|
|
|
Performance dates: February 12, 13, 14- 8pm Performance venue: Linesight Theatre
|
SAM SHEPARD
Fatefully, Shepard
began his work in the theater in New York City during the birth of the
Off-Off Broadway movement. His work was made at experimental avant-garde
venues such as Caffe Cino, the Open Theatre, the American Place Theatre
and La Mama. Young talent like Shepard dared to shock and surprise audiences
with avant-garde, daring, and groundbreaking work on next to nothing budgets.
Shepard's early influences include rock and roll, jazz and popular culture.
At a time when lowbrow and highbrow art were less and less clearly defined,
Shepard deftly incorporated non-literary influences like radio, movies,
advertising and rock and roll in his unconventional plays. Less than four
years after arriving in New York, Shepard's plays won the Village Voice
newspaper's OBIE awards for his plays Chicago, Red Cross, and
Icarus's Mother.
Shepard's work seems
to run parallel with is own journey to come to terms with his identity.
He has been attributed as saying, "I preferred a character that was
constantly unidentifiable, shifting through the actor, so that the actor
could almost play anything, and the audience was never expected to identify
with the character." So different and yet sharing attributes with
his father, Shepard's life has been one of creating and playing roles.
Newsweek once featured Shepard on the cover with the title, "Leading
Man, Playwright, Maverick."
|
Sam
Shepard was born in Fort Sheridan, Illinois on November 5, 1943. His father
served in the Air Force as a fighter pilot in World War II and then retired
to a farm in Duarte, California where Shepard was raised. As a youth,
Shepard was often troubled by his heavy-drinking father. Sam Shepard studied
agriculture for a year at San Antonio Junior College and then left to
join a touring company of actors. In 1963 he moved to New York City where
he served tables at the Village Gate, in Manhattan's Greenwich Village,
where legendary jazz performers played. Within a year, Shepard had several
of his plays produced in Off-Off Broadway theaters. 
From
the beginning of his writing career, Shepard's work reveals he is more
interested in consciousness than in reality. His plays are landscapes
of emotions that contain states of mind inside the self. More than typical
dramatic action or the typical character and story arc of a traditional
play, Shepard's plays, like Fool for Love, resemble the surreal
and often absurd and contradictory realm of dreams or the subconscious.
His characters (such as the ones in Fool for Love) have no tragic
flaw or fateful quest. They sort through the emotional tumult of their
lives in a power struggle where identity is vague, time is cyclical, and
the past haunts the present. As in a dream, memories are often idealized
and altered to suit the needs of the dreamer.
After
1985, Shepard starred in over fifteen feature films while staging only
two new plays. Shepard's career in acting (his film roles include Baby
Boom, Steel Magnolias, The Pelican Brief, Hamlet, Swordfish, and
Black Hawk Down) has often overshadowed his enormous influence
on theater. This Hollywood star status heightened with his relationship
to Oscar-winning actress, Jessica Lange.