a m e r i c a n c o n s e r v at o r y t h e at e r
Carey Perloff, Artistic Director Heather Kitchen, Executive Director
presents
Curse of the
Starving Class
by sam shepard
directed by peter dubois
american conservatory theater
april 25–may 25, 2008
WORDS ON PLAYS
prepared by
elizabeth brodersen
publications editor
michael paller
resident dramaturg
margot melcon
publications & literary associate
ariel franklin-hudson
publications & literary intern
Words on Plays is made possible in part by The Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation.
a.c.t. is supported in part by the Grants for the Arts/San
Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, the National Endowment for the
Arts, which believes that a
great nation deserves great
art, and the donors of The
Next Generation Campaign.
© 2008 American Conservatory theater, a nonprofit organization. All rights reserved.
Weston Tate, by costume designer Lydia Tanji
table of contents
.
Characters, Cast, and Synopsis of Curse of the Starving Class
6.
Director Peter DuBois on Curse of the Starving Class
1. About the Playwright
4. Excerpts from Motel Chronicles
by Sam Shepard
17. The Real Gabby Hayes
by Sam Shepard
21. Excerpts from “Shepard on Shepard: An Interview”
by Matthew Roudané
25. Sam Shepard on . . . Family
26. A Torturous Love Between Father and Son
by Samuel G. Freedman
30. The Shepard Frontier
33. An Interview with Director Peter DuBois about Curse of the Starving Class
by Margot Melcon
38. An Interview with Actor Pamela Reed about Curse of the Starving Class
by Margot Melcon
43. Curse Miscellany
49. Questions to Consider
51. For Further Information . . .
Ella Tate, by costume designer Lydia Tanji
characters, cast, and synopsis of
curse of the starving class
Curse of the Starving Class was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London,
opening April 21, 1977. Its u.s. premiere opened at the Joseph Papp Public Theater/New
York Shakespeare Festival on March 2, 1978. The revised script was performed for the
first time at a.c.t. on April 25, 2008.
characters and cast
wesley
ella
emma
mr. taylor
weston
ellis
malcolm
emerson
slater
Jud Williford
Pamela Reed
Nicole Lowrance
Dan Hiatt
Jack Willis
Rod Gnapp
Craig Marker
T. Edward Webster
Howard Swain
the setting
Duarte, California, 1965.
synopsis
A
ct i, scene 1. Wesley is loading the broken pieces of the family’s front door into a
wheelbarrow when his mother, Ella, enters. Ella says that Wesley shouldn’t be cleaning up when it was his father who broke the door, but Wesley doesn’t want to live with
the debris until Weston returns. Wesley and Ella discuss the events of the night before:
Wesley is upset that the police came to their house, but Ella insists that Weston was going
to kill her and she needed protection. Ella begins to make breakfast while Wesley narrates
the events of the previous night. He leaves, and Emma enters, wearing a 4-h uniform and
carrying hand-made charts depicting the proper way to cut up a frying chicken. When Ella
asks about the charts, Emma reminds her that she is giving a demonstration at the fair and
starts looking in the refrigerator for her demonstration chicken—which, it turns out, Ella
has boiled. Emma is furious and storms out.
1
Wesley re-enters and starts yelling to the offstage Emma about her chicken. The three
of them begin arguing about whether they are members of the starving class, while Wesley
urinates on Emma’s charts. Emma then yells that she is going to take the family’s horse
and run away.
Ella tells Wesley that she is planning to sell their house and use the money to go to
Europe. Wesley is angry and leaves. Emma comes back in, covered in mud from being
dragged across the corral by the horse. She tells Ella about her dream of going to Mexico
and becoming a mechanic.
Ella leaves and Taylor enters. Taylor explains that he is Ella’s lawyer. Emma interrogates
him and threatens him with her father’s wrath until Wesley comes in, carrying a lamb, and
sets up a small enclosure for the lamb in the kitchen. Emma, Wesley, and Taylor converse
tensely until Ella returns. Emma leaves, upset about Ella’s plan to sell the house, and Taylor
and Ella depart for a “business meeting.” Alone onstage, Wesley talks to the lamb until
he hears Weston’s loud, drunken voice from offstage. Wesley runs out and Weston enters,
carrying a bag of artichokes. He puts the artichokes in the refrigerator and stacks his dirty
laundry on the kitchen table while yelling into the empty kitchen. Wesley returns and asks
about the artichokes. Weston explains that he got them while visiting the worthless piece
of desert property he bought from a scam artist. Weston demands that Wesley tell Ella to
do his laundry, and Weston and Wesley discuss how to cure the lamb of the maggots that
infest its digestive tract.

scene ii. Wesley is building a new door and Emma is sitting at the kitchen table re-making
her charts. They discuss the potential sale of the house and Ella’s relationship with Taylor.
Emma fantasizes about being a mechanic in Mexico and cheating her customers, and
Wesley tells Emma about his dreams of getting away—maybe to Alaska. Weston stumbles
in, even more drunk than the night before. He is confused by the broken door—he doesn’t
remember that he broke it—and the fact that his dirty laundry is still on the table. Emma
and Wesley explain that Ella hasn’t come home yet from her “appointment” with Taylor.
Weston tells them that he has found a buyer for the house, and Emma leaves abruptly.
Weston and Wesley discuss the “poison” that Weston feels has infected him all his life.
When Wesley tells him that Ella is planning to sell the house, Weston explodes, threatening to kill Ella and Taylor, and collapses on the table. Wesley talks about the possibility of
not selling the house—of fixing up the farm and raising avocados instead—but Weston
explains that he’s in a lot of debt and, mumbling about his experience flying planes in the
World War ii, he passes out.
Curse of the Starving Class set model, by scenic designer Loy Arcenas
A
ct ii, scene i. Ella enters with a bag of groceries and begins to put them away in the
refrigerator, throwing the artichokes onto the floor. She tells Wesley that she knows
that Weston was cheated into spending $500 on a worthless piece of desert land, and
Wesley figures out that Taylor was the scam artist who sold it to Weston. Wesley tells Ella
that Weston has already sold their house, for $1,500 to cover his debts, and that Weston
wants to kill her for plotting to sell to someone else behind his back. Ella doesn’t believe
him. She speaks of the curse she sees operating on the family.
Ellis, owner of the Alibi Club bar, where Weston spends most of his time, comes in and
laughs at Weston, who is still passed out on the kitchen table. Ella asks Ellis if he makes a
habit of walking into other people’s houses as if he owns them, and Ellis explains that he
does own it, because Weston sold it to him. He produces the $1,500 he owes Weston for
the purchase of the house—enough to cover Weston’s debts. Ellis says he already possesses
the deed and other papers to prove the sale. Wesley wants to know who Weston’s creditors are, but all Ellis will tell him is that they are some “pretty hard fellas.” Taylor appears
with the news that he has the final draft of the deed of sale for Ella to sign. Ellis threatens
Taylor, and Taylor argues that Weston is not legally competent to sell the house. Taylor
says that he has backing from banks and corporations, using legal language and big words
to try to intimidate Ellis.

Suddenly, police Sergeant Malcolm enters and informs the family that Emma has been
arrested for riding her horse through the Alibi Club and shooting up the bar. Ellis seizes
the money from Wesley, declaring that they now owe him for the damage Emma has done
to his bar. Taylor sneaks out, and when Wesley demands that Sergeant Malcolm arrest him
as a con man, Sergeant Malcolm explains that confidence schemes are not his jurisdiction.
Ellis leaves with the money and Wesley runs out after him. Ella reluctantly agrees to go to
the station to deal with Emma.

scene ii. Weston, now awake and in clean clothes, is telling the lamb a story about castrating lambs and throwing their testes onto the barn roof for an eagle to eat. Wesley appears,
covered in blood, and when Weston asks him what happened, Wesley explains that he
tried to get Weston’s money back from Ellis. Weston tells Wesley that he got up early and
took a walk around the property and has decided to keep it after all. Sober and apparently
inspired, Weston cleaned himself up, made breakfast, did the laundry, fixed the door, took
care of the lamb, and began to feel
“full of hope.” Wesley says that
he is hungry, and Weston suggests that he take a hot bath and
clean up while Weston cooks him
breakfast. Weston is not worried
about Wesley’s failure to get the
money back; he is reconsidering
Wesley’s suggestion that they join
an avocado growers’ association
and make a living as farmers.
Wesley leaves and Ella enters.
She asks Weston why the lamb
is in the kitchen, and Weston
explains that he has cured the
lamb of its maggots. When he
tells Ella that he also did all the
laundry, Ella wonders if he is having a nervous breakdown. She tells
Wesley and Emma Tate, by costume designer
Lydia Tanji
Weston that she has been visiting Emma in jail. When Weston seems almost proud of
Emma’s slate of convictions, Ella begins to yell. Weston, however, stays cool and tells her
to take a nap on the kitchen table, because “it’ll do wonders.” She stretches out on the
table as Wesley comes in, naked. He picks up the lamb and carries it out. Weston yells
for Wesley to come eat his breakfast, but Wesley does not return. Weston begins to eat
Wesley’s breakfast, and Ella falls asleep on the table.
Wesley re-enters, dressed in Weston’s old clothes, which he pulled out of the trash.
He tells Weston that he butchered the lamb for food, and Weston yells at him and shows
him the now well-stocked refrigerator. Wesley tells Weston that his creditors are going to
kill him, and, eventually convinced of the danger, Weston considers fleeing to Mexico, or
tracking Taylor down and getting back the money he paid for the worthless desert property. Finally, Weston leaves. Emma comes in. Wesley tells her that he feels himself becoming their father, that as he put on Weston’s clothes, he could feel something “growing on”
him. Emma tells Wesley that she got out of jail by making sexual advances to the sergeant.
She explains that she has decided
to begin a life of crime, because
it’s “the only thing that pays
nowadays.” She takes money and
car keys from Ella’s purse and
leaves.
Ella wakes up and, seeing
Wesley in his father’s clothes, calls
him “Weston.” Offstage, there is
a huge explosion, and Emerson
and Slater enter, laughing and
carrying the bloody carcass of the
lamb. They tell Ella and Wesley
that they blew up the car as a
warning to Weston about paying
his debts, and then leave. Ella
and Wesley look at the carcass
of the lamb and tell the end of
Weston’s story about the eagle, in
which a cat fights the eagle and
the two animals kill each other in
a futile struggle for survival.

on the a.c.t. production
Excerpts from Remarks Made to A.C.T. Cast and Staff (August 2007 and March 2008)
A

