Rock-and-roll Jesus with a Cowboy Mouth (revisited)

Sam Shepard gets personal with American Theatre once again—20 years later.

By Don Shewey

"So, what are we up to here?"

It doesn't take long for Sam Shepard to get to the heart of the matter—casually, directly, existentially. Here we are, in a restaurant in downtown St. Paul, Minn., on a cold and gray November afternoon. What we're up to is an interview, obviously, though the occasion is a little murkier than usual. A playwright of Shepard's stature ordinarily sits down for a major interview only when there's a new project to promote. As it happens, Shepard does have a new play, but he's not quite finished writing it, and it won't be produced until the fall of 2004 at the earliest. The occasion for our meeting has more to do with the history of this magazine. Shepard appeared on the cover of the very first issue, and going back to him seemed like a felicitous way to mark the 20th anniversary of American Theatre.

What is Shepard up to these days? Plenty. The guy who first made his mark on American drama in the late 1960s with a torrent of wildly poetic one-acts bursting with rock-and-roll energy turned 60 in November. He remains steadily productive as an artist, just not necessarily in the theatre. Since New York's Signature Theatre Company devoted its entire 1996–97 season to his work (on the heels of Steppenwolf Theatre Company's acclaimed Broadway revival of his Pulitzer-winning Buried Child), Shepard has produced only two new plays—Eyes for Consuela (adapted from an Octavio Paz story) at Manhattan Theatre Club, and The Late Henry Moss, staged at San Francisco's Magic Theatre in 2000 and the following year at Signature in New York.

Still, revivals of older works keep him in the public eye. The Broadway production of True West in 2000 starred the hot young film actors Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly, who alternated in the leading roles. That show was directed by Matthew Warchus, who made a film of Shepard's Simpatico (released in 2000 and now available on DVD) and who will most likely direct his new play, a farce entitled The God of Hell, next season on Broadway. In addition, the Roundabout Theatre Company is considering a revival of Fool for Love, possibly directed by Sam Mendes.

While his theatrical writing has slowed down substantially, Shepard has also published two well-received volumes of prose, Cruising Paradise (1996) and Great Dream of Heaven (2002), both of which shuffle chunks of short fiction together with memoirs, dialogue and journal entries. And, of course, he has taken what seemed at first to be a fluky sideline into movie acting and turned it into an active and lucrative career. In the last five years alone, Shepard has acted in 16 features. They have ranged from Ridley Scott's Oscar-nominated action flick Black Hawk Down to run-of-the-mill TV movies such as Dash and Lilly, in which he played Dashiell Hammett to Judy Davis's Lillian Hellman. For theatre aficionados, by far the most interesting Shepard-related film available is This So-Called Disaster, a documentary directed by Michael Almereyda, whose modern-dress movie version of Hamlet featured Ethan Hawke in the title role and Shepard as the ghost of Hamlet's father. The documentary has its theatrical premiere this month at the Film Forum in New York City [see sidebar].

This So-Called Disaster focuses on the Magic Theatre production of The Late Henry Moss, which Shepard directed himself with an eye-popping cast of movie stars, including Nick Nolte, Sean Penn, Woody Harrelson and Cheech Marin, along with longtime Shepard stalwarts Sheila Tousey and, in the title role, James Gammon. Halfway through the rehearsal period, Shepard saw that something extraordinary was happening and invited Almereyda in to witness the process. The result fascinates on two fronts. It's an unusually intimate portrait of high-powered actors at work. With this bunch, the testosterone level is extremely high, and yet their struggles are both touching (see Sean Penn wrestle with his own perfectionistic standards) and amusing (see Shepard attempt to explain Brechtian theory to Woody Harrelson—and succeed!).

The film also reveals Shepard himself to an unprecedented degree. Among the series of family plays Shepard has written since Curse of the Starving Class (1976), The Late Henry Moss is probably the most autobiographical, dealing directly with the death of his father and their complicated, ambivalent relationship. In the film, Shepard speaks about his father with a detachment born of deep grief and mourning, and we see how the events of the artist's life get transformed into theatrical poetry, especially through glimpses of Gammon's and Nolte's fierce performances.

