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"Sam Shepard's perennial theme isn't nostalgia for the Old West or depicting the tortured artist in society," wrote Michael Green of Backstage West, "not even dysfunctional families (though they're part of it). It's displaying emotional primitives--characters bristling with raw energy, chaos, and contradictions, whose only defenses are fearful hiding, flight, or violence, who want to jump out of their skins and end up bolting their circumstances as best as they can do." For Green, "a good production of Shepard gives zero insight but makes you feel the lives of its characters in your gut." Hal Gelb, writing in the Nation, found Shepard's early plays to be "like no others--fresh, hip, antiheroic, free from the tired old psychology of Tennessee Williams and the Actor's Studio. By no means political, they nevertheless made us aware of the myths that shaped our behavior as Americans." Gelb dubbed Shepard "the best playwright of his generation."
The author of over four dozen plays, the winner of ten Obie awards, a Pulitzer Prize for Buried Child, a New York Drama Critics Circle award for A Lie of the Mind, a Golden Palm award for his screenplay Paris, Texas, and an Academy Award nomination for best actor in The Right Stuff, Shepard has cut a wide swath in American arts and letters since the 1960s, creating a highly eclectic--and critically acclaimed--body of work.
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