{"id":9733,"date":"2017-08-08T19:54:14","date_gmt":"2017-08-08T19:54:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=9733"},"modified":"2017-08-08T19:54:14","modified_gmt":"2017-08-08T19:54:14","slug":"rural-america-where-sam-shepards-roots-ran-deepest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/rural-america-where-sam-shepards-roots-ran-deepest\/","title":{"rendered":"Rural America: Where Sam Shepard’s roots ran deepest"},"content":{"rendered":"

John J. Winters<\/a>, Bridgewater State University<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

When Sam Shepard died on July 27<\/a> the world lost one of the greatest playwrights of the past half-century. He was an artist renowned for bravely plumbing his own life for material, spinning much of his own pain into theatrical gold. His best work revealed the hollowness behind the idea of the happy family and its corollary, the American dream. Subversive and funny, Shepard had the soul of a poet and an experimental streak that never faded. <\/p>\n

The American family was, no doubt, Shepard\u2019s great subject. His quintet of family plays that premiered between 1978 and 1985 \u2013 \u201cCurse of the Starving Class,\u201d the Pulitzer Prize-winning \u201cBuried Child,\u201d \u201cFool for Love,\u201d \u201cTrue West\u201d (both nominated for Pulitzers) and \u201cA Lie of the Mind\u201d \u2013 form the foundation of Shepard\u2019s lofty reputation. <\/p>\n

While researching my recent biography of Shepard<\/a>, I found that most critics and scholars focused on the playwright\u2019s relationship with his father. Rightly so: Samuel Shepard Rogers suffered from alcoholism and his only son grew up bearing the brunt of his abuse. Shepard\u2019s family plays turn on the collateral damage of the fathers.<\/p>\n

Less frequently examined is the playwright\u2019s fixation on the land, and the ways in which this plays out in his work. Both as a writer and in his personal outlook, Shepard drew deeply from the old trope that nature and innocence are intertwined. And according to critic Harold Bloom, Shepard saw doom in the \u201cmaterialistic and technological obsessions of modern society.\u201d <\/p>\n

Throughout his work, Shepard decried so-called progress, especially the rampant development of open space. Whether it was the forced sale of a family farm (\u201cCurse of the Starving Class\u201d) or Native Americans being driven off their reservation (\u201cOperation Sidewinder\u201d), it all came to no good.<\/p>\n

To Shepard, a relationship with the land was nothing short of existential. As the playwright told an interviewer in 1988: <\/p>\n

\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s most frightening to me right now is this estrangement from life. People and things are becoming more and more removed from the actual. We are becoming more and more removed from the earth to the point that people just don\u2019t know themselves or each other or anything.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Shepard arrived at this impulse naturally. When he was in elementary school, his family settled in a small house on Lemon Street in Bradbury, California. An orchard of 80 avocado trees attached to the house meant that Shepard \u2013 then known by his birth name, Steve Rogers \u2013 was kept busy irrigating and harvesting the crop. He also raised dogs and sheep, and when he had free time he worked the fields belonging to his neighbors. During high school, he was an eager member of the 4-H Club<\/a> and Future Farmers of America, and spent his summers tending to the thoroughbreds at nearby Santa Anita Park.<\/p>\n

\n \"\"<\/a>
\n To Shepard, the creep of development threatened the innocence and vitality of the natural world.<\/span>
\n Mike Lewinski<\/a>, CC BY<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In college, Shepard\u2019s major wasn\u2019t theater but education. As he once wrote to a friend, back then he wanted to become a \u201cveterinarian with a flashy station wagon, and a flashy blond wife, raising German shepherds in some fancy suburb.\u201d He never finished college nor became a vet. Instead, Shepard left home and made his way across the country to New York City and the East Village, where he would quickly transform himself into the brightest light of the nascent off-off-Broadway scene. <\/p>\n

But even as his reputation grew, he never left his agricultural roots behind. In fact, one of Shepard\u2019s early one-act plays was titled \u201c4-H Club<\/a>\u201d (1965). <\/p>\n