I myself have an unusually keen interest in the dance between Shepard's life and his work, since the first book I published was a biography of him. That's another big reason why we're sitting down for this interview: I wrote a book about this guy, yet I've never actually met him before. Shepard has always been exceptionally protective of his privacy—"I prefer a life that's not being eaten off of," he once said. When I began researching my biography in 1984 (the book was published the following year, and a revised edition came out in 1997), publicity was the last thing he needed or wanted. He was right in the middle of leaving his wife O-Lan and their son Jesse to move in with Jessica Lange, and my attempts to contact him were met with a self-explanatory silence. After the book came out, we had a couple of close encounters—I saw him once in Central Park, looking grim and unapproachable, and at a press preview of True West on Broadway he passed by near enough for me to see that, like most actors his age, he dyes his hair—but neither seemed like the most auspicious occasion to introduce myself.

When I wrote to him proposing a 20th-anniversary American Theatre interview, he responded favorably, and we agreed to meet in Minnesota, where he and Lange live with their high-school-aged children. Shepard sounded friendly on the phone. He mentioned that his daughter had a concert coming up (she plays cello with the school orchestra) and that he'd recently taken his son fishing in Montana. As we sit down together, he says he's looking forward to moving back to Kentucky when his kids finish school; he prefers a warmer climate, where he has more room to raise horses, which is clearly his passion. At the moment he's only got five horses, but on his ranch he raises 300 head of cattle. He and Lange also bought some land in Mexico six years ago, and since they started spending time there Shepard has bitten the bullet and gotten over his famous aversion to flying, thanks to the miracle of Xanax.

Since I'd made it clear that I wasn't doing a People-magazine profile and that our interview would range over his body of work, I'm surprised and intrigued to know that personal details were not 100-percent off-limits. I soon discover, though, that interviewing Shepard is a little like walking a maze—what seems like an open channel can abruptly turn into a dead end. I've come prepared with pages of questions, many of which represent my interest in venturing below the naturalistic/autobiographical surface of Shepard's plays into the theatrical, poetic and spiritual layers that coexist in his work. I find that certain inquiries go nowhere—sometimes out of lack of interest (he doesn't think about his work theoretically or intellectually at all), sometimes out of ignorance (culturally he's admittedly out of the loop—he'd never heard of Suzan-Lori Parks, for example, and political theatre for him means Waiting for Lefty), sometimes out of reticence (shielding his family but also his instinctive, emotional life, from which he prefers to draw without analyzing). Often I wish I was writing for an equestrian journal, because whenever we touch on the subject of horses his demeanor and his vocabulary become noticeably more energized.

Two things about Shepard I wouldn't have known without meeting him: He loves to laugh, and he has a whole arsenal of different ones (a chuckle, a giggle, a percussive heh-heh-heh) in different flavors (nervous, self-deprecating, jovial, male-bonding). And just as his plays are full of characters whose identities slip and slide around, he doesn't seem attached to any definitive self-image. Whatever energy he spends building up the persona of "cowboy" or "movie star," he spends just as much sidling away from it. He's a living example of the attitude espoused by Wyndham Lewis in his essay "The Code of the Herdsmen": "Cherish and develop side by side your six most constant indications of different personalities. You will acquire the potentiality of six men. A variety of clothes, hats especially, are of help in this wider dramatization of yourself. Never fall into the vulgarity of being or assuming yourself to be one ego."

The relationship between journalist and subject is a tricky one; that between biographer and living legend is even more so. Whether out of shyness or cowardice, I skip over the opportunity to acknowledge aloud that I'd written a book about him, and he doesn't bring it up, so the fact sort of slithers around our feet under the table like some harmless but slightly creepy snake.

DON SHEWEY: A lot of playwrights live and breathe theatre, and you obviously don't. (He giggles.) What keeps you writing plays?
SAM SHEPARD: I love the form. You have the actor, dialogue, lights, audience, sets. I can't think of another art form that combines so many elements and has so many possibilities. I've always had an affinity for it. I don't know why. It's like when a musician picks up a saxophone, he doesn't even look at a guitar or fiddle, it's all sax.

You used to say you hate theatre and you never go. What is the theatre you write for if not theatre that you go to see?
It's a little brash to say I hate theatre. I don't make a regular habit of going to the theatre. There are some pieces of theatre that are fantastic. Recently we went to the Guthrie [Theater of Minneapolis] and saw the Globe's all-male production of Twelfth Night. It was absolutely extraordinary. Every once in a while you come across things like that that wake you up. The Beauty Queen of Leenane—I loved that play! It's one of the few plays I went back and saw two or three times.

Have you seen any other plays of Martin McDonagh's?
I haven't, actually. I've read some of them. I think he's very talented.

