeld, Reading Theatre, trans. Frank Collins (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1999), 27.
139. Keatinge, “Beckett and Language Pathology,” 87.
140. Chaikin, “The Open Theatre,” 195.
141. Daniels, 35.
142. David Bate, Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and Social
Dissent (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004), 72.
6 States of Shock and Simpatico:

Performances of Waste
1. Sam Shepard, interview with Carol Rosen, Sam Shepard: A Poetic Rodeo
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 235.
2. Sam Shepard, States of Shock in Sam Shepard: Plays 3 (London: Methuen,
the text.)
3. Theodore W. Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” in Notes to
Literature: Volume 1, trans. Sherry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia
UP, 1991), 246.
4. Johan Callens, Dis/figuring Sam Shepard (Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang,
2007), 174.
5. Lesley A. Wade, “States of Shock, Simpatico, and Eyes for Consuela:
Sam Shepard’s plays of the 1990s,” in The Cambridge Companion to Sam
Shepard, ed. Matthew Roudané (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 260.
190 Notes
6. Peter Boxall, “‘There’s No Lack of Void’: Waste and Abundance in Beckett

and DeLillo,” SubStance 37, no. 2 (2008): 58–59.
7. George Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” in Visions of Excess: Selected
Writings, 1927–1939: Theory and History of Literature Volume 14, ed. Allan
Stoekl (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 118.
8. Michael Richardson, introduction to The Absence of Myth: Writings on
Surrealism by Georges Bataille (Verso: London, 1994), 3.
9. George Bataille, “On the Subject of Slumbers,” in The Absence of Myth:
Writings on Surrealism by Georges Bataille (Verso: London, 1994), 51.
10. Gary Grant, “Shifting the Paradigm: Shepard, Myth, and the
Transformation of Consciousness,” Modern Drama 36, no. 1 (1993): 123.
11. Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” 117. Bataille’s emphasis.
12. Sam Shepard, “Language, Visualization and the Inner Library” in American
Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard, ed. Bonnie Marranca (New
York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1981), 216.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double (New York: Grove Press,
1958), 72.
16. Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (London: Routledge,
1997), 82.
17. Callens, Dis/figuring Sam Shepard, 176.
18. Carol Rosen, Sam Shepard: A Poetic Rodeo (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004),179.
19. David G. Zinder, The Surrealist Connection: An Approach to a Surrealist
Aesthetic of Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press,
1980), 87.
20. Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” 117.
21. Zinder, The Surrealist Connection, 87–88.
22. Emilie Morin, Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness (Hampshire:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 127.
23. Ibid., 127–128.
24. Samuel Beckett, Breath, in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber
and Faber, 2006), 371.
25. Richard Gilman, introduction to Sam Shepard: Plays 2 (London: Faber and
Faber, 1997), xiv–xv.
26. Ibid.
27. Samuel Beckett, Endgame in Samuel Beckett: The Complete Dramatic Works
28. Sam Shepard, Seduced in Fool for Love and Other Plays (New York: Dial
Press, 2006), 236–237.
29. Ibid., 233.
30. Ibid., 238.
31. Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change
(London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 267.
Notes 191
32. Georges Bataille. “The Accursed Share,” in Georges Bataille: Essential