.c.t. artistic director carey perloff: The first time I encountered this play—
not to date any of us—was when Pamela Reed was starring in its original production
[at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1978]. It’s particularly interesting that this play
is happening right now, while so many Americans are losing their homes. You never know,
when you do theater, where history is going to catch up to you. I reread this play last week,
thinking about how there are things that happen in this play that we are very much wrestling with right now—what we thought the American Dream was going to be, particularly
with respect to home ownership. I read yesterday that the only people more bankrupt on
their credit than Americans right now are the British, because they’re even more obsessed
with owning their own homes than we are, whereas countries where people rent are doing
better. This play is about that wild underbelly of the American Dream. I think it’s a great
piece of writing, and I’m honored and thrilled that we’re having a chance to do it.
director peter dubois: First of all, thank you for having me. I’ve wanted to work at
a.c.t. since I first started making theater; this is one of the great American theatrical traditions. So it is a tremendous honor to be with you all.
When Carey called me about this project, I went to see Sam [Shepard] in Ireland
about something entirely different. The Public Theater [where DuBois until recently was
resident director] is doing a new play of his called Kicking a Dead Horse, which Sam is
directing. I went to Ireland to see the play [in its premiere at Dublin’s Abby Theatre] and
to get a feel for Sam and for what space at the Public the play would work in. That’s how
the relationship started. We spent the entire weekend drinking and listening to him play
bluegrass and meeting for breakfast in the morning to talk about the play.
One of the things Sam talked about was that Curse of the Starving Class is really
grounded in the story of his dad when he came back from World War ii. It’s very much
about the experience of that generation of men who came back from World War ii with
the promise of the house and the refrigerator on the porch, and being given the American
Dream. But the bottom line was, when you scratched the surface, it was really a generation
of traumatized men who became alcoholics and didn’t know how to function in society
any more. And when you scratch the surface of the American Dream, you find a kind of
violence and trauma as a result of war that dates back really to the founding of the country. Sam and I talked a lot about that—Sam plays bluegrass, and was playing with Celtic
musicians in the bars. I asked him why the bluegrass and the Celtic music had such a
similar sound, and he told me that in Appalachia the early settlers brought over a lot of
Celts, who were incredibly fierce warriors, to wipe out the Native American population
there. It seems like Sam is really interested in this history of violence that goes back to the
country’s founding, in interrogating the American Dream and getting at the brutality that
lies underneath it.
So an entire generation of alcoholic men who were numb to the world emerged, after
returning from the war, and the country didn’t really know how to handle them. I feel like
now we’re in a similar position as the men and women are returning from the war in Iraq,
and we are seeing a similar tension: How do we handle a whole generation of people who
have been broken by a very hard and difficult experience?
There’s a great speech that Taylor, the shyster lawyer guy, has at the end of the play.
He basically says, and I’m paraphrasing, “This country is moving ahead and you people
think that you’re at the center of the world, but you’re not, and it’s people like me, and the
corporations of this country, that are moving this country ahead, and you’re either on the
bus or the bus is gonna run your ass over.” Thematically I think that’s really at the heart
of the story.
At the time [when DuBois met with Shepard in Ireland], Sam was doing an overhaul
of Curse in anticipation of a different production that never happened. He shifted the play
from a three-act to a two-act structure and, in going back through the text, made these
very small but substantial changes. It’s not big surgery; there are no major changes to characters or anything like that. They’re minor changes to the original text, but I think they
do something to heighten the absurdity of the world of the play. The play walks this line
between pain and comedy in such a specific and beautiful way, and he has really heightened
that. Sam said to me, “I was a very young playwright when I wrote that play, and time has
given me more experience, and I want to really revisit it and work on the craft of it.”
I’ve never seen a production of this play, but I’ve known Sam’s writing since I was a kid,
and he’s always been absolutely one of my favorite writers. I think he’s been on a lifelong
search for authenticity, for what this country means to the lives of real people, so he doesn’t
write extraordinary situations. He finds the extraordinary in everyday situations, and I
think that’s what makes him so special, because we’re all living ordinary lives. So when you
find him reflecting something extraordinary in your everyday life, it’s amazing. He’s not
writing about Imelda Marcos, you know what I mean? He’s writing about what’s going on
behind the doors of the people who live two doors down. You scratch the surface or you
peel away a layer in any of our lives, and you find chaotic things, and that’s what I feel he’s
targeting. And then there’s this larger theme of how the circumstances of being American
affect what that day-to-day experience is. Everyone’s exposed. There are these absurd situ-

ations in the play, like when Wesley pees on his sister’s charts onstage, and the mother’s
calling out to the daughter, “Your brother’s peeing on your charts!” That’s crazy, but I can
think of things from my own childhood that can rival that, no problem. [Laughter]
I think part of what’s appealing about this play is that it’s just a feast for actors. The
language is stunning, and it’s not your predictable, realistic American story. Shepard’s up
there with [Tony] Kushner and [Tennessee] Williams in terms of his use of language.
And this play, I think more than some of his realistic plays, stretches the language almost
to the point of becoming abstracted. It stretches language as far as it can, but it still stays
within a kind of realistic landscape. I’m very interested in the poetics of the piece, and the
magical landscape that he’s painting. I think he’s a real magician in that way—he creates
this kaleidoscope of imagery and language that just draws you in.
on the scenic design

peter dubois: Naturalism is the new avant-garde. I should say, when I was preparing for
this, I was looking at different ideas. People have interpreted this play a number of different ways, the most extreme being
set inside a refrigerator. People
have cast a human as the lamb. I
think it’s worth saying that we’re
just going to do the play in a real
way. The one thing we did do was
pull away walls to really connect
the sense of the landscape to the
room, but this play is anchored in
reality, so I won’t be asking the
cast to do seven-minute crosses
or anything like that. The sky is
a combination of layers of drops,
of things that are painted and
things that can be lit, so that we
can have the effect of both the day
and the evening. Something about
the image of that final story of the
eagle and the struggle in the sky
(l to r) Mr. Taylor and Ellis, by costume designer
Lydia Tanji
was very resonant to me. Something about the smallness of these lives against the size of
the world and the land, and all that is to happen to the world and the land, felt very right,
so that was where [scenic designer] Loy [Arcenas] and I started to anchor things.
The design is grounded in something realistic, but I’m hoping to be able to find those
moments that lift it up metaphorically, that lift it poetically. I love visual worlds that feel
emotional, moments onstage where through the stagecraft you’re moved by gestures that
are just visual gestures you see in the real world. Especially in a play like this, I tend to
shy away from the idea of, you know, a room with a wall holding 300 whiskey bottles
representing the father’s alcoholism. I don’t want things that call attention to themselves;
I like it when the physical world just helps to unfold the play. So I guess this design is a
kind of magical realism, a more poetic realism, but it is anchored in something very realistic because I don’t want the physical world of the play to be pulling people outside of
this family’s reality, because the language is already doing that. The lighting, actually, is
going to be a lot of what, I think, brings the magic out into the world. I’m also interested
in finding a way to create something small and contained in the Geary, but then use the
height and the depth of the space
to bring us into the reality that
we’re existing in a larger world
with forces beyond our control.
We do have to think about how
we use the lamb, because I don’t
want the actors to be upstaged by
it. But the lamb’s in the kitchen for
a large part of the play, and I think
it’s really important to have this
feeling of the outside being inside
the house, because the old man
knocks down the door, and then
the kid brings in the lamb with the
maggots, and so suddenly you’re in
a space with no door, with a lamb,
in a kitchen, and there’s that feeling that the outside has moved in.
We’re also thinking about the
end of the play and the explosion
of the car, which is something

we’re continuing to talk about, whether or not Emma leaves and turns the car engine on
and blows up. There is the option that she’s taken a different car, but I think the direction
we want to go in is that she’s actually turned the key and blown up.
scenic designer loy arcenas: When Peter and I first talked about this, we thought
the landscape was very much the overriding scenic element in the play, but we also wanted
to enclose it in some fashion. We shifted some of the stage directions that Sam wrote.
We flip-flopped the entrances so that the landscape in this configuration is the stronger
element, but we’ve kept everything more or less as is. We’re using the hydraulic stage at
the theater and raking it to an inch and a half; it’s a very steep rake, and we made it even
steeper by lifting the horizon to about four feet off the deck. On top of this sits the kitchen,
which is also raked about three-quarters of an inch. The whole point is that we want the
sky to be a very big element. We want to create a Cinemascope idea of the West. We
hope to achieve this with light and whatever means we can with [lighting designer] Japhy
[Weideman]. What we also did was incorporate the outside into the inside, which is why
we have the telephone pole stuck in the middle of the kitchen. We also have a working
stove, from which we hope to see real fire and cooking.
on the costume design

peter dubois: I think it’s really important that [the costumes] look like real clothes.
Ideally they would be bought in a Goodwill shop in Appalachia. They can’t feel like costumes. Nothing in the visual landscape should pull you out of feeling that you’re in the
reality of this family. I think that’s the trick, how to get to that place of authenticity.
Sam’s got this incredible gift of taking everyday things and juxtaposing them in a way
that is theatrical. There are two gestures with the costumes that are seriously amazing. One
is a great scene where the mother comes out dressed for lunch with Taylor in this dress
with her white gloves, which could be really startling. The other is when the son shows up
in his father’s clothes; it’s so important that the father’s clothes are just perfect, because you
realize that the son is going to become the father, and Sam is so much about that, that generations repeat themselves, and the sins of the fathers fall upon the sons, and that there’s
no escaping this cycle. I think those two moments are really incredible. I think Taylor’s
clothes are really important, too, because Taylor, in a way, is like the audience. Taylor walks
into this world and thinks, “This is nuts.” But actually, again, when you scratch the surface,
you realize Taylor is actually the most destructive force in the play, next to the old man’s
drinking problem. Taylor really represents that which is destructive in this world.
about the playwright
S
am 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.
Shepard worked as a stable hand
on a ranch in Chino from 1958
to 1960 and studied agriculture for
a year at Mount Antonio Junior
College. After leaving college,
he joined the Bishop’s Company
Repertory Players, a touring theater
group.
In 1963, Shepard moved to New
York City, where he worked as a busboy at the Village Gate in Greenwich
Sam Shepard (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)
Village and began to write plays for
the emerging experimental underground theater scene. He made his debut at Theatre
Genesis on October 10, 1964, with the double-billed Cowboys and Rock Garden. In 1965
he presented Up to Thursday and 4-H Club at Theatre 65, Dog and Rocking Chair at La
MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, Chicago at Genesis, and Icarus’s Mother at Caffe Cino.
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.”
In 1966, Red Cross, Chicago, and Icarus’s Mother earned Shepard a trio of Village Voice obie
Awards. In 1967 and 1968, Shepard wrote La Turista, his first full-length play, Melodrama
Play, and Forensic and the Navigators, all of which also won obies, and Cowboys #2, which
premiered in Los Angeles.
In 1969, Shepard began a stint playing drums and guitar with the cult “amphetamine
rock band” the Holy Modal Rounders, later telling an interviewer that he would rather be