Are there other writers you follow on a regular basis?
Not playwrights, no. There are definitely other fiction writers I'm very interested in, such as Peter Handke. For a long time I've read just about everything of his. Another one is [Semezdin] Mehmedinovic, he's Serbian. He accomplished the kind of book I've always tried to do and haven't totally succeeded at, which is a combination of poetry, prose, short stories, diary, all thrown into one thing. I love that form. He actually managed to do it with Sarajevo Blues. During that horrible conflict, he chose to stay there in the city. He had a wife and kids and decided to stick it out. It's an amazing account of a writer under fire.

Are there writers or theatre artists you've heard about that you're curious about, whether you've seen them or not?
I'm sure there are, but I don't stay in the loop that much. I'm pretty much in the country.

I wonder what people in the horse world or the movie world think about your theatre life.
They find it curious. I kind of apprentice with some of these older guys in horse things. One guy in particular I hang out with is 75 years old, Bob McCutcheon. He's very well known in the cutting-horse world. I travel with him a lot, going to horse shows. We're barrelin' down the road 80 miles an hour, talkin' about movies, and out of the blue he says, "Sam, whur is Hollywood anyway?" (laughs) I just about fell on the floor. He didn't have a clue. Those are the kind of people I really enjoy being around. (laughs)

Do you have a sense of your place in the American theatre?
I don't, really. Every once in a while it's startling to come across other writers who have looked at my stuff and said that it inspired them to do their thing. If anything, I'd like to think that my work might inspire people not to imitate me but to find their own approach and go from there.

When you think about your plays, do you break them down into categories or periods, either chronologically or thematically or geographically?
(Shakes his head) I can't—it doesn't do me any good. I'm really not attached to them. I have been very fond of certain productions, like the one Matthew Warchus did of True West in New York. One of the beauties of the play is that it's like a piece of music. It can be played so many different ways. It was played by those guys in a way it had never been played.

You liked that they switched roles?
Not only that, but they actually conjured up their own characters in each case. You would never believe that these guys could reverse roles from one night to the next. What they came up with! It was just astounding. The first Steppenwolf production was interesting, but Malkovich was so overwhelming that Gary Sinise kinda got the floor wiped with him. You never saw the other side of the play. In Matthew's production they were two entities.

I think other writers connect to either the early one-acts for their wild poetry, or the rock-and-roll energy of plays like The Tooth of Crime, and then there are the family plays. Are those categories you relate to?
I didn't set out to write them like that. I suppose you can divide them like that. But if you go back and look at an early play like The Rock Garden, you can see the seeds of Curse of the Starving Class. I just went to a show the other day of Jasper Johns, not a retrospective but stuff from the '80s to the present. It's so radically different from his early stuff. But the way he repeats thematic stuff, repeating and repeating and duplicating and going over and running these things, is very much the way it feels to me a lot of times [see sidebar].

He's a perfect example of someone who's stuck with certain images and worked all the variations you can on it. I'm curious how that is for you. You have this iconography of images that show up again and again, starting with the old man in the rocking chair in Rock Garden that shows up in these other plays. The Late Henry Moss is an evolutionary product of eight or nine of your plays, so halfway into the first act, you've got all these recurring or recycled images set up.
A lot of people knocked it because it was interpreted to be a rehash of True West, which it wasn't. It was just that there were brothers again. There's no law against bringing brothers into the plays several times. (chuckles) I like this predicament, one brother sitting with the corpse, and the other one coming from a long distance and meeting around the death of the father. I thought it was an important predicament.

What do you mean when you say it's an important predicament?
There are predicaments and there are predicaments. There's King Lear, and there's Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. You know what I mean? There's predicaments that resonate and there are predicaments that don't mean anything. They're not even predicaments, they're just excuses to write a play. (chuckles)

Your plays excite me most when they go from something naturalistic to something poetic. One version of that is this notion of mutually exclusive realities that exist on stage at the same time. The idea of someone being alive and dead at the same time. Which is in Henry Moss and in some other plays.
The essence of that for me has always been this acknowledgment, which Brecht and Joe Chaikin introduced me to, of the actor being the actor first and the character second. It's not about dissolving into the character, which we do in movies, where it's no longer Clint Eastwood, it's the Pale Rider. In theatre, the most interesting thing is to sustain the actor, not get rid of him. Keep the actor moving in and out of character, or being able to separate the two. This is one of the most interesting things in theatre.