Writings, ed. Michael Richardson (London: Sage, 1998), 68.
34. Jonathan Jones, “See Through, Vito Acconci (1969),” The Guardian,
November 23, 2002, http://arts.guardian.co.uk/portrait/story/0,,845513,00
.html.
36. Rosen, Sam Shepard, 182.
37. Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” 128–129.
38. This was suggested to me in conversation with Professor Anthony Roche
on November 10, 2012.
39. Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (London: Penguin, 1991),
311–312.
40. Ibid.
41. Amy Lyford, “The Aesthetics of Dismemberment: Surrealism and the Musée
du Val-de-Grâce in 1917,” Cultural Critique 46 (Autumn 2000): 65.
43. Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of
Theatre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 160.
44. Sam Shepard, interview with Benjamin Ryder Howe et al., The Paris Review
142 (Spring 1997), http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1281/the-art
-of-theater-no-12-sam-shepard.
Press, 2006), 71.
46. Zinder, The Surrealist Connection, 86.
47. Richard Kearney, “Writing Trauma: Catharsis in Joyce, Shakespeare and
Homer,” ABC Religion and Ethics, July 19, 2012, http://www.abc.net.au
/religion/articles/2012/07/19/3549000.htm.
48. Ibid.
50. Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist
Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 68.
51. Ibid.
52. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre (Oxon: Routledge, 2006),
166.
53. Matthew Christopher, quoted in Joann Greco, “The Psychology of Ruin
Porn,” The Atlantic Cities, January 6, 2012, http://www.theatlanticcities.com
/design/2012/01/psychology-ruin-porn/886/.
54. Sam Shepard, Simpatico, in Sam Shepard: Plays 3 (London: Methuen,
the text.)
55. Shepard, “Language, Visualisation and the Inner Library,” 216.
192 Notes
59. Hilton Als, “The Theatre: Mother Knows Best; The Women Take Control
in Heartless,” The New Yorker, September 10, 2012, 106–107.
60. Ibid., 107.
61. Wade, “States of Shock, Simpatico, and Eyes for Consuela,” 267–268.
63. Bottoms, States of Shock, 254.
64. Ibid.
65. Vincent Canby, “Shepard Goes to the Races and Wins,” New York Times,
November 20, 1994, Section 2, 5.
66. Adam Jasper, “Feature: Andreas Slominski: Caught in a Trap,” Art Review
(April 2007): 79.
67. Ibid.
68. Wade, “States of Shock, Simpatico, and Eyes for Consuela,” 274.
69. Ibid.
70. Shepard, “Language, Visualisation and the Inner Library,” 214.
71. Sam Shepard, interview by Robert Goldberg, “Sam Shepard: American
Original,” Playboy 31 (March 1984): 112.
72. Ibid.
73. Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” 117. Bataille’s emphasis.
74. Ibid., 117–118.
7 Conclusion: Through the 1990s and Beyond

1. Sam Shepard, Eyes for Consuela, in The Late Henry Moss, Eyes for Consuela
and When the World Was Green (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), 120.
2. Ibid., 125.
3. Sam Shepard, Kicking a Dead Horse (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), 45.
4. Ibid., 11.
5. Sam Shepard, Ages of the Moon, in Fifteen One-Act Plays, intro. Conor
McPherson (New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 39.
6. John Lahr, “The Pathfinder: Sam Shepard and the Struggles of American
Manhood,” The New Yorker, February 8, 2010. http://www.newyorker
.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/02/08/100208crat_atlarge_lahr. Accessed
21 July 2010.
7. Unknown Author. “January Gloss-In,” The Gloss Magazine, The Irish
Times, January 2013, 6.
8. Sam Shepard, interview with Gwynne Watkins, “Sam Shepard Gives a Rare
Interview, Thinks Safe House Could’ve Been Better,” GQ Magazine, June 11,
2012. Accessed January 31, 2013, http://www.gq.com/entertainment
/tv/blogs/the-stream/2012/06/sam-shepard-interview-safe-house.html.
9. Sam Shepard, Heartless, Rehearsal Draft, July 9, 2012. Unpublished manu-
script. Act 1, 7.
10. Ibid., Act 11, 14.
Notes 193
11. Ibid., Act 11, 33.