a rock star than a playwright. He nevertheless continued to write plays, completing Holy
Ghostly and The Unseen Hand in 1969, Operation Sidewinder and Shaved Splits in 1970, and
Mad Dog Blues, Back Bog Beast Bait, and Cowboy Mouth (written with poet/musician Patti
Smith) in 1971. He left the Rounders in 1971 and moved to England, where he lived for the
next three years. Two notable plays of this period—The Tooth of Crime (1972, obie Award)
and Geography of a Horse Dreamer (1974)—premiered in London. In 1973 he published
his first book of essays and poems, Hawk Moon. Two similar collections followed in 1977
(Motel Chronicles) and 1982 (Cruising Paradise).
In 1974 Shepard returned to the United States and became the playwright-in-residence
at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco, a position he held until 1984. Plays from this period
include Action (obie Award, 1974), Killer’s Head (1975), Angel City (1976), and Suicide in
B-Flat (1976).
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
and Buried Child in 1978 (both of which won obie Awards) and True West in 1980. The
three plays are linked thematically in their examination of troubled and tempestuous blood
relationships in a fragmented society. Shepard achieved his warmest critical reception with
Buried Child, which also won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Washington Post theater critic
David Richards wrote, “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.”
Shepard began a new career as a film actor in 1978, appearing in Renaldo and Clara and
Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. He also began collaborating with Joseph Chaikin on
Tongues, a stage work with music that was heavily dependent on the theories of Antonin
Artaud. Shepard and Chaikin would also collaborate on Savage/Love (1979), War in Heaven
(1985), and When the World Was Green (A Chef ’s Fable) (1996).
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. He appeared as an actor in Resurrection
(1980), Raggedy Man (1981), Frances (1982), The Right Stuff (Academy Award nom., 1983),
Country (1984), his own Fool for Love (dir. Robert Altman, 1985), Crimes of the Heart (1986),
Baby Boom (1987), Steel Magnolias (1989), Voyager (1991), Thunderheart (1992), and The
Pelican Brief (1993). He also worked on several screenplays, including Paris, Texas, with
Wim Wenders (Palme d’Or, Cannes Film Festival, 1984). As writer/director, he filmed Far
North and Silent Tongue, in 1988 and 1992, respectively.
Shepard’s play Stages of Shock premiered at the American Place Theatre in 1991, and
Simpatico transferred to the Royal Court Theatre after its premiere in 1994 at the New York
Shakespeare Festival. A revised Buried Child, under the direction of Gary Sinise, opened
on Broadway in April 1996 and earned a Tony Award nomination. Eyes for Consuela, based
on a short story by Octavio Paz, premiered at Manhattan Theatre Club in 1998. The Magic
Theatre premiered The Late Henry Moss, starring Sean Penn and Nick Nolte, before it was
moved to the Signature Theatre in New York in 2001.
Shepard’s recent projects include the short story collection Great Dream of Heaven
(2002); the plays The God of Hell (2005) and Kicking a Dead Horse, which premiered in
Dublin, Ireland in March 2007 and will have its New York premiere in July 2008 at The
Public Theater; and the films Black Hawk Down (actor, 2001), Don’t Come Knocking (his
second collaboration with Wenders, writer/actor, 2006), The Assassination of Jesse James by
the Coward Robert Ford (actor, 2007), and the upcoming Descending from Heaven (actor, with
Pamela Reed).
Shepard is considered one of
the foremost modern American
playwrights. 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. The
Signature Theatre devoted
its entire 1996–97 season to
his plays. Writing in the New
Republic, Robert Brustein called
Shepard “one of our most celebrated writers,” adding that his
plays “have overturned theatrical conventions and created a
new kind of drama.”
Emerson and Slater, by costume designer
Lydia Tanji

excerpts from motel chronicles
by sam shepard
M

y Dad keeps a record collection in cardboard boxes lined up along his bedroom wall
collecting New Mexican dust. His prize is an original Al Jolson 78 with the jacket
taped and even the tape is ripped. Last time I saw him he tried to bribe me into taking it
back to l.a. and selling it for a bundle. He’s convinced it’s worth at least a grand. Maybe
more, depending on the market. He says he’s lost touch with the market these days.
My Dad has a picture of a Spanish señorita covered in whip cream pinned above the
sink to his kitchen wall. My Dad actually does. He walked me over to it and we both
stared at it for a while. “She’s supposed to be naked under there, but I’ll bet she’s wearing
something,” he said.
He gave me a tour of all his walls. All his walls are covered with pictures. Wall-to-wall
magazine clippings. Each picture is a point of view. Like peering out through different
windows into intricate landscapes. I stared at the pictures. A waterfall with real rocks
glued onto the foreground. Rocks he’d found to fit the picture. A white dog with a green
fish in its mouth. Saguaro Cactus in the setting sun ripped from a 1954 Arizona Highways.
An orange Orangutang fiddling with its privates. A flight of b-52 Bombers in Wing
Formation. A collage of faces splattered with bacon grease.
My Dad has a collection of cigarette butts in a Yuban coffee can. I bought him a carton
of Old Golds but he wouldn’t touch them. He kept twisting tobacco out of butts and rolling remakes over a grocery bag so as not to lose the slightest bit. He sneered at my carton
of cigarettes, all red and white and ready-rolled.
He spent all the food money I’d gave him on Bourbon. Filled the icebox with bottles.
Had his hair cut short like a World War ii fighter pilot. He gleamed every time he ran his
hand across the bristles. Said they used to cut it short like that so their helmets would fit.
Showed me how the shrapnel scars still showed on the nape of his neck.
My Dad lives alone on the desert. He says he doesn’t fit with people.
4/79 Santa Fe, New Mexico
M
y name came down through seven generations of men with the same name each
naming the first son the same name as the father then the mothers nicknaming the
sons so as not to confuse them with the fathers when hearing their names called in the
open air while working side by side in the waist-high wheat.
The sons came to believe their names were the nicknames they heard floating across
these fields and answered to these names building ideas of who they were around the
sound never dreaming their real legal name was lying in wait for them written on some
paper in Chicago and that name would be the name they’d prefix with “Mr.” and that name
would be the name they’d die with.
5/2/80 Homestead Valley, California
I
t’s a high crime night. The cops are out in hot pursuit. The moon is frozen full. Sleepers
are having bullet dreams. Sirens weave through a thousand streets.
In one kitchen far away a woman has gotten herself into deep water with a man. She’s
scared but it’s coming out angry. He’s drunk and it’s turning mean. He’s already blown a
hole the size of a wrecking ball through the front door. Ragged wallpaper flutters. The
night leaps in at them. No scream is heard because there’s no one to hear it. No phone. No
car because he’s got the keys. She sees him shaking with rage. His own. A rage of unknown
origin. She sees him fumbling with the plastic green shotgun shells. She makes a dash for
the hole in the door. He falls on his face. She’s loose in the cattle yard. No shoes. Sinks to
the knees in muddy manure. Hears a shot from the front porch. Waits to feel it. Nothing.
Pulls her legs out with both hands. Heads for the light on the hill. Can’t remember who
the light belongs to. Can’t remember if the light belongs to people or just some barn. A
light is better than no light, she thinks. Any light is better than dark. She’s falling in deep
plow ruts. Clawing her way. Any light is better than dark.
1/18/80 Petaluma, California
M
y Dad had this habit of picking at a shrapnel scar on the back of his neck every time
he heard a plane go over our land. He’d be stooped over in the orchard repairing
the irrigation pipes or the tractor and he’d hear a plane then slowly straighten up, peel off
his straw Mexican hat, run his hand through his hair, wipe the sweat off on his thigh, hold
the hat out in front of his forehead to shade his eyes, squint deep into the sky, fix the plane
with one eye and begin picking slowly at the back of his neck. Just stare and pick. The
scar was the mark of a World War ii mission over Italy. A tiny piece of metal remained
embedded just under the surface. What got me was reflexive nature of this picking gesture. Every time he heard a plane he went for the scar. And he didn’t stop picking at it
until he’d identified the aircraft to his complete satisfaction. He delighted mostly in prop
planes and this was the Fifties so there were quite a few big prop planes still in the air. If
a formation of p-51’s went over he would almost climb an Avocado tree with ecstasy. Each
identification was marked by a distinct emotional tone in his voice. There were planes that
had let him down in the heat of combat and he would spit in their direction. On the other

hand, a b-54 got a somber, almost religious tone. Usually just the minimal code number
was uttered: “b-54,” he would say, then, satisfied, he would drag his eyes back down to earth
and return to his work. It seemed odd to me how a man who loved the sky so much could
also love the land.
8/29/80 Santa Rosa, California
H
e was just about exactly halfway between San Francisco and l.a. He parked the
truck on the soft bank of Highway 5, crawled under a barbed-wire fence and headed
toward the Harris Feedlot. He found an open field behind the pens and sat down crosslegged in the middle of it. The raw smell of cattle filled his chest. The sun was just setting
behind the hills of Coalinga and two broad bands of orange clouds stretched out across
the Cental Valley like giant hawk wings. He wanted to talk to himself but the stillness
of space stopped him. He listened to it. Whippoorwills. Calves calling out. The beautiful
moan of a Kenworth diesel. He pictured both cities simultaneously, as though they hung
on the extended arms of the orange clouds. Suspended. Tiny San Francisco dangling to
the north: innocent, rich and a little bit silly. The sprawling, demented snake of l.a. to the
south. Its fanged mouth wide open, eyes blazing, paralyzed in a lunge of pure paranoia.
This was the place to be, he thought. Right here. In the middle. Smack in the belly of
California where he could eyeball both from a distance. He could live inside the intestines
of this valley while he spied on the brain and the genitals. It was a vain scheme. Already
things were pulling on him in two directions. Already he was moving when he wanted
nothing but stillness. A huge hand grabbed him from behind. A hand without a body. It
carried him up, miles above the highway. He didn’t fight. He’d lost the fear of falling. The
hand went straight through his back and grabbed his heart. It didn’t squeeze. It was a grip
of pure love. He let his body drop and watched it tumble without hope. His heart stayed
high, tucked in the knuckles of a giant fist.
11/23/81 Coalinga, California

© 1982 by Sam Shepard.
the real gabby hayes
by sam shepard
I
was seven years old and had driven with my father out to a place on the Mojave called
Hot Springs. We’d been looking at a small patch of desert that he’d bought out there
from a door-to-door real estate guy who’d spread out glossy color brochures on our kitchen
table. Pictures of glistening swimming pools, emerald-green golf courses, and a clubhouse,
all yet to be built. When we got there it was nothing but pure virgin desert. I helped my
dad stake his tiny plot with iron rebar on all four corners, tied with little orange flags that
snapped in the wind. When we finished, it looked to me more like a cemetery plot than
anything else. We spent the rest of the afternoon shooting rusty bean cans with a .22 pistol
and looking for snakes. He’d wanted to bring a rattler back with him to show my mother.
A green mojave. “Just to prove we were out here,” he’d said. “So she doesn’t get other ideas.
Starts thinking I’m off tomcatting around or something.”
“Is that the reason you brought me along?” I’d said.
“Is what the reason?”
“So she’d think you weren’t tomcatting?”
“You’re not even sure what tomcattin’ means, are you? You’re seven years old. How could
you be sure what that means?” He turned his back on me and walked away, kicking an
empty can and reloading the .22. I could tell he was pissed off for me having asked him
that. I followed him, picking up the empty shell casings as they hit the sand. He tossed
another can in the air and fired. He missed. He emptied the whole pistol into the sky
and missed every time he threw a can. I got embarrassed for him and pretended I hadn’t
seen this. I found a stick of black manzanita and started drawing diamonds in the sand.
He looked over his shoulder at me and reloaded. Sweat was dripping off his nose, and he
blew at it as though shooing flies. “So what’s your thought on this little piece of desert
here? Think I made a smart deal? The two of us oughta just pick up stakes and move out
here. Just forget about the women altogether.” He laughed and fired again, at a can on the
ground. I wasn’t sure if he hit it or not, because I wasn’t looking, but I didn’t hear any metal
ring. I was hoping he’d hit it, though, because I thought it might help to calm him down
some. Get his mind off things. He kept taking long sips from a fifth wrapped in a paper
bag that he had stuffed in his hip pocket. He tried to get friendlier with me. I could hear
it in his voice. Trying to include me in something, as though I were a coconspirator. But
the more he tried, the further I felt from him. He seemed to sense this too, but there was
nothing he could do about it. “Sometimes it’s good to just get off by yourself someplace.


