THE THEATER OF A LIBERAL IRONIST: THE AMERICAN WEST AND THE FEMALE SELF IN SHEPARD’S A LIE OF MIND

The formation and the establishment of the United States firmly adheres to two beliefs of the American dream and the American west. Though the American dream was part of American culture from its beginning, the other one became the driving force of American culture in the second part of the twentieth century when Sam Shepard began his career as a playwright. During this time, American theater emerged into a main arena for the presentation of the American west. Nevertheless, Shepard attempted to avoid playing with the duality of reality and illusion in his presentation of the American west when he put forward his characters to face and experience the world to then discover their selves. At the pinnacle of his success, he wrote A Lie of the Mind, a play that is filled with heroines who would leave the violent world of men to change their destinies. As such, Shepard endeavored to free their selves and flow them to experience a new world. Likewise, Shepard’s contemporary American philosopher, Richard Rorty, believed in the importance of self and the necessity of its redescription to create his ideal society. However, hopeless to find a philosophy model, he lends to literature to find his liberal ironist. On this account, the following study is not only to provide Sam Shepard as a liberal ironist in Rorty’s term but also to reveal certain puzzling features in Shepard’s A Lie of Mind, not least of which is the reason why his female characters blow the world of the American west to search for a new world.

Harry Dean the Punk Icon

Repo Man and Paris, Texas firmly established Harry Dean Stanton as what one writer called "the patron saint of the edgy set." In his sixties now, he hung out with the so-called "Brat Pack"--Sean Penn, Madonna, Johnny Depp. He was partying with Robert De Niro at the Chateau Marmond the night comedian John Belushi died of a drug overdose there. Dan Tana's in West Hollywood was his favorite hangout, however, and he held court there with pals like actors Ed Begley Jr. and Dabney Coleman. The lead roles he'd expected after Paris, Texas never came, but important supporting roles did. He rejoined Sam Shepard in Fool for Love in 1985, and he widened his following with his performances in Pretty in Pink in 1986 and Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation in 1988. More important, however, was his work with director David Lynch, including four Lynch projects in the 1990s and several more after the turn of the century. The weirdness of the Lynchian world even seemed to touch his personal life with an armed robbery at his home in 1996 and the embezzlement of his personal finances by his financial manager a few years later.

What the Buried Child Stands for: A Thematic Study of Sam Shepard’s Buried Child

As part of the family trilogy of Sam Shepard, Buried Child has been understood in that the corruption of the nuclear family has been identified as the theme of the play, and the guilt and the secret of this American family is the buried child who is regarded as the incestuous relationship between Halie and Tilden. This paper argues that the buried child is not only the illegitimate child in the family, but Dodge and every family member in the play. First, Shepard builds a multi-dimensional space in the play, in which the passage of time and the experience of characters are different, forming a chaos of narration. There are two main spaces represented in the play; the one is the living room, and the other is the backyard, and Dodge lying in the living room is equivalent to the secret child buried in the backyard. Second, Shepard uses a circular rather than linear movement in the play, which symbolizes that everything happened in the house is a closed story, and as one of elements in this circle, every family member becomes the buried child, or part of the buried child. Shepard titled the play with the buried child, using this image to depict the unchangeable influence of American family’s emotional and spiritual inheritance and how it will affect future generations an even deeper mystery.

Sam Shepard and the “True” West

The theater of Sam Shepard has almost emblematically been considered the epitome of the American, particularly the Southwestern, myth of the frontier and, hence, the vastness and masculine expansiveness it traditionally symbolizes. However, Shepard’s theatre attains, I believe, its true potential only when approached in the perspective of the (Neo)Baroque paradigm. Therefore, this article will indicate an alternative manner of interpreting his dramatic thought; the manner, which, as I will argue, allows for re-contextualizing the position of Shepard on the American stage.

The Evolution of American Dramatic Realism

Realism in American drama has proved its resiliency from its inception at the end of the nineteenth century to its transformation into modern theater in the twentieth century. This chapter delineates the evolution of American realistic drama from the influence of European theater and its adaptation by American artists such as James A. Herne and Rachel Crothers. Flexible enough to admit the expressionistic techniques crafted by Susan Glaspell and Eugene O’Neill and leading to the “subjective realism” of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, realism has provided a wide foundation for subsequent playwrights such as David Mamet, August Wilson, and Sam Shepard to experiment with its form and language.