Volume 32, Number 8 · May 9, 1985
Heading for the Last Roundup
By Robert Mazzocco
Paris, Texas
a film directed by Wim Wenders, written by Sam Shepard
Motel Chronicles
by Sam Shepard
City Lights, 143 pp., $5.95 (paper)
Plays by Sam Shepard, Angei City (1976), Operation Sidewinder (1970), Suicide in Bb (1976), True West (1980), Mad Dog Blues (1971), Action (1975), 4-H Club (1965), The Unseen Hand (1969), Red Cross (1966), Buried Child (1978), Curse of the Starving Class (1978), Cowboy #2 (1967), Fool for Love (1983), Melodrama Play (1967), Cowboy Mouth (1971), The Tooth of Crime (1972), Geography of a Horse Dreamer (1974), La Turista (1967)
by Sam Shepard
When the plays of Sam Shepard began appearing in the Sixties at underground theaters like La Mama or the Caffe Cino he was often thought to be a surrealist dramatist. That's true enough of much of his atmospheric detail, early or late: Angel City and its phantasmal green slime, Operation Sidewinder and its serpentine computer. At the start of Suicide in Bb we discover, to quote from Shepard, that 'the outline of a man's body sprawled out in an awkward position of death is painted in white' on the center of a darkened stage. And it's true that a dreamlike mise en scène inhabits most of his forty or so plays.
Review, 6653 words
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