Sam Shepard has been “goin’ down big” in New York this year. In addition to the off-off-Broadway revival of Tooth of Crime earlier this year, Shepard’s Fool for Love opened to rave reviews this summer at the Circle Repertory Company a few streets away from where the Cherry Lane’s revival of True West has been playing all year. And two more Shepard plays are scheduled to open at La Mama in September. For a playwright who has insisted, for the last ten years, that he doesn’t want to be a playwright at all, Sam Shepard has become an oddly permanent fixture on the American theatrical scene.
An aura of mysticism surrounds Shepard’s plays. Just as they seem to find their way to New York almost against their author’s will, so their form and genesis has been attributed to some other-than-human force: “The stuff would just come out,” as Shepard put it in a 1974 interview, “and I wasn’t really trying to shape it or make it into any big thing.” But “disciplined” is a word the critics also use to describe his plays, and Stanley Kauffmann labels Shepard our “best practicing American playwright.”
This mysticism, in fact, seems to hover over almost everything written about Shepard to date. The vocabulary of Shepard criticism—among people who write seriously about drama as literature—comprises words like “shamanism,” “totemism,” and “mythology.” But the most mysterious feature in all this is the inability of critics who think Shepard is good to