12. Ibid., Act 11, 2.
13. Hilton Als, “The Theatre: Mother Knows Best: The Women Take Control
in Heartless,” The New Yorker, September 10, 2012. 106.
14. Sam Shepard, Geography of a Horse Dreamer, in Fool for Love and Other
Plays (New York: Dial Press, 2006), 292.
Press, 2006), 91.
16. The recycling of characters’ names in Shepard’s later works should be
noted here. Heartless and A Lie of the Mind both contain characters called
“Sally” of Irish ancestry. Similarly a character by the name of “Ames”
appears in Simpatico and Ages of the Moon. Curse of the Starving Class both
feature young women called “Emma” while Buried Child and Simpatico
contain a “Vince” and a “Vinnie” respectively.
17. Sam Shepard, A Lie of the Mind, in Plays 3 (London: Methuen, 1996), 124.
18. Ibid., 125.
19. Eamonn Wall, preface to Writing the Irish West: Ecologies and Traditions
(Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), xvi.
20. Ibid.
21. Luke Gibbons, “‘Made in the Shade’: Sam Shepard and the West” (lecture,
The Abbey Theatre, Dublin, Ireland, November 10, 2009).
22. Diane Negra, introduction to The Irish in US (Durham: Duke University,
2006), 2.
23. Ibid., 1.
24. Ibid., 2.
25. Ibid., 9.
26. Sam Shepard, interview with Clare Dwyer Hogg, “The Good Guy and
Bad Guy Stuff Just Doesn’t Interest Me,” The Guardian, December 1,
2013. Accessed June 20, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2013
/dec/01/sam-shepard-interview-oedipus-derry
27. Eoin O’Brien, “Beckett and Ireland,” pamphlet from the Beckett Festival
at the Gate Theatre in October 1991 in association with Radio Telefís
Éireann and Trinity College, Dublin.
28. Dawn Ades, “Dada and Surrealism,” in Concepts of Modern Art: From
Fauvism to Postmodernism, ed. Nikos Stangos (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1997), 126.
29. Sam Shepard, Buried Child, in Sam Shepard: Plays 2, intro. Richard Gilman
Index
Abramović, Marina, 148 Barthes, Roland, 36, 104

Abstract Expressionism, 18–19 Bataille, Georges, 4, 22, 32, 34–5, 74,
absurdism, 11–12, 25, 36, 107, 113–14, 76, 137–61
123, 148–9, 166 on the absence of myth, 22, 34–5
Acconci, Vito, 147–8 “The Notion of Expenditure” (1933),
actualisace (foregrounding), 9–10 138–9, 144, 160
Adorno, Theodor W., 12, 136 Baudrillard, Jean, 24, 59, 143
Albee, Edward, 44, 46, 149 Beck, Julian, 85, 107
A Delicate Balance (1966), 149 Beckett, Samuel, 8, 13, 15, 27, 77,
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf 84, 105–34, 136, 144–5, 164,
(1962), 44, 46 166, 168–9
Almereyda, Michael, 23, 25, 79 Breath (1969), 145
American Place Theatre, The, 40, Echo’s Bones (1935), 113
109, 135, 143, 148 Eleuthéria (1947), 113
American Repertory Theatre, Endgame (1957), 110, 113, 136,
The, 126 145–6, 164
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 88 Film (1965), 84
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 14, 26, 107, 113 Happy Days (1961), 84
Les Mamelles de Tirésias How It Is (1964), 117–18, 131
(The Breasts of Tiresias) Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), 164
(1903), 14, 107 Murphy (1938), 113
Sky Blue (1918), 26 Nacht und Träume (1983), 106
Aragon, Louis, 46–7, 113, 115, 120 Not I (1972), 110, 117, 131, 164
Artaud, Antonin, 9–10, 22, 29–31, Piece of Monologue, A (1977), 131
36, 60, 106, 107, 113, 120–1, Proust (1931), 15, 166
143–4, 151 Rockaby (1980), 114, 130, 131
Le Jet de sang (The Jet of Blood) That Time (1974), 114
(1927), 29 Waiting for Godot, 8–9, 119, 126,
Theatre and its Double, The (1938), 130–1, 164
120 Bellmer, Hans, 65–6, 76–7
Theatre of Cruelty, 9, 30–1, 60, 107, Benjamin, Walter, 47
120–1 Bigsby, Christopher, 3, 19, 33, 56, 58,
August: Osage County (2013), 169 79, 107, 113–14
196 Index
Brecht, Bertolt, 9–12, 18, 40 Cordier, Robert, 114