To have a spot like this all tucked away that nobody knows about. Don’t you think?” He
fired again, at a giant jackrabbit, but didn’t come anywhere near it. The rabbit just sat there
and stared at him. “That’s what I had in mind for this place. A little desert hideaway. Can’t
always be the family man. Me and you could build a bottle house out here when you get a
little bit older. What do you think about that?”
“What’s a bottle house?” I asked him without looking in his face.
“You know. A bottle house like these desert rats make. You seen ‘em. All made outa
different kinds a bottles, stacked up like bricks. Different colors. Make a beautiful light
when the sun strikes ‘em right.”
“Sure,” I said, still fiddling with the stick.
“Keep a couple a burros. Take hikes and find us some treasure. There’s still treasure out
here, ya know. This is undiscovered territory yet.
“What kinda treasure?”
“Spanish booty. Cabeza de Vaca musta come right through here. Ever heard a him?
‘Head of a Cow’—that’s what his name means. Had a big, ugly head, apparently. From all
the accounts. I’ll bet he came right through here, searching for Cibola.”
“What’s that?”
“Seven Cities of Gold. You’ll learn all about that when you start your history. You
haven’t started on any history yet, I guess.”
“No. Just dinosaurs.”
“Well, this was way after the dinosaurs. This was when the Spanish had this notion that
there was a place made entirely of gold. I don’t know where the idea came from, but they
were convinced it was out here in the West somewhere.”
“Did they ever find it?”
“Nope. But old de Vaca had a Negro man—a Moor I guess they called them back then.
Big, giant Negro man that de Vaca used as his scout. He’d send him out in search of the
golden cities, and one day this Negro came back to camp and told de Vaca he’d finally
found it. So they rushed to this place with the Moor leading the way and when they got
there it turned out to be a Pueblo Indian village carved into the side of a cliff. When the
sun hit the pueblo at a certain time of day, it appeared to be golden. So de Vaca had the
Moor beheaded.”
“Beheaded?”
“Yep. Chopped his head right off. On the spot.” My dad walked away, leaving me with
the image of decapitation. A horny toad blinked right in front of me. I never would have
noticed him if he hadn’t blinked. “Anyhow, this would be the perfect kind of spot for a
little hideaway. Just the two of us.”
“You mean we’d just live out here by ourselves?” I asked him.
“Well, not permanent. Not on a permanent basis. Just have it as a kind of a retreat.
Nobody’d know about it except you and me. Be our little secret. Have to bring water to
it, of course. That’s the chief problem out here, is water. We could haul it in from Indio, I
suppose. Dig a well.”
“We’d never bring Mom?” this question seemed to piss him off again. He kicked at the
sand and spun the chamber of the pistol.
“She’s not the desert type,” he said. “Forests is her game. Woods and lakes. Midwestern
stuff.” He fired into an old kerosene can that was so close he couldn’t miss. “She likes it
where it’s all closed in and you can’t see the light of day. Not my cup a tea. Bottle house
would be perfect. All those different shafts of colored light.”
We drove across the sand, back to the blacktop highway, and stopped at a Date Shack
advertising Date Shakes in gigantic hand-painted red letters. He asked the Mexican owner
for directions to a place called the Shadow Mountain Inn—some kind of country club he’d
remembered from his air force days. We shared a box of dates stuffed with coconut shavings, and he kept licking his fingers and saying, “Beats the hell out of a Hershey bar!” We
found our way to the Shadow Mountain Inn and parked right in front of it. He wrapped
the .22 up in an old racing form, then stuffed it under the front seat. He took one more
long hit from his bottle and hid that in the glove compartment underneath some yellowed
highway maps. I started feeling as though I should be hiding something too, but I wasn’t
sure what it was.
As we crossed the parking lot he told me this was a very exclusive club and we should
act like we belonged here. It never occurred to me before that “acting” could be a part of
living. “It’s all in the way you present yourself,” he said. “If you go in there acting like you
don’t belong, like you feel awkward or something, they’re gonna sense that right off the
bat. Just act natural and relaxed, like a solid citizen.”
We sat at the mahogany bar, and my dad ordered a martini with white pearl onions
floating around in it. He pulled a big bowl of peanuts over and placed it between us. I
thought the peanuts might belong to somebody else, since they were already set out, but he
dug right into them. I’d never seen him order a martini before, but I guess he was trying to
impress the bartender. Back home he’d always order bourbon and soda. I got a cherry Coke
with a slice of lemon, and it was right about then, when the Coke was delivered, that I saw
Gabby Hayes. The real Gabby Hayes. At first I couldn’t believe it. I kept staring to make
sure before I said anything to my dad. I was hypnotized by his white beard. There he was,
big as life, sitting in a plush corner booth with a black string bolo tie and a shiny tuxedo.
It was the middle of a desert afternoon, about 109 degrees outside, so hot the blacktop was

melting, and Gabby Hayes had on a tuxedo. There were two young blond women with
him, decked out in slinky outfits, dripping with jewelry and sex. Even at seven, I could
recognize sex when I saw it. There was no mistake about that. They kept dangling shrimp
dipped in red sauce in front of his nose, giggling and nibbling on his fuzzy ears. One of
them had her hand in his lap under a white napkin. “Dad, that’s Gabby Hayes over there!
The real Gabby Hayes!” I whispered heavily. My heart was banging for some reason, and
my breath came out choppy and dry. My father turned stiffly on his stool, and I could smell
the boozy sweat on the back of his sunburned neck. He glanced over at the corner booth
and then turned back to his drink.
“That’s what fame and fortune’ll get you,” he said. “Couple a blond chippies and a
shrimp cocktail. How ‘bout that.” I kept staring at Gabby Hayes’s beard and watching his
mouth nibble on the shrimp, then suck on the girl’s finger. It looked like he had a whole
set of ivory-white teeth now. On tv he never had teeth. On the tv he never wore a tuxedo. He was the subservient gummy-mouthed sidekick, slightly demented and always shy
around women. It never crossed my mind that the real Gabby Hayes might be a whole
different person.
That night we drove all the way back home in silence. My dad smoked and squinted
down the long road toward the lights of Duarte. He turned the radio on once and listened
to Frank Sinatra sing “You Belong to Me,” then turned it back off again. I stared out at
the string of mountains that diminished behind us into the deep desert, and above them I
saw a huge decapitated head of a black man smiling down on us.
3/11/90 (Papantla, Mexico)
Excerpted from Cruising Paradise: Tales by Sam Shepard. © 1996 by Sam Shepard.

excerpts from “shepard on shepard:
an interview”
by matthew roudané (2000)
roudané: of the many compelling aspects of your theater that
spark public interest and a private nerve, it’s your exploration of
the american family that, for many, stands out. especially in such
plays as the rock garden , curse of the starving class , buried child , true
west , fool for love , and a lie of the mind , strange or absent fathers,
distant mothers, wayward sons, and confused daughters animate
the stage. many of us feel the way shelly must have when she first
enters the normal-seeming home in the second act of buried child
only to find a rather bizarre family. could you comment on your
life-long interest in exploring the american family?
shepard: The one thing that keeps drawing me back to it is this thing that there is no
escape from the family. And it almost seems like the whole willfulness of the sixties was
to break away from the family: the family was no longer viable, no longer valid somehow
in everybody’s mind. The “nuclear family” and all these coined phrases suddenly became
meaningless. We were all independent, we were all free of that, we were somehow spinning
out there in the world without any connection whatsoever, you know. This is ridiculous. It’s
absolutely ridiculous to intellectually think that you can sever yourself, I mean even if you
didn’t know who your mother and father were, if you never met them, you are still intimately, inevitably, and entirely connected to who brought you into the world—through a
long, long chain, regardless of whether you knew them face to face or not. You could be the
most outcast orphan and yet you are still inevitably connected to this chain. I’m interested
in the family’s biological connections and how those patterns of behavior are passed on.
In a way it’s endless, there’s no real bottom to it. It started with a little tiny one-act play I
wrote way back when called Rock Garden [1964], where there was, for the first time in my
work, a father, a mother, and a son. It was a very simple one-act little play, but it keyed off
into Curse of the Starving Class [1977], and that keyed off into Buried Child [1979], and that
keyed off into True West [1980], Fool for Love [1983], and all of that. I mean, I look back on
all of that now as being sort of seminal. It initiated something that I didn’t even see, I didn’t
even recognize that this was going to be the impulse toward other things, and I certainly
didn’t see myself spending my whole life on it. I’ve got this new production of True West

on Broadway now—and the play’s twenty years old—and the amazing thing to me is that,
now, in this time, for some reason or another, the disaster inherent in this thing called the
American Family is very very resonant now with audiences. I mean, it’s much more so now
than it was back when the play first started in 1980. . . .