Because it's so mysterious.
Because it's so true to the performance aspect of theatre, and we can't get away from that.

It shows up in a lot of your plays. In the last image of Buried Child, there's a sense that Vince and the dead baby that Tilden brings in from the garden are the same character.

Mmm-hmm.

There's this overlapping reality in a spooky, metaphysical way. I'm curious to know how you explain that to yourself.
I'm not interested in the explanation. I'm interested in the provocation. Explanations are a dime a dozen.

Suicide in B-flat is another example where there are these two mutually exclusive realms existing on stage at the same time, in different dimensions.
Yeah. I'm not sure that play ever really succeeded. I was so absorbed in trying to find a parallel to jazz that I think I got lost in that and forgot about the craftsmanship of the play. I was very interested at the time in jazz musicians like Thelonious Monk or Mingus. There's something about them that's—"holy man" isn't the right word, but they have a spiritual charisma. In the mid-'60s there were musicians who carried a certain kind of wisdom and power with them—like a shaman. When they played, you had the feeling that they were enacting something far beyond jazz music. It was particularly true of the new wave of black musicians.

Did you see ever Monk play in person?
Yeah, I worked at the Village Gate and he played there quite a bit. He'd get up and dance around the piano in his top hat. He was one of the first real artists I ever saw. When you saw him you knew you were in the company of something from another world.

When you re-use an image in that Jasper Johns way, is it almost like you've let go of previous versions of it, as if you haven't used it before?
No. It's more like this thing that keeps coming back to haunt you. I'm thinking of simple images like the bathtub. I love the bathtub. There's something religious about the bathtub.

Really?
Yeah, it's like cleansing, and there's something about death in it. It's like a casket. It's like birth and like death. Certain objects have that power to me. A refrigerator on stage is a very powerful image. (laughs)

Those are almost icons in your plays.
The kitchen has always been my favorite room in the house. The kitchen is where serious conversations happen, where genuine gathering together with family happens, where devastating things happen. Eating.

So what's the refrigerator?
I just love finding an object that's so domestic, so common in life, in an uncommon situation, on stage, as a character. It's another thing altogether.

What is it on stage?
Well, in the case of Curse of the Starving Class, it's this place where dreams and hopes were contained. Every time the thing's opened, there's some hoping, some hopeless hoping that goes on. Every time the light comes on, the yearning. We know it's empty. Why keep opening the door? Nobody's put anything in there! (laughs)

Then there's a refrigerator in Henry Moss that only has jalapeño peppers in it.
Right. Yeah. These things bring us back to—for lack of a better word—reality. My dad's place had nothing but a rocking chair and a refrigerator in it, and the refrigerator was full of jalapeño peppers or, when he had some money, booze, and that was it. It was not the place for food.

I wonder if you ever find yourself writing a play and saying, Damn, there I go again, another play about two guys exchanging or merging identities?
No, I don't care. As long as I have the feeling that I'm investigating something for real, I don't really give a shit how it comes off. (chuckles)

So Henry Moss has to do with death and having the corpse on stage, which doesn't have anything to do with True West. Simpatico is somewhere in between.
Yeah. Yeah. (pause) Yeah. (chuckles)

But it doesn't feel like a repetition of True West?
(cagey) Well, do they feel like the same play to you?

In some ways they do. Two guys who are in very different places swap identities. Underneath the surface Simpatico seems to be groping toward something about friendship between two men.
Yeah, I'm very interested in that. I don't know what to say about it, exactly, but a real friendship feels easier between two men. And that friendship covers a huge amount of ground. The one between men and women can, too, but not without a sense of conflict.

There's another recurring image that shows up in Simpatico—all these guys lying on the floor paralyzed and can't get up. Is there a meaning beyond the narrative level to that paralysis?
No. I'm interested in characters who have a certain profound sense of helplessness. I think it's a lot closer to the truth than the illusion that people are on top of things, which is the impression you get every day from television, that we're all on top of it, we're exquisite performers in our life. Get the SUV and we're goin' to town. The whole nation's on a winning streak. Which couldn't be further from the truth. We're on the biggest losing streak we've ever had. How many people a month come home from Iraq with limbs missing? Yet we're supposed to be victorious in this thing. It's a fucking nightmare. Every day it's brainwashing, that this is a heroic thing we're involved in. It's unbelievable bullshit.