Other plays from the 1960s combine his old life with his new one. Rural scenes are full of characters who talk in the hip argot of the Village streets, characters caught in an absurdist situation go \u201cfishing\u201d off the edge of the stage, and Native Americans, by their very presence onstage in plays like 1970\u2019s \u201cOperation Sidewinder<\/a>,\u201d stake a claim to the land that\u2019s been stolen from them. <\/p>\n

With time, the playwright would more directly address the scourge of overdevelopment that he saw happening around him. It would become a running theme of sorts, as Shepard saw the nation growing and changing \u2013 but not for the better. <\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the biggest tragedies about this country was moving from an agricultural society to an urban, industrial society. We\u2019ve been wiped out,\u201d he told Playboy in 1984<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Shepard\u2019s characters embody this loss. In \u201cGeography of a Horse Dreamer<\/a>\u201d (1974), one character is a gambler who can predict tomorrow\u2019s winners at the racetrack, but loses that power once he\u2019s physically forced from his usual haunts to a new, strange locale. In \u201cBuried Child<\/a>\u201d (1979), the land holds the answer to the play\u2019s central mystery: At play\u2019s end, the fallow backyard gives up a baby from a shallow grave, shining a light on the incestuous relationship that has led to the ruination of this family \u2013 as if the purity of nature had been offended by a terrible transgression. And in Shepard\u2019s late masterpiece, \u201cAges of the Moon<\/a>,\u201d two old friends finally find solace by communing with nature at a small, remote campsite.<\/p>\n

Nowhere in Shepard\u2019s oeuvre does land play a bigger role than in 1978\u2019s \u201cCurse of the Starving Class<\/a>.\u201d The Tate family\u2019s farm stands between husband and wife: He wants to unload it to pay off his gambling and drinking debts; she wants to sell it and use the money to escape her marriage and take the children to Europe. The culminating scene features the husband, Weston, coming to his senses after sobering up and walking around his property. Reconnecting with his land, Weston turns his life around, \u201clike peeling off a whole person.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shepard\u2019s love of the country and its open spaces would mark all aspects of his career. Also a celebrated actor, he favored \u201crural\u201d dramas, those set on farms, racetracks or some windswept piece of desert. In his screen debut, Shepard starred as the doomed farmer in Terrence Malick\u2019s \u201cDays of Heaven<\/a>\u201d (1978). In his screenplay for the cult classic film, \u201cParis, Texas<\/a>,\u201d (1984) Shepard mirrored the desolation of the South Texas desert in the soul of his protagonist, Travis, a man suffering from a malady that Shepard often said he himself felt: \u201clostness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shepard felt most at home traversing what one western historian called this \u201cstrange land full of mystery.\u201d He took pride in being a western writer.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was never interested in the mythological cowboy. I was interested in the real thing,\u201d he once said<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe would call me late in the night,\u201d Patti Smith wrote in a loving tribute<\/a>, \u201cfrom somewhere on the road, a ghost town in Texas, a rest stop near Pittsburgh, or from Santa Fe, where he was parked in the desert, listening to the coyotes howling. But most often he would call from his place in Kentucky, on a cold, still night, when one could hear the stars breathing\u2026\u201d <\/p>\n

She knew, better than anyone, that such places constituted Shepard\u2019s emotional and physical territory. He adored the vastness of the plains, the green of loping pasturelands; he cherished his time running the highways and byways in his pickup, or sitting next to the campfire on a real-life cattle drive, and reveled in the grit of this country\u2019s less-traveled corners. <\/p>\n

\"TheShepard loved America for its beauty, its danger and its promise, forever transforming her in our imaginations.<\/p>\n

John J. Winters<\/a>, Adjunct Professor of English, Bridgewater State University<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John J. Winters, Bridgewater State University When Sam Shepard died on July 27 the world lost one of the greatest playwrights of the past half-century. He was an artist renowned for bravely plumbing his own life for material, spinning much of his own pain into theatrical gold. His best work revealed the hollowness behind the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":9734,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[293],"tags":[360,171,2909,255,2339],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9733"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9733"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9733\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9735,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9733\/revisions\/9735"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}