a number of playwrights address in various ways the whole notion
of the “myth of the american dream,” however one chooses to
define such a term. many writers have said that the american
dream myth permeates all of american literature, forming an
ironical cultural backdrop to the writer’s story. do you think
such a myth informs your theater?
Nobody has actually ever succinctly defined “the myth of the American Dream.” What
is the American Dream? Is it what Thomas Jefferson proposed? Was that the American
Dream? Was it what George Washington proposed? Was it what Lincoln proposed? Was it
what Martin Luther King proposed? I don’t know what the American Dream is. I do know
that it doesn’t work. Not only doesn’t it work, the myth of the American Dream has created
extraordinary havoc, and it’s going to be our demise. I mean if you want to—and I’m not
an historian—but it’s very interesting to trace back this European imperialism, this notion
that not only were we given this land by God, somehow, but that we’re also entitled to do
whatever we wanted to with it, regardless of the consequences, and reap all of the fortunes
out of the land, much to the detriment of everybody “below” this rampant, puritanical class
of European colonialism. If you read in the journals of Lewis and Clark, it’s just amazing
how these guys approached the Plains Indians, particularly the Sioux, who were not very
welcoming to them, as opposed to some of the other tribes to the North who got along
with them better. But the Sioux couldn’t care less about these jokers. They’d mess with
them, they’d fool with them, they shot arrows at ‘em, and Lewis and Clark hated the idea
of going back through Lakota country because they knew they’d get the shit kicked out
of them by these “crazy” people who they considered many notches below the European
standard. Now if that’s the American Dream, then we were in trouble from the get go; if
that’s the way the myth of the American Dream was established, we were in deep shit.
Granted, Lewis and Clark and these other guys were somewhat heroic, they were vigorous,
they had all of this vitality and they had all of this adventure of going into strange territory and all of that stuff, but behind the whole thing is land-hungry Europeans wanting
to dominate. That’s behind the whole deal. So, again, there are so many definitions of the
myth of the American Dream. I mean, now you could actually say the American Dream is
the computer. It’s presented like that: the computer is the American Dream, the computer
is the Answer. The Internet is the Answer. ok? Where does that leave you? I think we’ve
always fallen victim to advertising from the get go. From advertising campaigns. The move
westward was promoted by advertising. You know, “Come West!” “Free land!” “Manifest
Destiny.” So we’ve always been seduced by advertising, and now we’re even more seduced
by the computer and the Internet. We’ve fallen into that thing, you know. So the American
Dream is always this fantasy that’s promoted through advertising. We always prefer the
fantasy over the reality. . . .
I find it to be a huge delimma. The friction between who we instinctively feel ourselves to be and anything that’s influencing us to become something quite different. You
see there’s always this battle going on between what I am inclined to believe through the
influences coming from outside, and what I sort of instinctively feel myself to be, which
is quite a different predicament. . . . It can be divided in all different kinds of ways: male
and female, violent and not so. And I think this “split” is where a lot of the violence comes
from in the United States. This frustration between imagery and reality. I guess that’s why
professional wrestling is popular.
would this in part explain why so many of your plays have key
male figures who have trouble functioning outside of the mojave
desert?
Yeah, well, I grew up in a condition where the male influences around me were primarily
alcoholics and extremely violent and, at the same time, like lost children, not knowing how
to deal with it. Instead, they were plunked down on the desert not knowing how they got
there. And slowly they began receding further and further and further away—receding
from the family, receding from society. You see it with some Vietnam vets. It was the same
thing, except these guys—my father’s generation—were coming out of World War ii. I
can’t help but think that these wars had something to do with the psychological state that
they came back in. I mean, imagine coming back into the Eisenhower fifties. It must not
have been easy. At all. Where everything was wonderful, the front lawns were all being
taken care of, there was a refrigerator in everybody’s house. Everybody had a Chevy, and
these guys had just been bombing the shit out of Germany and Italy and the South Pacific
and then they come back; I meant it just must have been unbelievable. I mean nobody ever
really talks about that. Back then it was taboo to talk about it. “Nobody’s crazy; everybody’s
in good shape.” I mean can you believe it? And this happened across the country of course,
but my dad came from an extremely rural farm community—wheat farmers—in Illinois,
and next thing he knows he’s flying b-24s over the South Pacific, over Rumania, dropping
bombs and killing people he couldn’t even see. And then from that into trying to raise a

family and growing up in white America, you know. I mean it’s extraordinary. It’s amazing
the way all that flip flops, from the fifties to the sixties. This monster appears. The monster
everybody was trying to keep at bay suddenly turns over.
perhaps this is why you have so many baffled father figures in
your plays, fathers who in part stand as an emblem for a wayward
america.
Yeah, but I don’t think you ever begin a piece of writing with that intention; it comes out,
you know what I mean? You begin from “character” and as it moves maybe it takes on some
of those kinds of resonances. I don’t think you begin from saying, “ok, I’m going to make
this father figure an emblem for America,” you know what I mean? If it comes out through
its own force, then it’s fine. That’s something I never really realized as a writer until I got
into Curse of the Starving Class, and with Curse I began to realize that these characters were
not only who they were in this predicament in this little subculture, but they begin to have
a bigger implication—there are ripples around them, particularly in the father.
Excerpted from "Shepard on Shepard: An Interview," by Matthew Roudané, The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard. © 2002
Cambridge University Press.
x

why is betrayal so central to your work?
I feel it’s in my bones somehow. It’s something that has not only affected me personally,
being raised up in this country, but that is in the whole fabric of the culture. I can’t put
my finger on it and I don’t have the cure for it and I would never pretend to. It certainly
feels, as time goes by, that there is a very mysterious betrayal of some kind that we don’t
understand. We keep paying for it and paying for it and we don’t know why we’re paying
for it. There’s all kinds of sociological bullshit you can explain it away with—genocide, for
example—but we can’t seem to come to terms with it as Americans. We don’t seem to be
able to face what has actually become of us.
can people look at betrayal within a family or between a man and
a woman in your plays and see a broader picture there?
I would hope so. Although evidently not, because things don’t seem to have come
around.
—Interview with Sam Shepard by Graham Coen in Interview ( June 1996)
sam shepard on . . . family
W
hat doesn’t have to do with family? There isn’t anything. Even a love story has to do
with family. Crime has to do with family. We all come out of each other—everyone
is born out of a mother and father. It’s an endless cycle.
I think it’s one of the tragedies of this country that the nuclear family has become so filled
with distrust. My family was torn apart, torn to shreds from the inside out. I know I’m not
alone in that. It’s not my personal trauma, but it’s characteristic of America, much more than
Europe, the sense of mother and father not really able to make it or break it off.
The fact of being born to parents, the fact that they were born to parents, is inescapable.
There’s a false ideology about being able to be independent of that. It’s wrong-headed to
blame the nuclear family for the turbulence in the country and there’s a great schizophrenia
about that, now that people feel a need to be related, attached to something in the past.
There are still parts of this country that have this feeling of connection with the land.
Wyoming. Montana. Texas. Whole towns in Texas are named for people who still live
there. (1979)
C
ertain things that occur inside the family often leave marks on the emotional life that
are far stronger than fantasy. What might be seen as the fantasy is, to me, just a kind
of rumination on those deep marks, a manifestation of the emotional and psychological
elements. Sometimes in someone’s gesture you can notice how a parent is somehow inhabiting that person without there being any awareness of that. How often are you aware that
a gesture is coming from your old man? Sometimes you can look at your hand and see your
father. But it’s a complex scheme—it’s not that easy to pinpoint. Again, the thing is not to
avoid the issue but to see that it exists. (1986)
M
idwestern women from the Forties suffered an incredible psychological assault,
mainly by men who were disappointed in a way that they didn’t understand. While
growing up I saw that assault over and over again, and not only in my own family. These
were men who came back from the war, had to settle down, raise a family and send the
kids to school—and they just couldn’t handle it. There was something outrageous about it.
I still don’t know what it was—maybe living through those adventures in the war and then
having to come back to suburbia. Anyway, the woman took it on the nose, and it wasn’t
like they said, “Hey Jack, you know, down the road, I’m leaving.” They sat there and took
it. I think there was a kind of heroism in those women. They were tough and selfless in a
way. (1997)

a torturous love between father and son
by samuel g. freedman (1985)
W

hatever else any great American playwright has done, each one has created, and in
turn become identified with, a personal vision of the American family. If anything,
the measure of achievement in American drama has been a writer’s ability to place a vivid
family portrait within a larger, societal frame—or, more to the point, to make the family
represent not only the writer’s inner life but a set of outer conditions. One thinks of Arthur
Miller’s men, hustlers who lived through one Great Depression and live in fear of another;
of Tennessee Williams’s women, cut loose with the fall of the plantation aristocracy and
thrown into the cruel cities. Eugene O’Neill, Clifford Odets, William Inge, Edward
Albee—all conjure images of the family at war with itself.
And in a cycle of family plays stretching over a decade Sam Shepard has painted a
picture of domestic disharmony as striking as any to have preceded it. The wastrel father
of Curse of the Starving Class, the Cain-and-Abel brothers of True West, the incestuous
lovers of Fool for Love have become indelible characters in the contemporary American
theater. So, too, has Shepard staked his claim to the landscapes—both geographical and
psychological—of the rootless American Southwest and the beleaguered Middle Western
farm belt. . . .
As Don Shewey points out in his recent biography of the playwright (Sam Shepard, Dell
Books), Shepard’s cycle of family plays departed from his earlier work. Shepard lived and
wrote amid the East Village’s experimental theater movement, and from 1963 through 1976
his plays tended toward the fantastic and his creations included cowboys and rock stars,
bayou monsters and b-movie gumshoes. Then, with Curse of the Starving Class, Shepard
began to penetrate his own past and to work in an increasingly naturalistic vein. Each
play since then has peeled back more layers of the playwright’s itinerant upbringing and,
particularly, of his relationship with his father.
“I don’t think it’s worth doing anything,” Shepard said in a recent interview, “unless
it’s personal. You’re not dealing with anything unless you’re dealing with the most deeply
personal experiences. It’s empty otherwise.”
Still, Shepard acknowledges the transition in his work since Curse of the Starving Class.
“I thought for years it was boring, uninteresting to write about the family,” he said. “I was
more interested in this thing of being wild and crazy.”
“But the interesting thing about taking real blood relationships is that the more you
start to investigate those things as external characters, the more you see they’re also inter-
nal characters. The mythology has to come out of real life, not the other way around.
Mythology wasn’t some trick someone invented to move us. It came out of the guts of man.
And myths are related on an emotional level. They’re not strictly intellectual programs.”
The presence that looms over Shepard’s recent work—and, one would surmise, over his
life—is that of his father. Samuel Shepard Rogers died in 1983 when he was hit by a car
near his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His death left forever unresolved the influential
and often volatile relationship with his son. Their torturous bond permeates [much of
Shepard’s work]. . . .
Sam Shepard’s . . . “old man” was a . . . complicated character. A World War ii flyer . . .
he attended college on the gi Bill, read Lorca, Neruda, and Vallejo, taught high school
geography and Spanish, and studied at the University of Bogota on a Fulbright scholarship. He could be a beguiling teacher at school and storyteller at home. He also was an
alcoholic, a father who fought bitterly with his son, a husband who frequently vanished
from his family.
“It was hit and miss, always hit and miss,” Shepard’s sister, Roxanne Rogers, remembers of the relationship between the playwright and his father. “There was always a kind
of facing off between them and it was Sam who got the bad end of that. It was Dad who
always set up if it was on or off. Dad was a tricky character. Because he was a charismatic
guy when he wanted to be—warm, loving, kind of a hoot to be around. And the other side
was like a snapping turtle. With him and Sam it was that male thing. You put two virile
men in a room and they’re going to test each other. It’s like two pit bulls. And that’s not
just our family. It’s been like this for 2,000 years.”
Shepard left home at 19. “There was this big fight with my old man,” he recalled in a
recent Newsweek interview, “and at that point I fled. And I thought, well, I’m just going to
have to start over, pretend I don’t even have a family.” Rogers remembers that their mother,
Jane, was sure Shepard would succeed as a writer, but that their father remained skeptical.
He saw only one of his son’s plays, and the occasion typified the picaresque and pathetic
nature of his life.
“Once there was a production of Buried Child in Santa Fe,” Shepard said, “and my Dad
took it upon himself to go, and he was rolling drunk and started talking to the characters
and stood up and made all this noise. He definitely struck up a relationship with the production. When the audience finally found out he was my old man, everyone stood up and
gave him a standing ovation. He was in a state of shock.”
As he became a husband and a father, as he advanced into middle age—he is now
42—Shepard sought reconciliation with his father. Sometimes the effort took the form of