The Rise and Fall of the City of Crevel, René, 4, 113, 123
Mahagonny (1929), 11–12
Breton, André, 4, 18, 27, 69, 76, 95, 98, Dada, 106, 148
106, 107, 113, 115–16, 120–4, Dalí, Salvador, 4–8, 17–18, 28–9, 41,
128, 134, 138, 143 79–104, 107, 113–14, 136, 142
Manifeste du surréalisme (1924), 113, Lugubrious Game (1929), 17
116, 120–1, 122–3 paranoiac-critical activity, 4–6
Qu’est-ce que le Surrealisme? (1934), 76 Premonition of Civil War (1936), 136
Breton, Simone, 69, 123 Swans Reflecting Elephants (1937), 5
Brook, Peter, 107, 108 de Chirico, Giorgio, 107, 113
The Empty Space (1968), 108 Desnos, Robert, 123
Brothers (2009) (dir. Jim Sheridan), 13 Duchamp, Marcel, 14, 159
Brown, Bill, 28 Bicycle Wheel (1913), 159
Buñuel, Luis, 79–104, 107, 119, 143, L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), 14
149, 155 Dylan, Bob, 38, 39, 80, 84–6
Belle de jour (1967), 101 (dir) Renaldo and Clara (1978), 85
La Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie
(The Discreet Charm of the Elam, Keir, 9–10, 12, 89
Bourgeoisie) (1972), 80, 100–1, Eluard, Paul, 113
103, 119, 149 Thorns of Thunder (1936), 113
Un chien andalou (1929), 79–104, Emin, Tracy, 26
113, 117, 143 My Bed (1998), 26
The Exterminating Angel (1962), 94 Ernst, Max, 10, 18, 47, 48, 63, 113, 116
The Milky Way (1969), 99 La Femme 100 Têtes (1929), 47, 116
Los Olvidados (The Young and the Esslin, Martin, 11, 25, 56, 122, 123,
Damned) (1950), 89, 101 149. See also absurdism
The Phantom of Liberty (1974), 100, Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme
101, 102–3, 155 (1938), 65
Subida al cielo (Mexican Bus Ride)
(1952), 101 Fellini, Federico, 84
Burgess, Anthony, 37, 99 Field Day Theatre Company, 165
A Clockwork Orange (1971), 37, 99 Fischl, Eric, 15
Bad Boy (1981), 15
Cage, John, 145 Freud, Sigmund, 49, 58, 60–3, 66, 67,
Carroll, Lewis, 37 76, 82, 83, 92, 93, 94, 100,
Castaneda, Carlos, 111 103, 122, 133, 143, 163–4
Second Ring of Power, The (1977), 111 Heimlich, 49, 51
Chaikin, Joseph, 25, 105–34, 135, 150, The Oedipus Complex, 13, 14, 15,
151, 163, 170 54, 61, 62, 102, 151, 160, 165
Open Theatre, The, 108–9, 111, Totem and Taboo (1913), 60–1
113, 125, 127, 131 Uncanny, The, 49, 83, 143
The Presence of the Actor (1972), 108
Chekhov, Anton, 73 Garber, Marjorie, 71–2, 75
The Cherry Orchard (1904), 73 Gelber, Jack, 107
Cold in July (2014) (dir, Jim Mickle), 169 The Connection (1959), 107
Index 197
Giacometti, Alberto, 65 Lorca, Federico García, 79–80