So this is some of the stuff that you're talking about in these plays.
Well, yeah. I've always found plays that are overtly political to be extremely boring. Waiting for Lefty. Incredibly boring. And yet at the same time, you have to deal with what's going on in the world. It's difficult now to find material that you feel is pertinent to a whole bunch of people. I'm not quite sure who goes to the theatre anymore.

In the '60s you were living in New York in the middle of a hotbed of theatre that interested you. Then when you were in London you were exposed to a big theatre scene there. In California you were part of the Bay Area/Magic Theatre community. Now you're...

In Minnesota. (laughs disparagingly)

So do you have a sense of community?
Not beyond family, no. A little bit with the horse thing, but there's not much of one.

Do you miss being attached to an artistic community?
You know, I never did really feel attached. There were certain people like Joe Chaikin that I was attached to, but I didn't feel like I was a member of the Open Theatre. At the Magic Theatre, there were certain actors I enjoyed working with. But I didn't feel like there was that much of a community.

I'm surprised to hear you say that, because I thought a lot of the work you did in California came from an ongoing connection. But you didn't feel any of that?
No. 'Cause I've never felt like a member of anything. (laughs)

For the Signature season, you produced a new version of The Tooth of Crime, subtitled (Second Dance). How was it for you to go back and rewrite that play?
I was very excited about it, because I was never satisfied at all with the second act. I tried to get away from the sentimentality and the self-pity of the hero. The demonic aspect of the other character became more interesting to me than the failing hero.

You mean like Faust and Mephistopheles?
Exactly. I felt like there was something inherent in that language I hadn't taken far enough. So I tried to carry it further. I didn't totally succeed. But it was much better than the first version; it was more venomous. One of the inspirations for Tooth of Crime (Second Dance) was working with my old friend T-Bone Burnett, who's now become quite famous for his persistence in finding essential music. [Note: Burnett's soundtrack for Joel and Ethan Coen's film O Brother, Where Art Thou? sparked a revival of interest in Appalachian music.] He wrote some amazing music for the show. Unfortunately, the production got lost in a whole lot of snarls and animosity between producers. I don't know exactly what happened with it. I had a good friend of mine direct it, Bill Hart. Maybe it's better if the director isn't a friend. (laughs) Maybe the play's snakebit.

What does that mean?
Bad luck. (heh heh heh heh) T-Bone called me a month or so ago and said the Coen brothers have an interest in making a movie of it. I've always thought Tooth of Crime won't be finished until the right kind of actors get hold of it. I've always thought Tim Roth would be the ultimate Crow. He would push it to the edge.

Who would be an ideal Hoss for you?
I dunno, Malkovich? Can you imagine Malkovich and Tim Roth? (laughs)

Speaking of how actors can finish roles, I want to ask you about the San Francisco production of Henry Moss and that once-in-a-lifetime cast.
The odd thing was, having that many extraordinary actors onstage, this sort of social phenomenon happened. It became this social event in San Francisco that had nothing whatsoever to do with the play.

Did you realize later you were a little naive about what would happen if you got those guys together in one place?
Totally naive! It never even crossed my mind that this would be a circus for San Francisco socialites. They were very generous, they attended and dressed up and there were cocktail parties and all. But nobody saw the play. They saw Nick, they saw Sean, they saw Woody, they saw Cheech.

Do you think it harmed the life of the play, that theatres thought, "Oh, we can't do that play unless we have superstars"?
I guess it did. It was a kind of lesson for me. Maybe I shouldn't have directed it. I don't know if it would have been different.

Your prose writing has developed in a way that's parallel to your plays. Your later fiction pieces have been more honed, more refined, just as your plays have gotten more attentive to form and structure. Is that right?
Absolutely. It sounds ridiculous, but I'm self-taught. I learn everything by doing it. I wasn't born knowing how to write a play. You do it, and hopefully you keep evolving. One really great thing that happened was that I discovered Chekhov's short stories. I'm embarrassed to say I didn't really start reading them 'til about five or six years ago. I'd always kind of dismissed Chekhov and didn't really know why. When I came upon the stories, and started really reading and studying them, I couldn't believe it. I read every single one.

What did you get out of them?
How as a craftsman he could apply himself with this dogged attention to detail and come up with these amazing things.

You have a new play. How many acts?
One act in three scenes, about an hour and a half. So it's like a miniature three-act play.

How many people?
Four characters: three men, one woman. I've just finished the second draft. It's still not where it's supposed to be. I've got the tail end of it, but I'm having trouble with the way I get to the ending. It's a lot better than the first draft.

