In the following essay, Carveth explores Shepard's examination of the human “self” in Paris, Texas.

In the following essay, Willadt analyzes the structure of States of Shock, emphasizing Shepard's sense of machismo and his portrayal of relationships between men.

In the following essay, Wyatt explores the ambivalence of the characters and the world view in Shepard's body of work.

In the following interview, Shepard discusses his background, his early experiences as a dramatist, and a number of specific plays.

Gilman is an American critic, editor, and educator whose books include The Confusion of Realms (1969) and The Making of Modern Drama (1974). In the following essay, he outlines biographical and cultural influences on Shepard's work and finds that the search for identity is a central theme in the author's plays.

In the following essay, Heilman provides a thematic overview of Shepard's plays, highlighting his literary style in each play.

In the following essay, Wilson examines the issue of linguistic “presence” in Shepard's plays, exploring the theological dimension of Shepard's dramatic language.

In the following essay, Rabillard notes the marked difference between Shepard's abstract early plays and his more realistic later work The critic finds, however, that both styles are explorations of theatricality that exert a powerful hold on audiences and draw attention to the dramatic act.

In the following essay, Shewey debates Shepard's mid-life quandaries, discussing the all-Shepard season at the Signature Theatre in New York, Shepard's collaborations with Joseph Chaikin, and his recent revisions to some of his best known works.

In the following interview—which is excerpted from Rosen's book Sam Shepard: A Poetic Rodeo—Shepard discusses his theatrical style and stage imagery as well as his concepts of rhythm, myth, voice, and character.

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

In the following essay, Smith assesses Shepard's current problematic critical reception, accounting for his early acclaim and his subsequently diminished reputation.

In the following excerpt, Powe discusses Shepard's use of music in The Tooth of Crime and the influence of rock music on some of the playwright's other works.

A director and critic, Bloom addresses Shepard's initial work, arguing that the early plays are a form of ";gestalt theatre"; that conveys the consciousness of America in the 1960s.

In the following essay, Shepard details the processes and principles that figure in the creation of his plays.

[Sam Shepard] has a tremendous ability to make words bring the imagination of an audience to life. (p. 12) Distances, levels, and points of view are important to Shepard's plays. [In Icarus' Mother the] pilot observing the characters below, and the characters observing him above are both fascinated by each other. The pilot is literally burning up his excess energy: he trails it in the sky and writes the formula for it in the air. We can assume he took off from the earth and separated himself f...

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 h...

In the following essay, Brustein offers a mixed assessment of Shepard's works, particularly Buried Child and Cruising Paradise, within the context of Shepard's attitudes towards being a celebrity.

In the following review, Brustein offers a mixed assessment of A Lie of the Mind, noting that the “plotting is a little too undisciplined.”

In the following interview, Shepard discusses his casting decisions for and the inspirations behind The Late Henry Moss.

In the following excerpt, Brustein offers a mixed assessment of Simpatico, faulting the play for its “manipulated suspense.”

In the following review, Weales criticizes A Lie of the Mind, objecting to the “cartoon atmosphere” of the play.

In the following interview, Shepard discusses Buried Child and his likes and dislikes among his various other works.

In the following review, Phillips offers a mixed assessment of The Late Henry Moss, noting that the play has “nuggets of gold.”

The Tooth of Crime was first produced at London's Open Space Theatre in 1972. In the following review of that performance, Cushman criticizes the play as being a simplistic story of dueling musicians.

Sam Shepard is a playwright of zap-pop-pow action, and he is a playwright of comic-book verbs: his plays flash, zoom, and screech across the stage. Primary colors ooze through neon tubing, jazz and rock music shoot through a sound system, and characters hurl words like weapons, wounding each other with Shepard's heightened version of American English, a language of riffs, culled from slang, jargon, punk talk, dime novels, and B-movies. Shepard floods his stage with such language, a codified language ...

Oliver began her career as an actor, writer, and producer and joined the New Yorker in 1948, becoming one of the magazine's theater critics in 1961. Here she praises Shepard's writing in The Tooth of Crime, despite the unusual staging the play received in a series of New York performances.

Smith is a critic, stage director, and theater director, whose books include Eight Plays from Off-Off Broadway (1966) and More Plays from Off-Off Broadway (1972). A drama critic for the Village Voice from 1959 to 1974, Smith wrote the following review of Shepard's first produced plays, becoming an influential supporter of the author's early work.

Of all contemporary American playwrights, Sam Shepard alone still has romantic feeling for the landscape. He is not a city playwright; but a Midwestern wanderer who has driven the backroads of the land, tramped its wilderness, scored on its main streets, and explored in his writing the mythology of the nation. He is a protean figure; and the weird terrains of his plays sparkle with the insights of a man who has inhabited many worlds—musician, addict, cowboy, bad-ass horse breeder, and even … m...

