[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 chore in Fourteen Hundred Thousand is a lifetime task, unwillingly undertaken; that Icarus's Mother is about the bomb; that Melodrama Play is incidentally concerned with making satirical points about the pop-music industry. Yet the communication of ideas is not Shepard's concern. (p. 241)

Red Cross, probably the most interesting of the plays, provides a good introduction to Shepard's work. It takes place in a cabin in which...