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ON THE PLAYWRIGHT | SAM SHEPARD

SAM SHEPARD was born Samuel Shepard Rogers III on November 5, 1943, in Fort Sheridan, Illinois. The son of a career Army father, Shepard spent his childhood on military bases in the United States and Guam before his family settled on a farm in Duarte, California. He worked as a stable hand on a ranch in Chino from 1958 to 1960 and studied agriculture for a year at Mount San Antonio Junior College.

In 1963, Shepard moved to New York City, where he began to write plays for the emerging experimental underground theater scene. Although many mainstream critics were baffled by his raw, chaotic, almost Beckettian pieces, he was soon hailed by the New York Times as “the generally acknowledged ‘genius’ of the [off-off-Broadway] circuit.” And in 1966, Red Cross, Chicago, and Icarus’s Mother earned Shepard a trio of Village Voice OBIE Awards.

In 1969, Shepard joined the cult “amphetamine rock band” the Holy Modal Rounders, at one point telling an interviewer that he would rather be a rock star than a playwright. During this period, he wrote such plays as The Unseen Hand and Cowboy Mouth (which he co-wrote with Patti Smith).

Beginning in the late 1970s, Shepard applied his unconventional dramatic vision to a more conventional dramatic form, the family tragedy, producing Curse of the Starving Class, which premiered at the Royal Court in London in 1977, followed by Buried Child in 1978 (which won the Pulitzer Prize) and True West in 1980.

Throughout the 1980s and into the ’90s, Shepard continued to write plays—Fool for Love (1983) won OBIEs for best play as well as direction, and A Lie of the Mind (1985) garnered the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and Outer Critics Circle Award for outstanding new play—and expand his work in film including the iconic role of Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff and the screenplay for Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas.

Shepard is considered one of the foremost modern American playwrights having written over 50 plays in a career that spans 40 years. In 1985 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which awarded him the Gold Medal for Drama in 1992. In 1994 he was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame. This is Shepard’s Long Wharf Theatre debut.

            “Shepard delivers a requiem for America, land of the surreal and home of the crazed. . . . The amber waves of grain mask a dark secret. The fruited plain is rotting and the purple mountain’s majesty is like a bad bruise on the landscape.”

   –Washington Post critic David Richards on Buried Child