writing, like the speech in Buried Child in which a teen-age boy, Vincent, tells of looking
in the mirror and seeing his face turn into his father’s.
Sometimes it meant father and son going out drinking together. “Yeah, we had bouts
of drinking,” Shepard said. He drew breath, paused. “Strange.” Again, he was quiet for a
moment. “Because it would always veer on that thing of accusation. It would always turn,
inevitably, on this accusation that there was something wrong and it had to do with me.”
Yet Shepard is more elegiac than angry when he talks about his father’s death. “It hasn’t
really clarified anything,” he said. “Nothing’s clearer to me. You spend a lot of time trying
to piece these things together and it still doesn’t make any sense. His death brought this
whole thing to a head, this yearning for some kind of a resolution which could never be.
But at the same time, it was well worth the journey, trying to make some kind of effort to
re-establish things.”
Death and time also have given Shepard some perspective, both as a person and a writer,
on his father. “When you’re younger, that rage is completely misunderstood,” he said. “It
seems personal when you’re a kid. This rage has to do with you somehow. Then as you get
older you see that it had nothing whatsoever to do with you. It had to do with a condition
this man had to carry because of the circumstances of his life, those being World War ii,
the Depression, the poverty of the Midwest farm family. And all these things contributed
to this kind of malaise. Then it becomes much more interesting, when you have some distance on it. Because then you can see here was a man who happened to be my father and
yet he was more than just that.”
One consequence of the turbulent Rogers household, and of Rogers’s death, is that it
made the children hunger for family. “I think it gave us a concrete perspective of what we
had as a family, that it wouldn’t be around forever,” Roxanne Rogers said. “We’ve always
been spread around and kind of carefree in our relations. What happened is we decided to
try to put this family back together.” . . . Shepard lives in Santa Fe with the actress Jessica
Lange, who is now pregnant; before that, he had headed an extended family on a northern
California ranch with his first wife, O-Lan Johnson.
“Sam’s always needed a family,” Roxanne Rogers said. “He’s always needed a base. Even
though it hasn’t always taken the most traditional form.”
A Lie of the Mind has brought Shepard back to New York, his first home away from his
family and the scene of his early triumphs. Here he formed part of a downtown theatrical community that also included the playwright Lanford Wilson and the producer Ellen
Stewart, among others. But for a man who disdains life east of the Mississippi, and cities
in particular, New York stirs little sentimentality. He likens the city to “a kennel” and, asked
how he copes with the congestion, says, “I got a .38. That’s my escape hatch.”
As for his memories of the downtown days, Shepard said: “For the most part, it was a
kind of survival act. I wouldn’t go through it again if I had a choice. When I came here I
was 18 and I didn’t know anything about New York. I had no idea what it was like except
it was some kind of cultural center. At the time I didn’t realize I was a kid. I thought . . .
well, I don’t know what I thought. And now, looking back, I see I was pretty much of a
kid, running around in an overcoat. But there is a mixture of feelings. There’s a sense of
this is where it all started, where I started writing, in this town. So there’s a nostalgia. But
I don’t miss the city, I’ll tell you that.”
More than 20 years after he first arrived in New York, Shepard also faces vastly different
expectations. No longer is he just another aspiring writer, holed up in the East Village; no
longer is he even the off-off Broadway hero whose name meant little uptown and even less
west of the Hudson. Now he is a movie star, gossip column fodder, and arguably the finest
American playwright of his generation.
Yet the surroundings have changed more than the man within them. Shepard sits for
an interview with cowboy boots, jeans, a flannel shirt and a trucker’s thermal vest. His
conversation grows most animated not on the subject of writing but of music. He speaks
knowingly of Lightnin’ Hopkins and Roscoe Holcombe, two favorites; he is up to date
on “Don’t Mess with My Toot-Toot,” the surprise hit from Cajun country. And it sounds
genuine when he professes not to feel the pressure to top, or at least equal, himself.
“I don’t think it’s possible to second-guess the reaction to your work,” he said. “You just
can’t get involved in it. If you do get involved in it, then you try to predetermine things
or calculate things. And I don’t think you can work that way. It just doesn’t seem possible.
My work has always come out almost like a miracle, some kind of strange accident. You
stumble into a certain territory that starts to excite you in a way that’s got to be manifested.
It comes out as a play or a character. But that kind of work cannot be formulated by ‘My
next project is this’ or ‘They’re expecting me to do this.’ Then it gets shot to hell. Because
then it becomes a career. I’m not interested in a career. I don’t want to have a career. I want
to do the work that fascinates me.”
Excerpted from “A Torturous Love Between Father and Son: Sam Shepard’s New Film and New Play Reflect on His Family
Relationships,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 8, 1985. © 1985 Chronicle Publishing Company.
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the shepard frontier
I
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n the plays of Sam Shepard, the cowboy is the reigning male; consequently, any female
is, perforce, marginalized. An image strong enough to arouse political leaders (Hitler
and Stalin both loved cowboys) can tell us something about “the nature of a nation,” to
borrow Petrone’s words in Shepard’s Suicide in B Flat. Shepard himself is fascinated (and
partly seduced?) by the other cowboy’s pre-eminent position in American myths and legends. No other figure so successfully sustains, recycles—and condones—the violence this
country is bred on; a troublesome thought at a time when America, and the world, veer
toward the Apocalypse.
All Shepard characters—rock star, billionaire, or ordinary mortal—are tourists caught
in a world that has undergone a cultural landslide, looking through the debris to find
images of themselves. What they can’t find, they adapt from the storehouse of images
that films, tv, rock, science fiction, etc., provide. If what they find doesn’t suit them, they
unsentimentally steal. Shepard’s plays are full of soul-stealers (Duke in Melodrama Play,
Crow in The Tooth of Crime, the Doctor in Geography of a Horse Dreamer, Cavale in Cowboy
Mouth).
There are several reasons for this resort to underhand—and underworld—tactics. First,
Shepard’s characters have a diminished sense of expectations: life offers little and promises to get worse. Second, naturally suspicious, they ungenerously assume lies, deceit, and
hypocrisy from others. Third, the legitimate and bastard offspring of America’s cowboy,
their jeans, boots, studs, kid gloves, and shades isolate them from the real world as effectively as a medieval knight’s suit of armor. Fourth, most are, in the words of Tympani, the
drummer from Angel City, “locked into the very narrowest part of the dream machine”—
that is, the creative imagination. Their most vivid imaginings circulate in a more or less
closed system that grants mythic splendor to images of the renegade hero who occupied
the precivilized, unsettled landscape of the American frontier.
Florence Falk, “Men without Women: The Shepard Landscape,” in American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard. © 1981
Performing Arts Journal Publications.
S
hepard’s world, however idiosyncratic, is of course America. It is at once a “youth culture” America, full of hot rods and juke boxes, rap sessions and brand names (some of
the characters are irreverently called Kent or Salem or Dodge), and a world always colored
by the evocation of an American past—a highly selective one. For Shepard’s is largely
the America of Buffalo Bill and Andrew Jackson, but surely not that of Henry Adams
or Henry James; the America of medicine shows and covered wagons, revivalist meetings
and rodeos, but hardly of Debs or Sacco and Vanzetti or even of the robber barons of Wall
Street. In short, a thoroughly demotic, folkloric America, the American past more or less
as a Hollywood cliché—but an America, nonetheless, continually illuminated through the
purview of the artist, the artist as tramp or seer. . . .
Much has been said of the deftness of Shepard’s ear, his mastery of “living speech.”
The isolated monologues of his characters, those brilliant, scarifying arias for which he’s
justly famous, are in many cases the equivalent of the prose poem. . . . A feeling for sound,
a feeling for movement—these by themselves, however, might eventually pall, seem marginal or merely opaque. What’s necessary, finally, is an energizing perspective, an element
beyond the purely dramaturgical, a feeling for space. Here Shepard makes his larger,
more personal and metaphorical claims, here his portrait of America, past and present,
assumes consciousness, makes itself known. For whether one is watching a farmhouse, an
office, a motel room, or a hideaway resort, behind everything, incorporating everything, is
Shepard’s irrepressible sense of nomadic drift. . . .
First, then, the hoopla and zeal of the trail, paths open, forever beckoning toward more
distant, more challenging vistas; later, invariably, the solace and consolation of the hearth.
Yet with Shepard neither the trail nor the hearth is ever completely satisfying in itself,
though neither is possible without the other. Each, rather, is part of an indefinable whole,
the “whole” itself being similar to Shepard’s definition of human behavior: “a fractured
whole with bits of character flying off a central theme.” If the family, either in union or
disunion, is the emotional focal point of his world, then the central theme or symbol, the
fibula of his theater, has to be that of the frontier.
Of course every part of America was once a frontier. [Historian Frederick Jackson]
Turner’s diagram of the successive wave-after-wave peopling of the West is famous—the
deerslayer to trek to the unknown, the migrants to settle and work it, the men of capital
to market and control it, and once again Babylon arises in our midst, and once more the
impulse to move still further on, to struggle toward yet another El Dorado mercilessly
takes hold. This diagram (or its Hollywood version) is surely always buried deep somewhere in Shepard’s imagination. “To not be fixed,” he remarked in an interview, is his
creed. “There’s an incredible sense of dissatisfaction,” he added, “when there is no danger.”
Danger, however, like violence, has always been double-edged in American history. If a
desire for a life free of the restrictions of civilization meant glorying in the wonders of a
rugged individualism, it also meant a life in the wilderness full of conflict and mayhem. On
the other hand, if the family shelters, the family also isolates and confines. And if rootedness allows for growth, rootedness also provokes restlessness.

