For several years Sam Shepard has been acknowledged as the most talented and promising playwright to emerge from the Off-off Broadway movement. Now, more than a decade after his work was first performed, he is increasingly recognized as one of the more significant dramatists in the English-speaking world. (p. 405)
Shepard draws much of his material from popular culture sources such as B-grade westerns, sci-fi and horror films, popular folklore, country and rock music and murder-mysteries. In his best work he transforms the original stereotyped characters and situations into an imaginative, linguistically brilliant, quasi-surrealistic chemistry of text and stage presentation which is original and authentically his own. One source of the unique quality and tension of his dramas is his ambivalent attitude toward violence. The structure of his work reflects both an abhorrence for and fascination with it, and with the menace which may lead to it…. What Shepard's ambivalent attitude toward violence, menace and power does result in throughout his dramas is the following pattern of action: Menacing, potentially violent characters or forces are introduced, only to have the terror they create defused either by an avoidance of the threatened violence, or vitiation of its effect through audience alienation devices. In the dramas preceding The Tooth of Crime (1972), this structure frequently involves characters who are self-indulgent, who often find their whims almost instantly gratified. Such a pattern is in contrast, for example, to that employed in Pinter's dramas, in which menace is almost never defused, but continues to build throughout the action, at times exploding into terrifying conflict.
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