What will you do with it when you're done?
Matthew Warchus is my favorite director of the moment, and he'll probably be able to do it in the fall of 2004. In New York—I don't want to do the provinces anymore. (heh heh)

How much do your plays change from draft to draft?
For each draft, I sit down and type through the whole thing, and as I retype I rewrite. It really works, because it causes you to go through it moment by moment like an actor. It's strange the way it happens. Little scenes open up. You discover new dialogue. You go off on little tangents and come back. I much prefer to do that than put Band-Aids on it or cut it open. I've never had good luck with that.

Okay, last question: What do you know about playwriting now that you wish you'd known when you were starting out?
Like I said, I'm a slow learner. It's taken all of this time to get to where I feel like I can now say I know how to write a play. It's such a strange, strange form. Because it's so dependent on these fragile ingredients. Not the least of which is this thing of the predicament. If you don't have this essential predicament, if it doesn't have real weight, real value, you can write 24 hours a day and it won't amount to anything.

I love the word you use, predicament. It's very American.
Another way of saying it is "stakes." What are the real stakes involved? You can play penny poker or play for the ranch.

What are the stakes in the new play?
They're pretty high. They're pretty damn high. I'm hoping that they'll have repercussions. This is the best play I've written since, maybe...uh, the best play I've written in a long time.

Come on, go out on a limb—since when?
True West. I knew when I wrote True West it was going to work.

 

On SHEPARD and FILM

When Sam Shepard appeared as an early-20th-century Texas farmer in his first Hollywood feature, Terrence Malick's 1978 Days of Heaven, the movie world immediately took notice of him as an actor. Pauline Kael, the doyenne of film critics, wrote in the New Yorker, "Though the irregularly handsome, slightly snaggletoothed Shepard has almost no lines, he makes a strong impression; he seems authentically an American of an earlier era." Yet even when he won an Academy Award nomination for his performance as test pilot Chuck Yeager in Philip Kaufman's 1983 The Right Stuff, there was still the sense that Shepard the actor was moonlighting from his "real" job as a prolific, Pulitzer-blessed playwright. Who knew that 20 years later Shepard would be steadily employed as an actor, making one or two films almost every year? He can currently be seen in Blind Horizon, a thriller starring Val Kilmer and Neve Campbell. He just returned from Australia where he worked on a film called Stealth, directed by Rob Cohen, maker of big-box-office B-movies like The Fast and the Furious. And he will shortly begin work on a low-budget independent film called The King. [Complete filmography]

Shepard has written and directed two movies of his own (Far North and Silent Tongue), but they didn't create enough of a stir to ensure his future as a filmmaker. Although the search for financing has caused a series of delays, he and German director Wim Wenders (they collaborated on 1984's Paris, Texas) are ready to go with a new film called Don't Come Knockin', which Shepard wrote and is supposed to star in with Jessica Lange.

Appearing in films alongside a multitude of big names has given Shepard an opportunity to develop his own perspective on the differences between acting in film and acting onstage. This So-Called Disaster, Michael Almereyda's documentary film about the San Francisco production of The Late Henry Moss, lets us be the proverbial fly on the wall as Shepard works day-by-day directing actors like Sean Penn, Nick Nolte and Woody Harrelson in what is, for them, a rare stage appearance. I asked him about that.

DON SHEWEY: I'm guessing that the real experience for you was being in the rehearsal room with those guys.
SAM SHEPARD: Yeah. Which is why I had the impulse to make a documentary. I knew this was sort of a chance of a lifetime, with this many great actors. The thing is that, as is true of any production, you don't see the work the actor does. You don't see the sweat, the real grit, the energy that goes into making the character. These guys were absolutely dedicated. For movie stars, this was something that a lot of them hadn't really encountered. The daily grind of showing up and the obligation to it. They were incredibly loyal.

With Sean and Nick, I could palpably feel that these guys had their ears up. They felt like they were being paid attention to as actors, and not just: What are you gonna look like with the furniture? How do you fit into the plot? Are you gonna speak loud or speak soft or be brutal here? You know what I mean? One thing about a play is that it requires teamwork. And that's not true of film. The grips, the lighting guy, all those guys have to work as a team. The actors don't. They can go solo the whole way. Half the time they're there by themselves anyway. Not to say there's not some craft in that. There's some brilliant film acting. But it's very different from going to the theatre every day and working together in this team situation.