If we look back over the expanse of Shepard’s work—the trash of human loneliness or
human aggression, a feeling for “images that shine,” as he says, “in the middle of junk” (the
billboard culture of America serving him here) or for things that time and again are “blown
away”—we can see in the jocose desolation or stoical amiability, in the interplay of ego
and environment the unstinting vigor and originality of his vision. But also its limitations.
Americans—that is, Americans en masse—have always celebrated their own ignorance.
“The best place to hide something,” Vachel Lindsay once wryly observed of the habits of
his countrymen, “is in a book.” And there’s no doubt that Shepard, with his tall tales and
holy fools, celebrates that national trait.
Robert Mazzocco, “Heading for the Last Roundup,” in The New York Review of Books (May 9, 1985)
x
F
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ood has always been a central image in Shepard’s work, a fascinating and enigmatic
metaphor about the most basic of human desires. What about the corn in Buried
Child? The artichokes in The Curse of the Starving Class? The toast in True West?
Both [Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaikin] laugh. “The artichokes,” Chaikin says, helping put Shepard on the spot.
“It’s about this connection between the human being and the earth,” Shepard says,
slowly and somewhat reluctantly. “You need sustenance to keep going, you know? It’s connected to the notion of hunger. We’re all hungry.”
Spiritual hunger, sexual hunger, physical hunger?
“All hunger.”
—Interview with Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaikin
by Kevin Kelly in the Boston Globe, December 15, 1985
an interview with director peter dubois
about curse of the starving class
April 3, 2008
by margot melcon
margot melcon: have you ever worked on a shepard play before?
peter dubois: No, this is my first one.
have you ever seen a production of
No.
curse of the starving class ?
so, how did you respond to the script, and how familiar were you
with the script before shepard made the changes?
I read the script years ago in college, and it always stuck with me. It was one of three of his
plays (with Buried Child and True West) that really resonated with me over the years. I did
direct a production of Savage Love, the play that Sam wrote with Joseph Chaikin, which is
a series of poems about love, in Prague in 1993. That was one of the first things I directed;
it was the show that really got me some attention in the Czech Republic. It moved to four
different theaters and played almost a year, going into rep in a few different places. So it’s
been 15 years since I encountered Shepard.
what did you think when you started talking to shepard about
the rewrites he was planning to do on CURSE ?
One of the things he said was that he was going to make it funnier, and that made me
nervous because I’ve always found it so funny. I thought he meant jokes, but he didn’t. He
made the situations more absurd and more extreme, and in doing so, made it much funnier.
The comedy of the play doesn’t leap out at you on the page. It’s when the alchemy of all
the different elements gets pulled together that the comedy really emerges and really plays.
The grimness and the bleakness of the story are apparent on the page, but the comedy
really comes alive when the actors hit the stage. Mining that is one of the great, surprising
things about working on this production.

how do you work with the cast on balancing that level of comedy
with the dark underbelly that exists in the play?
We go after the most essential emotional truth of any given moment. Because these actors
are who they are, in digging through the play that way a lot of what is funny and what is
tragic is in the same moment, so if the moment is played truthfully they never have to try
to make anything funny. They just go after the essential emotional truth and they don’t
exaggerate it or overplay it or melodramatize it. When you go at it truthfully the comedy
just pops out.
you have said that one of the things you like about shepard is
that he finds the extraordinary in ordinary situations. in terms
of the style of the piece, how real do you think it is, and at what
point, if any, in the play does it cross the line outside of realism?
Sam stretches the rubber band without snapping it. He takes the real situation and he
stretches it so tight that it’s right about to break but it doesn’t. I’m treating the play in a
very real way. There are just a handful of moments that dip toward something surreal that
we’re consciously building into the play, which I feel Sam built into the language. These
things are happening in real time to real people, and the alchemy of these different events
happening at the same time is actually what gives the play its metaphysical quality. We
haven’t really had to stylize things to make that happen.

can you give an example of one of those moments?
One of the moments that rides the line between the real and the surreal—and tips more
toward the surreal—is Wesley’s recounting of the night before, when his father arrives
drunk, and he’s lying in bed playing pretend with his airplanes and it takes him into the
reality of his father’s coming home. But there are other moments that have an equal kind of
magic, like the mother eating while the son is urinating in the kitchen on his sister’s charts
while his sister is out in the yard screaming and having a fit. It’s this magical combination
of elements that makes the situation something metaphysical. I would say another one is
when the old man is passed out on the kitchen table, and the mother and son are having
an argument about the mother going off with the lawyer, and then the owner of the Alibi
Club shows up decked out in his impresario western gear. Sam’s put all of these things
together that, on their own, seem quite normal, but when they get in relationship to one
another they become really magical.
the language is so poetic—not heightened, but something more
than everyday speak. how does language play into all of this?
There is a musicality to it. What becomes important is that the actors not fall into the
rhythm, that they fill the words out with the emotional truth of the moment and ride that
line between honest, truthful acting and the rhythm of the poetics of the language. If the
honest truthful acting gets too big, then the poetics get stepped on, but if the poetics get
too big, it seems too stylized and the language doesn’t become as alive as it could be if it’s
fully acted. It’s coming at it from both ends.
it sounds like a balancing act.
When we were doing auditions, it was fascinating, because Shepard is like Shakespeare
in the sense that actors can either speak it or they can’t. It’s either in their mouths and in
their bodies, or it’s not. You can have an amazing actor pick up Shepard and just not be
able to do it because the music isn’t in his mouth. Then you have other actors that you may
overlook in other situations, but they get the Shepard in their mouths, and it’s incredible.
shepard has said in earlier interviews that the play is largely
based on his own family. do you think there are larger universal
truths about the american family that he’s addressing?
I think the play is clearly a deeply personal one, and the story is a deeply personal story. At
the same time, he’s telling a larger American story that goes back to Appalachia and the
Celtic people that were brought over in large part to kill the Native Americans, and the
tradition of Celtic-influenced bluegrass music was born. From this country’s earliest roots,
it’s been about this big American Dream of the icebox on the porch and home ownership
and barbeques, and that dream has been built on the back of war. The men that fight the
war come back and they don’t know what to do with that pain and they drink and that
turns into violence and the culture pushes us to buy and consume and go into debt. When
this brew of the ambition of the American Dream and the soldier who has experienced a
deep psychic trauma come together, and alcohol is thrown into the mix, that traditional
beautiful 1950s-style vision just blows up. I do feel that is one of the things that Sam does
with this play: he puts dynamite under the post–World War ii vision of America that
emerged in the ‘50s. He just blows it up and calls it bullshit. That’s the larger truth of the
play, calling out the postwar vision of the beauty and simplicity of this country and the
opportunities for the nuclear family.

is that what the “curse” refers to?
The curse has a lot of implications. Part of the curse very much refers to this invisible force
that is bigger than government that blows through history and sucks people into it, and
once they’re sucked into it, they can’t break free of it. It’s in the blood. It’s in the air. It’s
fate. It’s what our behavior accumulates into, and in the play, it’s this thing that becomes
larger than the characters executing that behavior.
can you talk a little bit about how relevant those themes still
are today?
I would say that when audiences watch this show written about a family in the mid 1960s,
that they will recognize the current state of America as if the play was written a month
ago.
have you set time and place for this production?
We’ve been targeting 1965, after the Kennedy assassination but before the Summer of
Love. [In the town of ] Duarte, in southern central California. The population in Duarte
is a combination of people from Oklahoma and Appalachia, and then a large black and
Mexican population. We’ve been imagining this house and this property slowly being surrounded by a more suburban, sprawling American thing.

what are you doing with the music for the show?
[Sound designer] Fabian [Obispo] is researching Irish and Scottish music, Celtic in influence, the music that would have been the forebear of bluegrass, and listening to bluegrass
to find a weave of these two sounds, which I think are at the root of this story. Weston is
Scots-Irish, and we’re really excited about going into those roots. Sam is a terrific bluegrass musician, and he gave me the ethno-musicology trip of how bluegrass came into the
country, so I thought that would be a great sound for this.
is it found music, or is he composing?
We’re not sure yet. He was just here last week and started the research. And then I think
the sounds of the play—the dog barking, the Packard car, the peacocks, and the refrigerator humming—also add to the surrealism and the magic of the world. I don’t know yet
how much we’ll bring those sounds in.
can you talk about working with this group of actors, especially
with pamela reed and her past experience with the show?
It’s great that Pamela has this experience of playing Emma, and now she’s playing Ella. It’s
an incredible journey for her, and she’s the most amazing resource we can have, because
she’s told this story before. She’s been inside the rhythms of these characters before. It’s
not that there is only one way of telling it, but when you’ve got someone in the room who
has walked the path before, it’s a really great thing. Seeing her discover the character on
her own for herself is amazing. What I love about these actors uniformly is that they have
an incredible approach to the language. They understand the language and the music in
the language. They’re red-meat actors. They’re hungry, carnivorous actors and they get
into the play and they get into the rehearsal room and they challenge one another and
they challenge the play and they challenge me, and we’re all in there saying, “No, look over
here, the moment is over here.” Everyone is really respectful but really passionate about
the scenes maximizing their value. It’s nice getting used to the rhythms of how everyone
else rehearses; with some actors, I’ll give a note and they’ll go right to the place where the
note was and start working. I think the family of actors here in the Bay Area—the only
other place that has this kind of actors outside of New York is Chicago—has a quality that
is totally unique, and I find that really exciting.
where would you like all these elements to arrive?
I don’t want to say it, because I don’t want to kill it. It wants to come to a unified telling
of the story, but I cannot predict what that alchemy is going to lead to. I can only take
the steps toward it that I think are right. With these actors, the play is emerging in ways
I didn’t know it could. It’s hard to predict where it’s going to go, but I do know that what
I’m trying to do is shape a process to get it to the “there” that it wants to be at, and that
it doesn’t happen too early and it doesn’t happen too late. That’s the big challenge. And
then making sure we have the time to make the technical elements support and expand
and enhance the elements that the actors are finding.

a interview with actor pamela reed about
curse of the starving class
April 3, 2008
by margot melcon
margot melcon: i’d like to first ask you a couple of things about
your background. where were you in your acting career when you
played the role of ella in the public theater’s premiere production of curse of the starving class in 1978?
pamela reed: Curse was my first play at the Public. I auditioned for Joe [Papp] with
Ebbe Roe Smith, who was already going to play Wesley. I remember when that audition
was over and he gave me the job on the spot, I threw my arms around him and said, “I’ll
always remember this day.” And he said, “I think I will, too.” And that began our working
together. We commenced rehearsals shortly thereafter. It was a wonderful experience.
were you classically trained?
Yes, the University of Washington at that time was one of the classical training programs
in the United States. I did do Helena in All’s Well for Joe in Central Park, but the rest of
my career in New York has been all new playwrights. Which I love.

