The following is one of seven blog posts that have appeared on doodlemeister.com featuring Sam Shepard talking about his craft over the years. To read all seven posts, type his name, including capital letters, into the search window off to the right.
Adapted from: The Pathfinder
By John Lahr, The New Yorker, February 8, 2010
The male influences around me (growing up) were primarily alcoholics and extremely violent. I listened like an animal. My listening was afraid.
I just dropped out of nowhere. It was absolute luck that I happened to be there (NYC, 1963) when the whole Off-Off Broadway movement was starting. I think they hired everybody. It was wide open. You were like a kid in a fun park—trying to be an actor, writer, musician, whatever happened . . . . For me, there was nothing fun about the sixties. Terrible suffering . . . . Things coming apart at the seams.
I had a sense that a voice existed that needed expression, that there was a voice that wasn’t being voiced. There were so many voices that I didn’t know where to start. I felt kind of like a weird stenographer . . . . There were definitely things there, and I was just putting them down. I was fascinated by how they structured themselves.
When you write a play, you work out like a musician on a piece of music. You find all the rhythms and the melody and the harmonies and take them as they come . . . . Break it all down in pairs. Make the pairs work together, with each other. Then make ’em work against each other, independent.
I preferred a character that was constantly unidentifiable . . . instead of embodying a “whole character,” the actor should consider his performance “a fractured whole with bits and pieces of character flying off the central theme,” . . . . to make a kind of music or painting in space without having to feel the need to completely answer intellectually for the character’s behavior.
Character is something that can’t be helped. It’s like destiny . . . . It can be covered up, it can be messed with, it can be screwed around with, but it can’t be ultimately changed. It’s like the structure of our bones, and the blood that runs through our veins.
(I was) dead set against revisions because I couldn’t stand rewriting . . . . (The plays) were chants, they were incantations, they were spells. You get on them and you go. Plays have to go beyond just working out problems. (They have to move) from colloquial territory to poetic country.
I hate endings. Just detest them. Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing, and endings are a disaster.
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Shepard’s plays *did* live in poetic country, as he hoped, but that was decidedly un-romantic poetry, full of life’s grit and energy and weirdness. He unraveled, just a bit, some of the mystery of our humanity. The unraveling is never an answer to the mystery. It’s just an exposure of it. Thank you, writer extraordinaire.
Excellent comment, Jo-Ann, and I agree. I’d just add that the mystery of his writing—the refusal to nail-down answers—is a powerful appeal of his work. He allows me to buy into and explore the mystery on my own; I even get to collaborate, sort of—that is, if it’s not giving myself too much credit . . .
Jim
Your collaboration is just what he wanted–at least from one of the interviews that you posted: “Sam Shepard IV”: (Shepard): “There’s more to it than just getting off as an artist, because, you know, anybody can make a piece of art. It’s not hard. And anybody can have that piece of art admired by any number of people. But what happened between those other people and the artist? Is there really a sense of responsibility in the relationship between the thing that you make and the people who come in touch with it?”
Jim, I love your blog! m
What a nice thing to say, Margaret! A-hem. Please tell all your friends and co-creative types . . . and I know you have millions . . .