What Are Sam Shepard'S Most Influential Plays?

Influencing my play choice list is the work of Sam Shepard. With his work often smelling of gas and dust, I have long been a huge fan. While not the only influential play by this American playwright, Buried Child is the one that many point to as his breakthrough play, winning the Pulitzer for Drama in 1979. While the play’s subsequent elevation to ‘influential work’ has led to it sometimes being read as some sort of groundbreaking work that revolutionized the American family play, it is actually a fairly influential exploration of a mythic decaying family, with secrets buried and slow revelations of shame and even violence. I read Buried Child on a rainy afternoon and immediately got a strong sense of an abandoned, decaying, rural farmhouse, with old canned food and an old television that won’t switch off.

I could go on listing plays by Shepard but for now I’ll stop here. 'True West' is another seminal work that uses the battle between two brothers to get at issues of family, class and the destructive nature of those who would seek to stifle creativity. The play is a taut and lean(serendipitously this was a small downtown theater)study of two brothers in increasingly ascending states of feral nature; a fascinating and cinematic dialog study of two profoundly American argot speakers, locked in a pitched battle to decide who shall be the more primal man.

A few more plays which have greatly affected me are 'Curse of the Starving Class' and 'A Lie of the Mind'. The first is a very dark, blackly comedic play about a rural family’s economic collapse, and the second is probably his most emotionally complicated play. It deals with a lot of trauma and perception of reality, and it’s still really relevant today, especially with a lot of the contemporary explorations of family violence and memory.

The reason I’ve listed 'The Tooth of Crime' as well is because it’s such an unusual and predictive play. It’s a rock-and-roll fable about performance, identity, and conquest, and it really shows how Sam Shepard was an experimenter not just in the tragic events that took place on the kitchen table, but also in terms of form and genre.

Shepherd combines the largest of landscapes with the smallest of human spaces. And his dialogues listen as much as they speak. There is space for actors to invent within the sealed unit of a scene. For someone who is curious why modern American drama is increasingly concerned with crumbling families, with myth, and with poetic violence, these are the key plays. I still sometimes quote a line of his as half-true. And each new production of a play reveals yet another layer. This is what I mean by living theatre.

If I'm on a night bus and I find a playwright then by dawn I've read everything he or she has ever written. Sam Shepard is one such writer who I fell for pretty quickly. So for the purposes of this exercise, here are the five most influential plays by Sam Shepard: ‘Buried Child’ (Shepard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a ‘dysfunctional’ family of farmers); ‘True West’ (two brothers and a typewriter which leads to increasing levels of violence); ‘Fool for Love’ (a portrait of a woman obsessed with another man); ‘Curse of the Starving Class’ (a darkly comedic play about a group of farmers who are slowly starving to death); and ‘A Lie of the Mind’ (a heart-wrenching exploration of a family’s trauma).

As for me, I love the diversity within his plays – the stark realism of some, and the mythical complexity of others. “The Tooth of Crime” even has a healthy dose of rock-and-roll to it. His influence is everywhere – the merging of poetry with the natural, daily speech of characters, the struggle with the broken male archetype, and the slow-burning, dramatic revelations within the unconventional family dynamics. Reading one of Sam Shepard’s plays is like having a secret map to the often-complex, often-dangerous, and always-emotional wasteland of the American West. I have included a list of his “influential” plays, and would be happy to tell you which one I would recommend starting with.

For a really unusual view of the detective genre, one should look at Beckett’s weird, wonderful, surreal ‘Suicide in Bb’ (a detective story featuring two musicians and a possibly deceased detective). A film noir dreamed by a jazz musician, ‘Suicide in Bb’ is a mood piece and atmosphere which never received the same sort of attention as Beckett’s ‘family plays’. But its influence is profound – it’s a pure work of genius in its unadulterated style. For playwrights of the genre-bending, tone-poem school, ‘Suicide in Bb’ is a hidden treasure in Beckett’s oeuvre, demonstrating the full range of his talent for storytelling beyond the dirt-under-the-fingernails realism of his more famous works.