A Dilapidated Pyramid

Few American playwrights have exerted as much influence on the contemporary stage as Sam Shepard. He is a leader of the avant-garde in modern American theatre who enjoys the Master reputation together with Edward Albee and David Mamet. Though the works in his early stage appear to be hard to categorize, the late ones are relatively stable. They tend to be more familial. Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child and True West are called Shepard’s "Family Trilogy", which present us the gloomy panorama of the whole American society through miniature life of families portrayed in his plays. Family is the basic unit of each society, if the former faces abyss of devastating desperation, the latter cannot survive the crisis either. Thus the broken relationships, the isolated emotions, the loss of roots are the main parts that Shepard dealt with. Though many playwrights have already written great family plays, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill for example, only Shepard can enable those plays as a mirror to reflect the whole society.This thesis intends to find a new perspective by applying Humanistic Psychology theory to analyze Shepard’s family trilogy. The exact theory applied is the Hierarchy of Needs, brought out by Abraham Maslow, at almost the same time with the publication of Shepard’s trilogy works. The biography of Shepard, the maturing process of his writing style and the typical features in the family trilogy are the major proofs that show how people’s faith of "united family" gradually is gone. The thesis comprises three parts, the introduction, the body and the conclusion. The introduction provides a brief comment on Sam Shepard and his works, pointing out the family trilogy as study target. The body consists of four chapters. Chapter One gives a detailed description of social backdrop when and where Shepard wrote the trilogy. Chapter Two retrospects Shepard’s drifting boyhood and his first two family plays, illustrating the strong biographical elements in the trilogy and the maturing process in his writing skills. Chapter Three mainly analyzes the text, lines and characters based on the theory of hierarchy of needs, clarifying how the family gradually loses all the faith. The theory of hierarchy of needs will be unfolded from the bottom all the way to the top, looking like a pyramid, and then the collapse and dilapidation follow step by step. Chapter Four explains the literary importance of Shepard’s family trilogy. Finally, the conclusion part restates the main points in this thesis and argues that through the representation of the complicated relationship between people and the pursuit of those delusional dreams in his familial writings, Shepard has achieved his artful purpose of "mirror" effects of play on the American society.