Sean Penn is a really interesting actor, and he's done some stage acting. How was it to watch him work?
I felt like Sean wanted to go much, much further than he allowed himself to go. Out of all the actors, I felt like he was the most vulnerable. He's a very sensitive, smart actor but scared a little bit by the possibility of laying it out there with the other actors. Nick—not a fear in the world. He's gonna crash and burn the whole way. He'll jump over the cliff for you. Sean is a lot more tentative, but a lot of yearning. I regret now that we didn't experiment more.

See, a film actor doesn't even get that opportunity to mess around. You come the day of work, you've got your lines, you put the costume on, you go to work and you do it. Here we were, day after day after day, in the lap of this luxury, being able to experiment, go places, move here, move there, for weeks.

Tell me about being in Hamlet yourself.
I loved doing that. The weird thing is, when I first ran away from home and decided I would go audition for this one-night-stand company called the Bishops Company, they gave me a piece of Shakespeare. I don't even remember what play it was. I was so nervous, and I read the whole page. Only later I realized that I'd read Shakespeare and then the footnotes, scrambling it all together. The next day they hired me! Anyway, that was my first experience with Shakespeare. I thought never in a million years am I ever going to do Shakespeare. Then Michael, bless his heart, asked me to do this thing. I spent, I guess, a month and a half memorizing that thing. I was in Montana at the time, driving around in the truck, doing the lines. I thought, "This is the most spectacular writing I've come across in my life." By the time we went to film it, the language had found its way into me somehow.

In a way that other movies hadn't.
Never. I'm always rewriting my shit in films. I look at it and say, "I can't say this."

—D.S.

 

on SHEPARD and GURDJIEFF

When Sam Shepard met Peter Brook in London in 1973, Brook introduced him to the teachings of spiritual philosopher G.I. Gurdjieff, whose memoir Meetings with Remarkable Men was the basis of a film that Brook made in 1979. Among students and adherents, there is a tradition of not speaking publicly about the Gurdjieff work. Some prominent artists have let their involvement with Gurdjieff’s teachings be known—actor Bill Murray is probably the best-known—and a recent anthology called Gurdjieff: Essays and Reflections on the Man and His Teaching includes entries by Brook, Jerzy Grotowski, playwright Jean-Claude Carriere and composer David Hykes. The closest Shepard has ever come to acknowledging his relationship to Gurdjieff was his dedication of A Lie of the Mind to “L.P.,” a reference to Lord Pentland (Henry John Sinclair), the British businessman who established and directed the Gurdjieff Foundation of California and whose funeral Shepard attended in the spring of 1984.

I’d always been curious to know what if any influence Gurdjieff’s work had on Shepard’s plays, especially A Lie of the Mind. I knew enough about Gurdjieff’s philosophy to know that “waking sleep” was one of his metaphors for the human condition, spiritual practice being an invitation to rouse oneself from this unconscious slumber. And reading the anthology, I was very intrigued to find central themes from Shepard’s work expressed in this passage from an essay by Jeanne de Salzman, who oversaw the continuation of Gurdjieff’s work after his death: “Try for a moment to accept the idea that you are not what you believe yourself to be, that you overestimate yourself, in fact that you lie to yourself. That you always lie to yourself every moment, all day, all your life…You will see that you are two…One who lies and one who cannot endure lies…Learn to look until you have seen the difference between your two natures, until you have seen the lies, the deception in yourself. When you have seen your two natures, that day, in yourself, the truth will be born.”

I was hoping that this interview with Shepard would be an opportunity to sound him out on this subject. Here’s how it went:

I was struck by something that you said to Michael Almereyda in the documentary: “It’s an amazing dilemma when one begins to discover that you’re living your life as a somnambulist. You’re living your life in a trance—in a dream, to be corny about it. When that occurs, there’s a kind of amazing thing that takes place. One is despair, and the other is a sudden awakening. There’s another way of seeing.” That metaphysical perspective shows up in a lot of your plays, and it sounds to me like some of the language that comes from the Gurdjieff work.
Yeah, it’s language that’s used in a lot of different traditions. The Buddhist tradition. The notion of awakening is a Christian idea.

How so?
The resurrection.

