Sam Shepard: The Life of a Playwright and Storyteller
SAM SHEPARD, the playwright, actor, short story writer, essayist and musician, wrote 44 plays, as well as first-rate short stories, essays, and screenplays. His play “Buried Child” won a Pulitzer Prize. He could ride a horse with skill, and play both the banjo and drums. He could recite reams of Samuel Beckett’s poetry or drive a car for 18 hours, concentrating on the task so fiercely that he felt disembodied. He found parts of his past that were common, second-hand or ugly and made of them something stirring and original.
He was raised as Steve Rogers. The family moved often because his dad was an army officer.
Sam graduated from high school in Duarte, California, spent a lot of time around horses, and was a stable hand in Chico, before trying college, falling in with a theater group, moving to New York City in 1963 and becoming a playwright on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He married an actress named O-Lan Jones, and new things hurtled at him. What he hoped to keep from his days in the west was a friendly, unpretentious attitude and a core of toughness.
He found an experimental theater called La Mama and between 1964–1971, wrote 16 plays. Young men, he believed, tend to pursue success as if going into battle, all weapons out, trying to dominate the small space where they find themselves. And the shielding needed for battle, the bulky armor young men use to protect themselves may allow them to grab some territory for a while but doesn’t let them grow as a person or an artist.
As Shepard himself grew older, he tried consciously to remove from his mind the idea of striving as battle, to remove the armor of defensiveness, to leave behind all ideas of domination. He was more vulnerable now but more receptive, and happier.
Sam Shepard’s plays are often set amidst scruffy lives being played out on the margins of wealthy United States society. They often evoke the fraying of the nuclear family. “True West” (1980), perhaps his best-known play, is about two brothers in their mother’s house. Austin is a screenwriter house-sitting for Mom and under some pressure; he’s pitching a movie. His brother Lee shows up after spending three months in the desert, eager to push his more “successful” brother’s buttons.
Shepard always thought it odd to hear about a playwright “finding his voice.” For him, the voices were plural — and he didn’t have to go looking for them. They found HIM. The trick was to know which voice to stay with and channel, which voice was a lively character in a play not yet written, and which voice could safely be told to shut up and leave Sam alone.
His plays range over politics, religion, horses, dogs, dreams — almost everything that went through his mind. He used a manual typewriter, and compared the feeding of a new sheet of paper into the typewriter to the saddling of a horse. He wrote lines that were true and beautiful about love and hate, and he wrote them in everyday language. There was always something oddly unstated in his plays, and they follow no genre. They have amusing moments but are not comedies. They have tense, awful scenes but are not tragedies. Accident and deliberate intent can be hard to distinguish in the behavior of the characters.
Philip Seymour Hoffman did “True West” and during rehearsals felt he was lost, reduced to clinging for support to his co-star John C. Reilly. Shepard assured Hoffman that he’d find his way to the character, and by the time the play opened Hoffman was brilliant — but he said ‘Nothing gets under your skin like a Shepard play.’
Sam believed firmly that the ending of a play should NOT resolve the play. A “happy ending,” he believed, is dishonest and untrue to life; what Shepard tried for was to have a play’s end subtly suggest to the audience an authentic new beginning for the characters, but without delivering it.
He liked to set the actors loose on one of his plays. He believed in the script, he had worked terribly hard on it, but he knew that the lines, the direction, the stage managing of emotion could only go so far. The actors had to take command of the play and carry it home.
He became an actor himself and was nominated for an Academy Award for his portrayal of the pilot Chuck Yeager in “The Right Stuff.” It amused his friends that he played a pilot; in real life he hated to fly. Cars were better than planes, and horses were better than cars. He was drawn to the film when he read the screenplay and found his character would chase his wife on horseback through the Mohave Desert.
The musician Patti Smith loved Sam’s fluency with silence. She came to know him well in New York and was always impressed that a man so skilled with words could also be so comfortable with silence. Patti had known plenty of people who’d stonewall a conversation with silence; she admired Sam for the way he used silence to encourage and continue a conversation.
And in the silence she could always look at that marvelous face, and the way he held his hands. He had a crescent moon tattoo between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, and his face and hands seemed to speak even at rest.