Woman with her Throat Cut (1932), 65 Lyotard, Jean-François, 143
Goffman, Erving, 72, 131
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life Magic Realism, 55–6
(1959), 131 Magic Theatre, The, 87, 105, 109,
Goya, Francisco, 102 110–11
The Third of May, 1808 (1814), 102 Magritte, René, 9, 29, 47, 64, 65, 66,
Grotowski, Jerzy, 107 75–6, 96
L’Homme au journal (Man with a
Happenings, The, 25, 107, 145, 148 Newspaper) (1928), 47
Hegel, Georg W. F., 131 Les jours gigantesques (1928), 66
Phenomenology of Mind (1807), 131 Le Musée d’une Nuit (1927), 96
Hinduism, 105, 122 Pleasure (1926), 65
Hitchcock, Alfred, 83 La Reproduction Interdite (1937), 96
Vertigo (1958), 83 Rêve d’une petite fille qui voulut
Hughes, Robert, 146, 147, 148, 170 entrer au carmel (1930), 47
The Treachery of Images
Ibsen, Henrik, 44, 62 (1928–1929), 9
Ghosts (1882), 62 Une Semaine de bonté (1934), 47
Ionesco, Eugéne, 166 Le Viol (The Rape) (1934), 75–6
Irigaray, Luce, 69 Malina, Judith, 107
Malkovich, John, 3, 148
Jagger, Mick, 28, 38 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 37
Jakobson, Roman, 128–9 Mariën, Marcel, 136
Jameson, Fredric, 137 Masson, André, 18, 65, 110
Jarry, Alfred, 10, 14, 21, 23, 113 Matta, Roberto, 18
Ubu Roi (1896), 23 Mauss, Marcel, 138
Johns, Jasper, 19, 145 McGinley, Seán, 164
Joyce, James, 151 Meckler, Nancy, 44, 45, 109
Judson Poets’ Theatre, The, 107 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 115
Miller, Arthur, 44, 46, 94, 141
Kandinsky, Wassily, 144 All my Sons (1947), 141
Kazan, Elia, 53 Death of a Salesman (1949), 46
Killing Them Softly (2012) Miller, Lee, 142
(dir. Andrew Dominik), 169 Milton, John, 130
Kubrick, Stanley, 99 Paradise Lost (1667), 130
Morise, Max, 123
La Mama Experimental Theatre Mud (2012) (dir. Jeff Nichols), 169
Club, 26 Mulvey, Laura, 91
Lacan, Jacques, 4, 82, 91, 103
Lautréamont, Comte de, 27 Nerval, Gérard de, 40
Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 105, 153 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 41, 112
Levy, Jacques, 108–9, 10, 13–14
Lichtenstein, Roy, 3–4 Off-off Broadway, 25, 106–7
Limbour, Georges, 152 Oh! Calcutta, 13–14
Living Theatre, The, 85, 107–8, 111 Oldenburg, Claes, 19
198 Index
O’Neill, Eugene, 44, 46, 50 Cowboy Mouth (1971), 19, 21, 22,
Long Day’s Journey into Night 26, 28, 37, 40, 153, 156
(1956), 46 Cowboys (1964), 4, 8, 13, 31
Oppenheim, Dennis, 147 Cowboys #2 (1967), 6, 8–9, 133
Oppenheimer, Joel, 107 Curse of the Starving Class (1977),
The Great American Desert (107) 43, 50–3, 67, 73, 156, 158,
Orlan, 149 164, 165
Out of the Furnace (2013) (dir. Scott Eyes for Consuela (1998), 163
Cooper), 169 Fool for Love (1983), 43, 55–6,
67–8, 78, 135, 156
Paris Colonial Exhibition (1931), 31 Fourteen Hundred Thousand
Paz, Octavio, 163 (1966), 6, 10–11, 109
Performance Group, The (TPG), 40 Geography of a Horse Dreamer
Picasso, Pablo, 141 (1974), 84–5, 156, 166
Guernica (1937), 141 The God of Hell (2004), 164
Pollock, Jackson, 41 Heartless (2012), 156, 166–7
Pop Art, 4, 18–19, 21–2, 24, 37 The Holy Ghostly (1969), 13, 32, 63
postmodernism, 19, 21, 24–5, 29, 34, Icarus’s Mother (1965), 1–6, 7, 15,
37, 40–1, 69, 103–4, 137, 143 46, 55, 88, 119
Presley, Elvis, 22, 39 Inacoma (1977), 110–11, 156
Prigogine, Ilya, 138 Kicking a Dead Horse (2007), 164,
Primitive Art, 60 165, 166
Killer’s Head (1975), 109–10
Rauschenberg, Robert, 19, 145 La Turista (1967), 10, 12, 21, 25,
Ray, Man, 69, 75, 142 66, 75, 156
Monument to D.A.F. de Sade The Late Henry Moss (2000), 164
(1933), 75 A Lie of the Mind (1985), 15, 43,
Rea, Stephen, 2, 164, 165, 166 53–5, 56, 59, 70, 75, 78, 135,
Reavey, George, 113 156, 166, 167, 168
Rimbaud, Arthur, 40 The Mad Dog Blues (1971), 19, 21,
Rockwell, Norman, 45–6, 50 22–4, 28, 29
Rolling Stones, The, 28 Operation Sidewinder (1970), 19,
21, 22, 24–5, 26, 29–30, 32,
Sade, Marquis de, 75, 166 40, 66, 138, 164
Schechner, Richard, 12, 40, 107, 108 A Particle of Dread (Oedipus
Shepard, Sam Variations) (2013), 165, 168
Plays Red Cross (1966), 6–8, 10, 107,
Action (1974), 109 109, 156
Ages of the Moon (2009), 164–5 The Rock Garden (1964), 4, 10,
Angel City (1976), 79–104, 132, 12, 13–18, 31, 45, 63
144, 150, 151, 157, 167 Savage/Love (1979), 105–34
Back Bog Beast Bait (1971), 40 Shaved Splits (1970), 21–2, 28, 30
Buried Child (1978), 43–7, 49–50, Simpatico (1994), 135–61
55, 60–3, 66, 68, 70, 77, 78, States of Shock (1991), 135–61
156, 169 Suicide in B-Flat (1976), 132, 133
Index 199
Tongues (1978), 105–34 Tanning, Dorothea, 47, 48

