Authors
David Mamet (b. 1947) and Sam Shepard (b. 1943)
Bibliography: David Mamet
Bibliography: Sam Shepard
Shepard’s major plays are Cowboys (1964), The Rock Garden (1964), 4-H Club (1965), Up to Thursday (1965), Dog (1965), Chicago (1965), Icarus’s Mother (1965), Fourteen Hundred Thousand (1966), Red Cross (1966), La Turista (1967), The Unseen Hand (1969), Holy Ghost (1970), Operation Sidewinder (1970), The Tooth of Crime (1972), Curse of the Starving Class (1978), Buried Child (1979), True West (1980), Fool for Love (1983), A Lie of the Mind (1985), States of Shock (1991), Simpatico (1995), Eyes for Consuela (1998), The Late Henry Moss (2002), and The God of Hell (2004). His major film scripts are Zabriskie Point (1970), Paris, Texas(1984), Fool for Love (1985), Far North (1988), and Don’t Come Knocking (2005). Hawk Moon: A Book of Short Stories, Poems, and Monologues (1973), Rolling Thunder Logbook (1977), Motel Chronicles (1982), Cruising Paradise: Tales (1996), and Great Dream of Heaven: Stories (2002) are important nondramatic additions to his canon. Shepard’s place in theatrical history is assessed by Robert J. Andreach in Creating the Self in the Contemporary American Theatre (1998). Richard Gilman provides a helpful analysis of the playwright’s career in his introduction to Shepard’s Seven Plays (1981). Also helpful are Doris Auerbach’s Sam Shepard, Arthur Kopit, and the Off Broadway Theater (1982), Laura Graham’s Sam Shepard: Theme, Image, and the Director (1995), Lynda Hart’s Sam Shepard’s Metaphorical Stages (1987), Kimball King’s Sam Shepard: A Casebook (1988), and Ron Mottram’s Inner Landscapes: The Theater of Sam Shepard (1984).
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Questions for Discussion and Writing
Guys talking tough to other guys; quiet desperation; loneliness and deep misunderstandings; lives without moral direction, and failure in the pursuit of the American Dream. These themes are standard fare for Mamet and Shepard – and also in plenty of other works of literature and popular culture. The indebtedness to Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, and literary naturalism will be apparent to students who have been reading chronologically through NAAL. The real interpretive fun, however, might lie in considering how these plays fare, and what they signify, as they turn up suddenly and surprisingly here and there in the contemporary world.
1. Glengarry Glen Ross premiered in New York in 1984 and won a Pulitzer Prize. About a year later it opened in London; and since then it has shown up as a featured work in college and university playhouses. Would a play like this look and mean the same in London as in New York? If you put it on at a small, private liberal arts college in New England, would the work change yet again? What can you say about audience and context as an influence on the reception and understanding of contemporary plays like this?
2. Let us make a similar speculation about Shepard’s True West: this playhad its first performances in a small San Francisco theater in 1980; afterwards it migrated to the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago and the New York Shakespeare Festival in New York; then it went to the Royal National Theatre in London (with veteran British actors Bob Hoskins and Anthony Sher in the leads); and finally it went to Paris, in a translation called L’Ouest, le vrai. In each step farther from California, what do you think would be lost? How do you imagine that the play would work for a French audience?
3. Plays by Shakespeare, by Oscar Wilde, by J. M. Barrie, George Bernard Shaw, Lorraine Hansberry, and August Wilson survive in the popular imagination partly on the basis of memorable lines – quotations that people recall and wait for when they see the plays again. Do you recall any from True West or Glengarry Glen Ross? If not, is that a weakness in these plays or do you think that our expectations about drama have changed, happily or otherwise, in recent decades?