He read passionately, and not the authors in fashion but little-known Latin writers, and Vladimir Nabokov, Ruby Worlitzer, Bruno Schulz. He brought books and notebooks with him when he traveled, always observing, ready to jot something down that he’d seen or overheard, and might be useful later in a piece of writing.
He believed that theater plays, like beauty, and the deeper convictions, don’t come to the playwright whole, all at once, but slowly and in parts. His work was to thoughtfully assemble these parts into something whole.
He loved seeing animals in nature, perfectly adapted to their environment. Losing self-consciousness and simply BEING in nature was a deep pleasure for him. When he was in Bolivia in 2010, starring in the underrated western “Blackthorn,” in phone calls to friends, he talked not about his Spanish director Mateo Gil, or the shooting of the film, but of the thin air of the Bolivian mountains, and sitting around a bonfire at night, then lying on his back under good blankets, staring up at the starry sky.
His marriage with O-Lan Jones ended and in 1982, while working on the film “Frances,” Sam met Jessica Lange, who was playing Frances Farmer. Jessica shared his feeling about nature and she left the great Russian dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov and moved in with Sam. He proposed to her with an antique sapphire ring. She fended off marriage but they had a daughter, Hannah, together in 1985 and a son Samuel in 1987. Disliking big cities, wanting their children to have as normal a childhood as possible, they lived in or near Cloquet, Minnesota — not New York or Hollywood.
In 1984, Shepard and Lange co-starred in “Country,” one of those Hollywood films of the mid-’80’s about Middle American farmers trying to hold onto their farms with weather troubles and agribusiness closing in. Jessica and Sam played Jewell and Gil Ivy, and managed to look at home on the farm, and to play the fear and anger with restraint.
Jessica loved Sam’s looks, his quietly reverberating intelligence and sure sense for how disparate things can be connected. She admired the way Sam could face down blue moods with dark humor. But he drank too much in some of those years and often treated Jessica badly when he’d been drinking. The clarity they’d known grew clouded over, and they finally split in 2009. It was all the more painful because Sam’s father had abused alcohol, so Sam understood quite well the pain he had caused a woman he loved.
He would have been welcome in what he called “the sprawling , demented snake” of Los Angeles but instead lived quietly in Scott County, Kentucky, breeding thoroughbred horses, enjoying the flash of fireflies and the croak of bullfrogs. Though he had one of his characters in “True West” say “Those are the most monotonous fuckin’ crickets I ever heard in my life,” Sam Shepard loved crickets.
In Kentucky, he was a small-town celebrity. When he drove into the nearest decent-sized town, Midway, he’d eat at a restaurant, and people recognized him. Women would gawk at him and walk slowly past the booth where he was sitting. He didn’t like signing autographs or posing for pictures but usually obliged when asked politely. People who strode over and took his picture with a flash camera got an angry outburst, and a warning that he better not see that photo on-line.
He was philosophical about the way that being a celebrity distorts the way people deal with you, making some people fawning, and others cunning. He’d say that seeing a movie star is like “seeing a leopard let out of the zoo.”
His house was about 50 yards from a creek. The walls of his house were lined with books, and many of its windows looked out over rolling fields. At night, he carefully lined up his boots against the wall — but sleep didn’t come easily.
Sometimes, he’d get out of bed and call Patti Smith in New York. When the phone rang, she’d be asleep or nearly so. When she heard Sam’s voice, she’d put on a pot of Nescafe, and prepare to stay up all night. She could hear the sadness in her friend’s voice, “a blue to get lost in, a blue that might lead anywhere.” They talked until dawn, riffing like jazz players. Sam’s silences were still eloquent.
Then Sam was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, and his fine body began rapidly wasting. His muscles weakened until he couldn’t move his arms and legs. He began using a wheelchair, and his breathing was labored, his words strangled.
On a rainy day in 2017, with family around him, Sam Shepard died. In Scott County, people swapped stories about the times they’d seen him. In Manhattan, on Broadway theaters, the marquee lights dimmed for 60 seconds in his honor.
Patti Smith remembered those long late-night phone calls, what Sam had said about the emeralds of Cortez, the white crosses on Flanders Field, the way the Kentucky Derby had changed character over time. She felt like crying but she smiled recalling how Sam used to drive out into the desert outside Santa Fe and cut the engine, just to listen to the coyotes howl.