The Tooth of Crime (1972), 10, 21, La Chambre d’Amis (1950–52), 48
25, 29, 36–42, 66, 160 Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (A Little
True West (1980), 27, 35, 43, 44, Night Music) (1943), 48
50, 56–8, 68, 77, 78, 144, 154, Portrait de famille (Family Portrait)
156, 164 (1953–54), 48
The Unseen Hand (1969), 10, 19, Theatre Genesis, 18, 31
21, 22, 25–6, 27, 32, 33–6, Theatre of Cruelty, 9, 30–1, 60, 107,
145, 164 120–1
The War in Heaven (Angel’s see also Antonin Artaud
Monologue) (1985), 105–34
When the World Was Green (A Ubersfeld, Anne, 133
Chef ’s Fable) (1996), 163
Prose Van Itallie, Jean-Claude, 127
Motel Chronicles (1982), 14, 77 Vermeer, Johannes, 82
Sheridan, Jim (director), 13 The Village Voice, 31
Slominski, Andreas, 159–60 Villon, Jacques, 40
Smith, Michael, 1, 31–2, 46 Vitrac, Roger, 113
Smith, Patti, 21, 40, 75, 117, 165
Surrealism Wagner, Richard, 81
acte gratuit (gratuitous act), 18, 136, Walter, Sydney Schubert, 10, 11
146–8 Warhol, Andy, 22, 39–40
convulsive beauty, 43, 70, 98, 102 Weill, Kurt, 11
femme-enfant, 48, 64, 65, 72 Weston, Edward, 152–3
le merveilleux, 19, 47 Williams, Tennessee, 44
le objet surréaliste, 22, 27–9
le objet trouvé (the found object), 19 Yale Repertory Theatre, 50, 84
Poetic Surrealism, 106, 121
and women, 64–6, 69–70, 75–7 Zabriskie Point (1970) (dir. Michelangelo
Synge, John Millington, 166 Antonioni), 88