I hadn’t made the connection to resurrection as the same kind of metaphor, but I see what you mean. You also repeatedly use a metaphor of a living corpse. Henry Moss says “There are a lot of dead people walking around, a lot of walkers and talkers.”
It’s an extremely provocative idea that the unconscious can believe themselves to be conscious. People who are in an unconscious state, which is a great majority of us, can believe they’re conscious. In other words, we could be walking in a dream and not know it. To me it’s a fascinating idea.

A Lie of the Mind is another play that deals with being dead and alive at the same time. Jake thinks he’s killed Beth at the beginning of the play. There’s also the notion of being split, which shows up in your plays.
Yeah. I don’t know what more to say about it. (laughs)

I’m curious about the relationship between the Gurdjieff work, the language of waking sleep and lying, with this notion of being split.
I don’t know how Gurdjieff got into it. (He turns cold all of a sudden.)

It seems like a code that runs through some of the plays.
No, it’s not. As far as the split thing goes, I always felt envious of people who feel themselves to be whole. Maybe there are people who do genuinely feel whole, like they’re one person. I’ve never felt that ever in my life. I felt like I’m many. Many. I don’t mean schizophrenic or neurotic or any of that bullshit. On a daily basis, I can feel maybe six different versions of myself playing out in the course of a day, that I’m aware of.

During a break from tape-recording the interview, I pointed out to Shepard that I’d been trying to get him to talk about the Gurdjieff work and he’d been dodging my questions. He let me know in no uncertain terms that he doesn’t want to be viewed as a representative of the Gurdjieff work. He said that he doesn’t know enough about it and he didn’t want to reduce it or simplify it. He also indicated that he didn’t want people to get the impression that’s what his plays are about. I understood and respected his position. I did show him the quote from Mme. De Salzman [above], and he was very interested in it, saying, “Now she knows what she’s talking about.” —D.S.

 

On SHEPARD and JASPER JOHNS

If Shepard hadn't mentioned going to see an exhibition called "Past Things and Present: Jasper Johns Since 1983" at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, I would never have made a connection between these two artists. Once made, though, the connection has considerable resonance. Both are quintessentially American artists who are peculiarly insistent in their use of recurring images. Shepard's The Late Henry Moss is practically a catalogue of visual elements recycled from previous works: the bathtub from Chicago, the refrigerator from Curse of the Starving Class, the barred window reminiscent of a prison cell from When the World Was Green, the comic business of carrying a full bowl of soup across the stage from States of Shock, the pair of brothers from nearly every Shepard play, the fish from Action, the apparently dead body on stage at the top of Buried Child (a reference, Shepard admits, to J.M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World). Jasper Johns, most famous for his flags and targets, has moved on in recent years to new repeating images, some of them traced from other art works. The show at the Walker focuses in great detail on the recurrence of the artist's own shadow in a series called The Seasons and a somewhat cryptic figure known as "the Green Angel."

As Joan Rothfuss, who curated the exhibition, writes in the show's catalog, "The quotation or appropriation of motifs—as opposed to their invention—is a strategy Johns has long used, in part to help him hide his 'personality, psychological state, and emotions' by removing his imagination from the artistic equation... Beginning in the early 1980s [Johns shifted] toward a more openly autobiographical and personally expressive iconography. Johns himself acknowledged the shift in 1984 when he admitted that 'in my early work I tried to hide my personality, my psychological state, my emotions... but eventually it seemed like a losing battle. Finally, one must simply drop the reserve.'" That could almost be Shepard talking. —D.S.

 

on SHEPARD and WALLACE SHAWN

I’ve always found it intriguing to note that Sam Shepard and Wallace Shawn were born a week apart in 1943 (Nov. 5 and 12, respectively). Physically, they would make an odd couple—the tall, lean Marlboro Man and the short, round urban clown. Yet temperamentally they share many characteristics. Both are highly original writers who create deep, darkly comic dramas that, true to their Scorpio natures, often revolve around essential themes of sex, power and transformation. Both of them choose to keep their home lives private, and they’re both in long relationships with women who are also distinguished artists (actress Jessica Lange and writer Deborah Eisenberg). And while they’re among the most respected playwrights in the American theatre, they both have built solid careers as movie actors. Shepard’s cowboy persona and hypermasculine good looks have led to his being cast as any number of strong, silent authority figures, while Shawn’s chirpy, endearing speaking voice has made him one of the most sought-after performers in animated features. —D.S.

Don Shewey has published three books about theatre, including the biography Sam Shepard (Da Capo). He writes theatre reviews for the Advocate and feature stories for the New York Times. An archive of his writing is available online at www.donshewey.com.

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