In the following review, Duncan-Jones praises a London production of A Lie of the Mind, calling the play a “triumph.”

Sam Shepard's "Rolling Thunder Logbook" is a particularly interesting literary genre, the rock-tour-as-mythic-quest narrative. It is interesting primarily because the Rolling Thunder tour in 1976 was interesting…. [Clearly], Mr. Shepard's book could have been more than interesting. The poets of the Beat Generation, early folkies like Mr. [Ramblin' Jack] Elliott, and the penetration of their strain of ambient bohemianism into the mainstream of American culture, with ...

In one of the more revealing images of Sam Shepard's Seduced, the mind in pursuit of an idea is compared to a bird of prey swooping down on a rabbit. The image is both homey and disturbing, typical of Shepard in its physicality, its seeming innocence, and the hidden terror it carries: A simple cowboy lost in our insane urban society, at heart he may be more frightened than anyone else by the sensitivity of his perceptions, the lucidity of his thoughts. The tension in Shepard's paradoxical self...

In the following review, King compares Shepard's fiction in Cruising Paradise with his dramas, faulting the stories as the “literary equivalent of doodles.”

[Except for Melodrama Play], which has something approximating a conventional plot, [the plays collected in Shepard's Five Plays] are all constructed in the same fashion. He puts a number of not very well differentiated characters into a situation in which an undefined something seems to be going on and lets them talk, either in long monologues or in exchanges that tend toward single-sentence lines. It is possible to find meaning, in the traditional sense, in his works, to assume that the bookcase ch...

Despite my worst instincts I cannot prevent myself from mildly loving the plays of [Sam Shepard]…. He is so sweetly unserious about his plays, and so desperately serious, about what he is saying. Mr. Shepard is perhaps the first person to write good disposable plays. He may well go down in history as the man who became to drama what Kleenex was to the handkerchief. And just like Kleenex he may well overcome….

[Shepard's plays] have no extrinsics. Not only their meaning lies in themselves, but also their mode and their tradition. Shepard's theatre, as much as Richard Foreman's or Robert Wilson's, is the theatre of a private artist—one who happens to have the gift of making instant public connection with his words. The other web of connections that we call stage convention isn't there; the inner sense comes to you unmediated, direct, implacable—make of it what you w...

Sam Shepard fills the role of professional playwright as a good ballet dancer or acrobat fulfills his role in performance: That is, he always delivers; he executes feats of dexterity and technical difficulty that an untrained person could not, and makes them seem easy. Occasionally the performance is merely dexterous, done with soundness but not with the deepest feelings. Even then, the performance is always satisfying; rarely is there a slipup. Shepared is reliable, a professional secure in the authority o...

[There] are occasions when I have no idea what to say about Sam Shepard…. Shepard is very much the avant garde man of the moment….

Sam Shepard is fascinated by America's folk heroes, which for him means not merely historical and legendary figures, but also movie and pop stars. These larger-than-life people and their illusions—almost everyone wants to be someone else—populate the stage in his free-wheeling new play "Mad Dog Blues."… [Kosmo] is apparently a modern prototype of the movie cowboy. Yahoodi … is not so apparently a modern prototype of the movie gangster, although he acts shifty...

Mr. Shepard writes mythic plays in American jazz-poetry. He writes about today but obliquely, which is possibly the only way today can be written about. He is trying to express truths wrapped up in legends and with the kind of symbolism you often find nowadays in pop music. His command of language is daring and inventive—some of the words sound new, and quite a few of them actually are. The playwright has a musician's command of speech rhythms and links them to character and thought patterns. ...

Red Cross is an enigmatic play on many counts, the playwright having left out a great deal of information ordinarily thought pertinent. He avoids elements of exposition, like identification of the scene and of the relationship of Jim and Carol. He avoids delineation of character, such as whether Jim is psychotic, playful or merely young. He leaves unclear the intention of the action: are the calisthenics symbolic masturbation, is the swimming lesson symbolic intercourse? Even his theme is elusive: is the en...

Sam Shepard, at around thirty, is one of the three or four most gifted playwrights alive. His "The Tooth of Crime" is … strong and vivid and funny…. The play, like Mr. Shepard's wonderful "The Unseen Hand," of several years ago, is a comedy with science-fiction trimmings. It is about an aging and garrulous fellow of the Old West called Hoss, whose control of his territory is threatened by a "new" man, an icy, impersonal, taciturn young fellow ca...

Sam Shepard is one of those natural dramatists who is almost obsessed with dramatic form. In "Melodrama Play" …, Mr. Shepard is as much concerned with being melodramatic as with being playful. He is trying to take the essence of the old melodrama—its exaggerated expression of understandable feeling and its use of music for accentuation and extension—and to give it a new life. The attempt has often been tried before, but always at the expense of the melodrama. In such conte...

