Sam Shepard: A Life by John J. Winters. Counterpoint, 2017. 432 pages.
I have been reading and watching Sam Shepard plays since I saw his astonishing Pulitzer Prize-winning Buried Child at the Theatre de Lys (now the Lucille Lortel Theatre) on Christopher Street in New York's West Village in early 1979. I remember emerging from the three-hour production feeling that I had just experienced something inexplicable but important. I had a similar feeling six years earlier across town in the East Village when I saw The Homecoming, my first Harold Pinter play. What the two playwrights have in common is their ability to get under my skin, flash images and language onstage that I cannot forget years. But there were two big differences between the Pinter and Shepard plays. Pinter presents static language that echoes incessantly on a backdrop of restricted character movement; Shepard's characters spew explosive language, and their actions cannot be contained by the stage. Also, while Pinter dramatizes the mystery of the human condition, Shepard shows how the human condition shapes family, society, ans more specifically, a decaying culture in Middle America. Since that Shepard production 45 years ago, I have rarely missed an opportunity to see Shepard's new and older works, including the definitive 2016 revival of Buried Child directed by Scott Elliott, which was captured on film with Ed Harris and Amy Madigan.
The legend that is Sam Shepard seems to grow with time. His rugged looks made him an A-list film star. He is often compared to Gary Cooper. He leapt from experimental theater to Hollywood, capturing the heart of Jessica Lange, who lived with him for two decades. After dropping out of college, he left his parents' home in Duarte, California, unable to get along with his father, a World War 2 Air Force pilot and high school teacher, known better for his alcoholic furies. At 19, Shepard boarded a bus bound for New York's Port Authority. He lived in a rundown East Village apartment with former west coast classmate Charles Mingus III, son of the legendary jazz musician Charles Mingua, who became an important artist in his own right. When Shepard was not hustling tables as a waiter , he wrote short plays that quickly earned him a reputation as a cutting-edge writer. In 1986, Ellen Oumano's Sam Shepard: The Life and Work of an American Dreamer was published when Shepard was only 42, and Don Shewey's biography Sam Shepard, arrived 15 years later, both doing much to cement the writer and actor's reputation.
John J. Winters's biography reviews Shepard's life from his childhood in Illinois and California until a short time before his death at age 73 from complications of arterial lateral sclerosis (ALS) in 2017. Winters covers a lot of territory, including his bouts with alcoholism; affinity for writing autobiographical material in his plays and prose; residential locations, from Durate to New York, London, New Mexico, Virginia, Minnesota, and Kentucky; story development process through the openings of his plays, which evolved from writing only single drafts with help from psychotropic drugs to multiple drafts and complete rewrites of earlier produced plays; uncomfortable time on film sets as a screenwriter, actor, and director; aversion to publicity throughout his career; connection to family members, among them three children and a step-daughter; love of animals, particularly dogs and horses; and relationships with women. (He was married to actress O-Lan Jones for 15 years and lived for 27 years with Jessica Lange.)
Winters refers to Oumano's and Shewey's biographies, interviews of Shepard's colleagues and family, and Shepard's notebooks, diaries, and public writings. Few milestones in Shepard's life are overlooked, so readers get a detailed picture of the man who reinvented himself numerous times. Shepard's artistic failures may have been monumental, but plays like Buried Child, Fool for Love, and A Lie of the Mind, as well as the screenplay for Paris, Texas, will remind us of just how important he was to the American art form.
