SOURCE: ";'In the Old Style': The Tragic Vision in Sam Shepard's The Tooth of Crime,"; in Text and Performance Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 4, October, 1989, pp. 277-85.

Mustazza is an educator and critic. In the following essay, he outlines the similarities between The Tooth of Crime and traditional tragedies such as Shakespeare's Richard IL

Most commentators on Sam Shepard's The Tooth of Crime (1972) have understandably focussed their attention on the play's strikingly original concept and its unique use of language, music, and spectacle. By the same token, however, another important feature of the play, a more familiar informing principle, has gone largely unnoticed and therefore unexplicated—namely, the classic tragic lines that lie beneath a novel surface. Only two critics have noticed this subtle conception, and both have commented very briefly. Florence Falk [in an essay in American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard, ed. by Bonnie Marranca, 1981] has argued...