Sam Shepard has gained a reputation
as one of America’s foremost living playwrights.
Reduced to synopsis, Shepard’s life
sounds a lot like one of his plays: absurd, improbable. How else would
you label the unlikely chain of events that turned a small-town runaway
and junior college-dropout into one of the most important contemporary
American playwrights and a reclusive movie-star. In fact, he has turned
into an archetypal symbol of the American self-made man and has been labeled
“a true American hero”.
Sam Shepard was born under the name
Samuel Shepard Rogers on November 5, 1943 in Fort Sheridan, Illinois. For
a long time he was to be called Steve Rogers. His father was a former Army
pilot, who retired to become a farmer. He moved his family from South Dakota
to Florida to Utah 
and
finally settled in Duarte, California to become an avocado farmer. Shepard's
father was an alcoholic which is why Shepard's memories of home are not
pretty: violent confrontations with his father, an ineffectual mother,
unfulfilled hunger for something not available in Duarte, a rural suburb
of Los Angeles.
After high-school he began to study
agriculture at Mount San Antonio Junior College, but he dropped out after
three semesters. He joined a local acting troupe named The Bishop's Repertory
Company. Their mission was to bring the public "Christian-oriented drama."
To find the public, they set out on a cross-country bus tour, and Steve
Rogers went with them. Later he became a playwright in residence at the
Magic Theatre in San Francisco.
In 1963 he moved to New York and
lived together with Charles Mingus, the son of the famous jazz musician.
Mingus got him a busboy job at the Village Gate, a leading New York jazz
club.
It is the year of Jack Kennedy's
assassination and the beginning of the escalation in Vietnam, but
also the start of the Hippie era. A revolution has overtaken dance, theater,
music, the arts in general; its epicenter is downtown Manhattan. In unconventional
spaces like Caffé Cino and Judson Memorial Church, writers and performers
are declaring their independence from yesterday's theater. The "Off-off
Broadway" theater is born.
Shepard, by that time still called
Steve Rogers, is very involved in this new development. 
He
takes drugs, writes poems and plays theatre. His idols are Jack Kerauc,
Alan Ginsberg and Bob Dylan. Ralph Cook, a headwaiter at the Village Gate,
asks Shepard to write a play he can produce at Theater Genesis, a new theater
he is planning to open. The kid from California, who has begun signing
his work "Sam Shepard," hands over two short plays. Entitled "Cowboys"
and "The Rock Garden."
They are first performed as a double
bill in October 1964. Their lack of conventional structure and the manic
language of their long monologues offend critics from uptown papers. Some
find the plays derivative of Samuel Beckett and other European dramatists.
But Michael Smith of THE VILLAGE VOICE hails them as "distinctly American"
and "genuinely original," and declares their author full of promise.
Motivated by his success, Shepard asks Edward Albee, the writer of "Who´s afraid of Virginia Woolf", who is one of the most famous writers in America by that time, to produce some of his plays. Albee selects a play called "Up to Thursday," which is based on Shepard's experience of dodging the draft by claiming to be a heroin addict. Thanks to Albee, it attracts favorable attention when it appears at the Cherry Lane Theater on a bill with early works by Lanford Wilson and Paul Foster. The career of Sam Shepard, playwright, is launched.
At that time, critical opinion on
the 22-year-old Shepard remained divided. His work stroke many uptown theatre
goers as too bizarre as his plays sounded as if they were written at high
speed and never revised – which was the truth. At this time, Shepard obeyed
Jack Kerouac’s dictum: “first thought, best thought” as he was heavily
influenced by the Beat Generation writers with whom he also shares the
topics of concerns (such as alienation from society, loss of identity and
the deterioriation of the family structure). But downtown audiences applauded
what uptowners deplored. They found Shepard funny, scary and edgy.
His play “Chicago” then won an Obie,
an award given to the year’s outstanding plays produced off-off Broadway.
He was to be awarded ten more Obies in the next few years.
In
1969, he married an actress named O-Lan Johnson and soon their son Jesse
Mojo was born. They spent three years in England then, where he won an
enthusiastic audience. In the summer of 72, Londoners could see no fewer
than 5 Shepard plays. Returning to NY in 74, his creative fires burn hotter
than ever before. In 1979, Shepard wins a Pulitzer Prize for his “Buried
Child” that propelled the author from downtown noriety to national fame.
His Pulitzer was the first ever to be given to a play not yet seen on Broadway!!
By 1980, he is the most produced playwright in America after Tennessee Williams and also his movie career is flourishing. He stars in Days of Heaven and the Right Stuff and is hailed as the Gary Cooper of the 80s. He receives an Oscar nomination for his role of hotshot test pilot Yeager.
In 83, he leaves his wife to move
in with Jessica Lange, whom he met while they were co-starring in a movie
called 'Frances'.
Like all self-made men, Shepard
cherishes the abililty to remake himself. The angry young man who once
dissected family relationships to expose the rot within is now a devoted
husband and father, living with Jessica and their 2 children on a ranch
in Minnesota. The small-town cowboy 
with
a fondness for rodeos and racetracks is now an avid golfer and polo player.
He has also converted to reworking his plays up to 13 times. He refuses
to be what people expect, and he consciously trades masks to confound us,
to keep us at a safe remove. The attainment of an identity is desirable,
but it is equally fraught with pitfalls and traps. The subject of identity
is important in all of his work as in his own persona, too.