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Sam Shepard and

Published by Palgrave Macmillan:

1. Surrealism and Sam Shepard’s Early Plays: 1964–1967 1

I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to the staff at the

Reality is always suspect in a Sam Shepard play. Reviewers of

Shepard’s open realism exists in a dramatic field composed of events not

It seems that Shepard’s dramatic landscape eludes categorization and ges-

Thus, Shepard’s anarchistic approach to life as an “ongoing improvisation

in relation to the representation of masculinity and performative machismo

The penultimate chapter uses Bataille’s theories on nonproductive expen-

Icarus’s Mother (1965) AND

Shepard describes writing as a psychic necessity. He discusses his early works

Bill: Are you his wife, Jill?

Indeed, any expression of idiosyncrasy from the collective group is under-

Rea identifies a sense of isolation in Shepard’s characters and a fear of an

THE SURREALISTS AND PARANOIAC ACTIVITY

The coexisting images of fire in this play can be considered in terms of

paranoid-critical method in his speech “The Moral Position of Surrealism”

Red Cross, Cowboys#2, and Fourteen

Carol. [ . . . ] Something’s happening. My hands never sweat like that.

Carol then launches into a monologue concerning a hypothetical imagi-

Pertaining to Dalí’s theories, it could be argued that Carol indeed “organiz[es]

the service of the reality of our mind. [ . . . ] It is through a decidedly paranoid

Dalí attacks prospective interpretation or futile searches for meaning as

Notwithstanding, the prioritizing of personal states of inner turmoil as wor-

It is not only the granting of unusual prominence or autonomy to aspects of

The alienation device in this play acts as a self-conscious commentary on

language. This painting directly relates to Keir Elam’s definition of linguis-

Although Brecht did not describe this work as Surrealist,25 it is apparent

The Rock Garden

out to be warplanes. B-29’s. I felt a tremendous panic suddenly. I was between

Boy: Two coats?

The boy’s sexuality becomes a statement of his identity, the contradistinc-

excrement in the foreground. In its seemingly distasteful approach to art,

demanded. It deviated from Surrealism by rejecting the attachment of

Myth, Ritual, and a

Artaud highlights the surreal undercurrent of their conception, Surrealism

THE SEARCH FOR SELFHOOD

To analyze Baudrillard’s words, identity, in these plays, is an absurd dream,

However, Baudrillard considered simulation as the obvious progression of

In the context of the young man’s speech in Operation Sidewinder, he cannot

Objects operate in Shepard’s plays in an identical manner, as “the uncon-

a unifying vision or a sacramental, almost religious meaning to a society that

This invites comparisons with Bill Brown’s “thing theory.” According to

archetypal figures in these plays insinuates a two-dimensional objectifica-

The image is the basic element of Surrealism for it is an image-conscious sen-

This is remarkably similar to Artaud’s stage direction: “Thunder rages,

In a similar vein, Shepard wrote the following in a notebook from 1969:

Smith’s description of Shepard’s theatre as “an intuitive approach to lan-

naturalism,” his detection of fantasy in Shepard’s work, and his acknow-

Myth served as a story in which people could connect themselves to the

The critical analysis of the role of myth in Shepard’s plays is a well-traversed

[ . . . ] Shepard is drawn to the mythical world of heartland America as his

Bigsby suggests that the America that Shepard’s characters resurrect is a

Throughout the 1940s, Bataille interrogated the absence of myth in contem-

the Morphan brothers approaches legendary mythologization: a threesome

THE TOOTH OF CRIME (1972)

domain;—to manipulate it like a solid object, one which overturns and

Galactic Jack highlights the emptiness of the language. It is “[a]ll tricks, no

Similarly, Shepard resurrects primitive rituals in this play in a futile

The Tooth of Crime essentially dramatizes Hoss’s personal endgame with

is [his] survival kit” (249). In The Performance Group’s (TPG) production of

Hoss: Yeah. It is me. Just like I always wanted to be.