True West:
In a play about two brothers working together on a screenplay, the idea here seems to be to explore not only the ways in which western films are entirely dependent on tropes, but also the ways in which stories that attempt to defy tropes are now full of their own tropes.
We start with a brother working on a screenplay in Los Angeles as his older, scumbag, and recently returned from the desert living a life of derelict and affected squalor. As they bicker back and forth about their mother, her house, their father, his drinking, and their own shared heritage and destinies, we learn more and more about the work the one brother, college educated and a bit too up his ass about it. It comes out that the producer is coming by and when he does, the desert dwelling brother, a conman writ small, convinces him to play a game of golf. When we come back from the game, we find out that the older brother has leveraged a script — what he calls a movie, NOT a film built entirely on overused western tropes, but also based in some otherwise real pathos and truths.
The play then goes back and forth as they bicker and fight and work on their script together.
The play is interesting and is built on gaps in narrative, big personalities, and perceived slights. The older brother character is built on the fragile histrionic masculinity where nothing and everything matter simultaneously, and it’s everybody else’s fault.
Buried Child:
In this play, from 1979 and which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama that year, we meet a family stacked upon each other in a spiral in literal and figurative terms. Dodge is in his seventies and has two sons in their 40s. In addition he has his wife and is soon to recall that he has a grandson, who has been out of the picture and is actually the “buried child” of the title. The play involves the return of this grandson, his son Tilden’s boy, returning with a woman from Los Angeles. This return brings with it the collapse of history and time into the present moment.
The play presses upon this theme of time as a spiral (but not a flat circle) and suggests the idea that all history, past, and past selves are always present but never distinct in the bodies and lives and souls of the living.
I found this play to be quite disturbing in a lot of ways and has an element of the grotesque in it, not the least of which for the fact that Shepard was in his 30s writing this one and not much older. I wonder, given his later fiction how the Shepard of his 70s, dying from a terminal illness would look at a play like this and its depiction of history, older bodies, and lifetimes.
It’s interesting to me because as he got older he wrote less drama and more (short short) short fiction.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Sam-Shepard-Starving-Turista-Tongues/dp/0553346113/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1LDLXPPMTDTBM&keywords=sam+shepard+plays&qid=1557692348&s=gateway&sprefix=sam+sh%2Caps%2C153&sr=8-1)
