From Absurdity To Reality

Sam Shepard has been regarded as one of the most important playwrights since Arthur Miller and Tennesse Williams in American theater. He developed his career from a highway boy addicted to drugs and obsessed in rock-and-roll music to a distinguished playwright both in American Off-Off-Broadway Theater and beyond. By the end of the twentieth century, Sam Shepard has written over one hundred plays and won over ten Obie Awards, one Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for Buried Child which eventually established his fame in the world.Current critics become more and more interested in Sam Shepard and his works. They either attempt to explain his family plays or engage in the research on his dramatic techniques. But as far as the dramatic style is concerned, Shepard has presented a clearly evolutionary process, of which we still have a large space to do a closer analysis.In this thesis, I will try to study this evolution. Sam Shepard is essentially an improvisational playwright. He is contemptuous of the mainstream theater and playwrights whose plays are carefully planned. Instead, he attempts to create a theater in which emotional, psychological, or spiritual states are presented directly to the audience. From his first play Cowboy produced in 1964 to the end of the sixties, Shepard mainly experimented on a group of"collage"plays characterized by their absurdity. From then on, Shepard had written several plays, like The Tooth of Crime, which blend pop culture and fantasy. Since the end of seventies, Shepard has changed his attitudes and tried a different kind of writing which is very"stark", trying to"scrape it down to the bone as much as possible."Based on the classification of Shepard's plays - collage, fantasy and family - which is helpfully categorized by the critic Ruby Cohn, I will do it in six parts. Introduction will give a brief account of the playwright's life, career and current criticism on him. It shows that the evolution of Shepard's dramatic style is closely related to the historical, social and philosophical context of different periods. Chapter One analyzes the features of Absurdity reflected in Shepard's early plays. Born and brought up in the turbulent times after World War II, young Shepard led a"highway"life of drinking, fighting and racing, and took an existential view of the world. These concerns are rightly reflected in the irrational plots, farcical characters, and illogical languages of his plays. Chapter Two examines the Surrealistic characteristics in the plays of the middle period. The unease in personal life and the plight in playwriting prompted Shepard to move to England, where a theatrical revolution was going on. He blends pop culture and fantasy, creating a group of plays which are surreal in space, narrative and characters. Chapter Three emphatically discusses the aspect of"cruelty", advocated by French dramatist Antonin Artaud, in the early two periods. No obvious evidence proves that he learnt from Artaud, but Shepard perfectly manipulates it in his plays. It works on the nerves and senses by changing the air between the actors and the audience through the use of rituals and the special employment of stage elements. Chapter Four focuses on the return to realism in his family plays. The unhappy family life when he was young is always lingering in Shepard's mind. On the other hand, American theater has a good tradition of the family theme from Eugene O'Neil to Arthur Miller. Shepard creates a series of plays about the dysfunctional family. These plays present obvious realistic features considering the stage setting, plot, character, and language. The last part concludes that the evolution of Shepard's dramatic style is still going on, and the analysis of it is of great help for us to understand the"idea"beneath the dramatic structure. I think, through this clarification of Shepard's dramatic style, we would have a better understanding of his plays and his dramatic pursuit.