Sam Shepard is a voice from the "underground," a poet's voice. His plays are mythic. They speak of the contemporary world and subliminally convey a social "message." They possess no specific ideology, they proclaim no prophesy except the ultimate doom of the present state of civilization. They express a yearning for restoration through the ancient virtues of kindness and human brotherhood, unity of flesh and spirit. Because he employs no philosophic identification tags, wh...

[Rolling Thunder Logbook] is more remarkable for what was left out than for what was put in. In his introduction, Shepard cannily seeks to defuse such criticism by saying that reasons for the tour and the failure of the film don't matter, that the only purpose of the book is to provide a taste of the experience. That's thin reasoning for an equally thin book. Shepard's style here could best be described as hit-and-run journalism; an image garnered here, a scrap picked up there. There ar...

Sam Shepard's vast canvas of the disintegrating American landscape, both physical and spiritual, continues in a rather fragmented way in his new drama, Seduced …, which deals on the surface with the last day on earth of a mysterious billionaire tycoon made in the image of the late Howard Hughes. As usual, the prolific Shepard chooses to use both comedy and allegory, as well as deep-rooted symbolism, to make his philosophical points. Most of the audience are willing to take this drama on its su...

Chicago is a play of vivid stage imagery, slippery symbols and an unbridled indulgence of imagination. It possesses the barest outline of recognizable reality…. [I] think Mr. Shepard intends by it only to lend a minimal credibility to his stage action. The hero, for example, spends all but the final moments of the play in a bathtub, but I don't think the device is meant to do more than locate him and render his existence recognizable…. The tub and the hero in it are stage images, vivid ...

Madness in drama has reached a … universal point of contact in the world of knife-edge dreams and hopes as realized by Sam Shepard…. The marvellous thing about Shepard is that he reads just as well as he plays. For the avant-garde this is unusual. Enthusiasts might be forgiven for defending some plays by saying things like—'Ah, but it was all in the way he masturbated.' Shepard has no need of such excuses. He is a dramatist.

Red Cross is a cool play—in the sense that it is dense, not brought to the point of intellectual clarity, embedded in a series of metaphors which are all interconnected—and because it is a cool play, it must be treated as such, not "hotted up" by filling in the seemingly empty places where not enough is said to make for clear, unitary, conscious meaning. (Two facts are relevant here: [1] Sam can be extraordinarily precise and articulate whenever he feels the necessity of it; [2] ...

If the initial production of Fourteen Hundred Thousand was in any way a success, it was only in demonstrating to both myself and Sam Shepard some pitfalls that can be encountered when director and playwright work together. From a critical point of view the production was undeniably a failure. Fourteen Hundred Thousand is a script characterized by an emphasis on language and a highly formal structure. It is true that the dialogue is elliptical, diffuse; that the play is composed of oddly dissimilar fragments...

Shepard is one of the most stimulating figures in the off-and-off-off-Broadway theater; in Red Cross, he conjures up a day in the estival life of a young couple in a forest cabin. She wakes up with a vision of her head splitting open someday on a ski slope; while she goes off to do the shopping, he entertains the maid who comes in from town with tales of his crab lice that have, he claims, bothered him for years. He also gives her a swimming lesson on top of two parallel beds. When his wife (or companion) r...

The Unseen Hand is a hallucination based on fact—a compound of nostalgia and celebration in the face of the more tawdry elements of American life—which draws its energy from a compost heap, the flamboyant vulgarity of California culture. Partly observed, partly absorbed, the characters of the play are a weird blending of authentic types and media constructs….

["Red Cross"] is a disagreeable, and hateful, play. It is also as mysterious and haunting as [Mr. Shepard's] "Chicago" of a few seasons back. Preceded by earsplitting, abrasive rock music that goes on forever, and then by dead silence, "Red Cross" is about a man who is afflicted with body lice. The setting is a cabin in the woods where everything is dead white…. The lice, needless to say, are invisible and (let us hope) metaphorical, so that the questi...

["Up to Thursday"] centered on (1) a young man lying in bed under an American flag and (2) four handsome, very young people sitting on straight-back chairs. The examination of drama not being altogether a police case, it is not necessary to pin down motive. The author draws brightness from the banalities of conversation. Some of his devices are theater of the absurd à la Abbott and Costello, but he cuts deeper. He delineates the initial shyness of a relationship and the unreserved cando...

["Chicago"] is a fantasy-comedy about a young man in a bathtub…. What gives the play its delights is Mr. Shepard's ability to follow fast after the ephemeral half-thought that is usually unspoken….