Critics point out that Shepard’s
dramatic output has dwindled in the 90s – just 4 new plays, several screenplays
and revisions of earlier plays. They are anxious that his voice, which
resonated so strongly for his generation, has finally grown muted. Nevertheless,
he received the Gold Medal for Drama from the Academy in 1992 and was introduced
into the Theater Hall of Fame in 1994.
His latest play “The late Henry
Moss” has won a celebrity cast at the San Francisco Theater: Woody Harrelson,
Nick Nolte and Sean Penn. He has written more than 40 plays by now and
starred in over 20 movies and is writing some excellent poetry.
Selected works:
COWBOYS, 1964
ROCK GARDEN, 1964
LA TURISTA, 1966
FIVE PLAYS (Chigaco, Icarus's Mother, Red Cross, Forteen Hundred
Thousand, Melodrama Play), 1967
OPERATION SIDEWINDER, 1970
THE UNSEEN HAND AND OTHER PLAYS (The Holy Ghostly,
Back Bog Beast Bait, Forensic and the Navigator), 1970
THE TOOTH OF CRIME, 1972
MAD DOG BLUES AND OTHER PLAYS (Cowboy Mouth, Rock
Garden, Cowboys Nr. 2.), 1972
GEOGRAPHY OF A HORSE DREAMER, 1974
KILLER'S HEAD, 1975
ANGEL CITY, 1976
SUICIDE IN B-FLAT, 1976
CURSE OF THE STARVING CLASS
SEDUCED, 1979
BURIED CHILD, 1979 - Pulizer Prize
SEVEN PLAYS (Buried Child, Curse of the Starvig Class, The Tooth
ofthe Crime, La Turist, True West, Tongues, Savage/Love), 1981
TRUE WEST, 1981
FOOL FOR LOVE, 1983
PARIS, TEXAS, 1984
A LIE OF THE MIND, 1986 - award: New York Drama Critics Circle
Award
THE UNSEEN HAND AND OTHER PLAYS, 1986
SIMPATICO, 1994
CRUISING PARADISE, 1996
THE LATE HENRY MOSS, 2000
Films (as actor, scriptwriter or director):
ME AND MY BROTHER, 1969 (doc. drama,
co.script)
BRAND X, 1969
EASY RIDER, 1969 (voice only, dir. by Dennis Hopper, starring
Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson)
ZABRIESKIE POINT, 1970 (dir. by Michelangelo Antonioni)
BRONCO BULFROG, 1970
OH CALCUTTA!, 1972 (co-script)
RENALDO AND CLARA, 1978
DAYS OF HEAVEN, 1978 (dir. by Terrence Malick, starring Richard
Gere, Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard)
RESURRECTION, 1980 (dir. by Daniel Petrie, starring Ellen Burstyn,
Sam Shepard)
RAGGEDY MAN, 1981 (dir. by Jack Fish, starring Sissy Spacek, Eric
Roberts)
FRANCES, 1982 (dir. by Graeme Clifford, starring Jessica Lange, Kim
Stanley, Sam Shepard)
THE RIGHT STUFF, 1983 (as Col. Chuck Yeager, Academy Award
nomination, dir. by Philip Kaufman, starring Sam Shepard, Scott Glenn,
Ed Harris, Dennis Quaid, Fred Ward)
MOTEL CHRONICLES, 1984 - Motellin aikakirjat
PARIS, TEXAS, 1984 (co-script from his story Motel Chronicles, dir.
by Wim Wenders, starring Nastassja Kinski, Harry Dean Stanton, Dean
Stockwell, Aurore Clement) - award: the Palme d'Or at the Cannes
Film Festival
COUNTRY, 1984 (co-starring with Jessica Lange, dir. by Richard
Pearce)
FOOL FOR LOVE, 1985 (also script, from his own play, starring Kim
Basinger, Sam Shepard, Randy Quaid)
CRIMES OF THE HEART, 1985 (dir. by Bruce Beresford, starring
Diane Keaton, Jessica Lange, Sissy Spacek)
BABY BOOM, 1987 (dir. by Charles Shyer, starring Diane Keaton,
Harold Ramis, Sam Wanamaker)
FAR NORTH, 1988 (dir., script),
STEEL MAGNOLIAS, 1989 (dir. by Herbert Ross, starring Sally
Field, Dolly Parton, play by Robert Harling)
BRIGHT ANGEL, 1990
PASSAGIER FABER/VOYAGER, 1990 (dir. by Volker Schlöndorff,
based on Max Frisch's novel Homo Faber)
DEFENSELESS, 1991
THUNDERHEART, 1992 (dir. by Michael Apted, starring Val Kilmer,
Sam Shepard)
THE PELICAN BRIEF, 1993 (dir. by Alan J. Pakula, based on John
Grisham's novel, starring Julia Roberts, Denzel Washington, Sam
Shepard)
SILENT TONGUE, 1994 (dir. script)
SAFE PASSAGE, 1994 (dir. by Robert Allan Ackerman, starring
Susan Sarandon, Sam Shepard, based on the novel by Ellyn Bache)
THE GOOD OLD BOYS, 1995 (TV)
LILY DALE, 1996 (TV)
PURGATORY, 1999 (dir. Uli Edel, starring Sam Shepard, Randy Quaid)