this play was a pretty big departure for shepard, writing in a
more realistic style and closer to home, about family, than he did
in his earlier plays. did you have any trepidation about shepard’s
reputation for being somewhat experimental?
No. I’m an actor. You want as much variety in your life as you can get. It’s Sam Shepard!
His writing is brilliant. He’s one of the great American playwrights of the 20th and 21st
centuries, and it’s an honor. Period.
was shepard part of the process at all?
No. I premiered two of Shepard’s plays in New York and never met him. The reason I
never met him was because he said he was afraid of flying and he didn’t want to come
back to New York. So when do I meet him? When we’re doing The Right Stuff together
and he’s playing Chuck Yeager. The irony was not missed by me. We became friends then.
Now I’m doing a piece of his again, and let’s see if he comes back to San Francisco. We’ll
see. It’d be very nice if he and Jessica came to see this production.
i’ve read in several interviews that he doesn’t fly.
Chuck got him up. Chuck Yeager got him up in a plane. He took me up, too.
did you break the sound barrier?
He asked me if I wanted to go for a plane ride. I said, “With you?” “Yeah.” He took me up
in his plane, what’s it called, a Mustang? A Maverick? Anyway, when we were up there he
said, “Hey, Pammy, you want to do a little trick?” I said, “Okay,” and he dropped the plane
really fast and we kind of went to zero gs for a minute. I’m not a roller coaster girl, but,
you know, you feel like you’re in good hands with Chuck Yeager and I can go to my grave
saying, “I flew with Chuck Yeager.” Pretty damn cool.
what do you remember about the original production of curse in
new york?
The play was well received. I don’t really remember much about all that. I never kept any of
the reviews or anything like that. The only thing I kept from that play was my belt. I still
have it and I brought it to San Francisco with me. It was so thrilling to be in that theater.
I was telling the cast members that my favorite preparation for a role was for Emma. The
first play that I saw in New York after I graduated from University of Washington, I was
snuck into the Newman Theater at the Public, and I saw a workshop of a new musical
called A Chorus Line. In this little 350-seat theater, they blew the roof off. It was mind
and body chilling. It was such a gorgeous, stunning, absolutely breathtaking experience.
It was beautiful, so exciting. I buzzed out of there thinking, “Oh my god, I’ve arrived in
New York!” And then three years later I found myself stage left at the top of those stairs.
It was empty in the wings. I would listen to the audience laughing, buzzing as they came
in. I could smell the gels on the lights and the play would start and I could hear Olympia
Dukakis and the laughter that ensued from her performance and Ebbe and the smell of
the bacon cooking on the stove. And I was home. I was in the theater. In the same theater
where I saw A Chorus Line, I was working at The Public Theater for Joseph Papp and I
was premiering a Sam Shepard play. I was so clean. And that’s what Emma has to be when
she walks onstage. She is very comfortable in her skin, very clean. I was able to easily start
that every night, just from where I was. It was wonderful.

how old were you?
I turned 29. And Nicole [Lowrance] just turned 29, who’s playing Emma now. I had my
birthday when I was playing Emma back then, and I had my birthday playing Ella, just
yesterday, and celebrated with the cast. My father was w. v. Reed, and his first name was
Wesley, and Emma was my grandmother and my mother’s middle name. I was going
to name my daughter Emma, but at the last minute we chose Lily, which was my other
grandmother’s name. So there’s lots of little things like that.
what do you think of the changes shepard has made to the script?
Oh, I think they’re wonderful. I think he’s made it tighter, made it a little bit cleaner. He’s
added some things and brought even more humor to it. It’s a very funny piece. There are
some beautiful moments, but there are also some very big changes just because it only has
one act break. Those changes aren’t massive amounts of writing, but because of where the
act break is now, you know things that you didn’t know when we did the play the first time.
You weren’t sure. But, now, this time, you do know, and that raises the stakes a great deal.
can you think of an example?
I can’t tell you that, because it’s giving away things that you’ll see in the play.
have you ever done a play more than once, in your career?
No. This is the first time. I wouldn’t want to do a play more than once. Really. I mean,
when you’ve done it, you’ve done it. But now I get to go to the next generation.

how do you think playing emma when you were younger is influencing how you’re playing ella now?
Well, I’m trying to not have it influence me. I had a terrible thing happen after I was
offered the role. I said yes, of course. I’d wanted to play Ella for a long time. But when
I went to my Samuel French [acting edition of the script], which was my original one,
in the library, and I started reading it, it was like putting in a cd. I could hear Olympia’s
voice, James Gammon’s voice, Ebbe Roe’s voice, my own voice, Michael J. Pollard’s voice.
Kenny Walsh. It was ridiculous. I could hear them all like it was yesterday, and it scared
me very much. I told Carey I’d never had an experience like that as an actor. There are
many plays I can think back on where I wouldn’t remember what it sounded like, what the
actors sounded like. But this play is so musical that it’s just turning it on. For the month
before I came up here, I read this play more than I have any other play that I’ve ever done,
because I kept having to read it aloud, again and again and again and again, to try to hear
my voice, because I could only hear Olympia and I didn’t want to channel Olympia, I have
to give my own performance. Her portrayals are so profoundly rich that they are indelible.
We have some things in common, and I’ve completely stolen one of her bits, which is my
homage to Olympia. It’s a bit with the artichokes coming out of the refrigerator, it’s totally
hers. I did not discover it, but it’s hands together, knees down. I’m trying to make my own
way. The music from this company is starting to happen. It’s all really funny. Jack [Willis]
and Jud [Williford] are kicking butt. We’re making our own family now, and I’m hearing
all of that stuff far less. Once in a while I’ll look at Nicole as she stomps around on that
stage and out into the yard—[in the original production] we didn’t see the yard; Santo
Loquasto [the scenic and costume designer for the Public Theater production] built a box
set that was brilliant—but this set allows you to see the outside as well as the inside, so
when she has her big tantrum she gets to stomp all over the place and I’m jealous. I wish
I’d had that! She’s doing some things and I’ll think, “Oh, I didn’t think of that. That’s so
clever. Why didn’t I think of that?” She’s a wonderful, wonderful actress.
it must be almost like watching your own daughter.
She’s becoming my daughter. I have a 13-year-old daughter and a 17-year-old boy. But my
husband is not an alcoholic [laughs].
is your daughter anything like emma?
I would say yes in one aspect, but no, she’s not. But we go at it. She’ll give me the business
like all kids will.
that’s part of being a family.
But we’re really close. Ella’s losing Emma. Emma is leaving throughout the course of the
play, and it’s heartbreaking for Ella, because she doesn’t know how to get her back. I’m on
my daughter Lily like white on rice. She ain’t going anywhere. My daughter has a horse
and rides. A lot of similarities.
it seems like the kind of show where you do turn into a family,
because you have to.
The writing is so . . . What Shepard is talking about, the sale of America and the loss of
the family and the breaking down of what makes us a family, is more profound today than
it was when we first did it. People are more aware of it now. He was a visionary in many
ways. Unfortunately what he’s talking about has become so true. People are losing their
homes. Small family loans. I think the play has real legs. Long, long legs.

i think you’re right, the rewrites do bring everything into focus.
Did you compare [the original script and the new one] back and forth?
we went through both scripts pretty meticulously. one thing
that struck me is how, with a few words, he will bring an idea
that was already present in the play and drop it in earlier, so
that it ’s on your mind earlier.
So it resonates more fully later.
one of the lines he added for ella is something about sacrificing herself for the family; that line really hit me because that
theme of sacrifice and what ella has given up for the family and
what she’s trying to reclaim is so important in the play. the fact
that she now says it right up front, instead of waiting for it to
come up later, is very interesting.
And where the act break falls now, you know Ella spends the night with Taylor. That was
so not the case when we did the play the first time. You didn’t know if they had any relations, but now it’s definite that she’s done this. And I don’t think it was very pleasant. I’ve
decided that it was rather heartbreaking. When she gets dressed to go out to lunch with
him, she’s all atwitter, but she doesn’t know what’s going to happen. And it happens. He
takes full advantage of her and everyone else that comes into contact with him.
the way it ’s structured now makes it hit a little harder.
It’s her last shot of innocence, and she goes out and comes back and it’s gone. Everybody
at the end of this play is so different from where they started. It’s everybody’s story. There
are no frivolous parts of this play.

curse
miscellany
packard
The Packard was a United States–based automobile built by the Packard Motor Car
Company of Detroit, Michigan. The first Packard automobiles were produced in 1899 and
the brand went off the market in 1958. Packard automobiles are highly sought after by collectors today. Bob Hagin summarizes the history of the Packard on The Auto Channel:
The Packard line was spawned from a dissatisfaction experienced by the brothers j. w. and w. d. Packard . . . over the lack of quality and reliability they found
in the Winton auto they bought in 1888. The brothers felt they could improve
on it and . . . a year later they presented the first Packard, a tiller-steered, highwheeled, single-cylinder “horseless carriage.” But it was far more advanced
than most of its competition, and it soon sported a three-speed transmission
that featured a reverse gear. . . . By the early days of the 20th century, the name
Packard was well on its way towards becoming the standard of American automotive quality and perfection. . . . [T]he 1916 introduction of the world’s first
production-line v12 engine (known as the Twin Six) established the Packard
reputation of building big, luxurious automobiles. . . .
Throughout its life span, the Packard retained its reputation for quality.
. . . To stay afloat, the company introduced its “Junior Packard” lines of small
straight-eights (the 120 series) and even a much smaller 110 six-cylinder line,
but the Packard quality was always a constant and the cars always carried
the distinctive and traditional Packard grille. . . . Packard fell on hard times
after World War ii and although it bravely came on line with advanced v8
engines and modern styling, it couldn’t compete with the Big Three: Ford,
General Motors, and Chrysler. Through a supposed life-saving merger with
Studebaker, Packard hoped for resurrection, but it was not to be, and the last
true Packard rolled off its Detroit assembly line in 1956. (Bob Hagin, “History:
Packard at 100,” The Auto Channel, April 16, 1999, http://www.theautochannel
.com/news/writers/bhagin/1999/fs9916.html)
Robert E. Turnquist, in The Packard Story: The Car and the Company, says, “Packard was
more than a car, more than a status symbol; it was part of our American heritage. Packards
were the transportation of the people that made America the complex, highly industrialized society that we know today.” According to Turnquist, the Packard was the high-status

car of the early 20th century, driven by politicians, presidents, stars, and movie moguls, and
appearing in numerous movies. Its quality, supposedly, was equal to its price and status.
kaiser-frazer
The Kaiser-Frazer car company was not as glamorous or as classic as the Packard car
company. Nevertheless, it still made collectible cars, and has an interesting—if fairly
short—history:

Five months after the end of World War ii, Henry Kaiser and Joseph Frazer
responded to America’s pent-up demand for cars with the Waldorf-Astoria
premiere of two new models bearing their names. The crush of interest literally
smashed in the doors to the ballroom. . . . During five days, 156,000 spectators
filed by the prototypes, leaving behind 8,900 signed orders. The lack of a sales
organization, fully engineered designs, or an assembly line capable of producing
cars didn’t stop Kaiser from touting plans to build 13 million automobiles. . . .
Joe Frazer, former president of Willys-Overland and Graham-Paige,
brought ample auto industry expertise to this enterprise. . . . He was a titan in
America’s steel, aluminum, and magnesium industries and was even involved
in health care. But competing against the Big Three automakers resulted in
epic failure for Kaiser and his son Edgar (who replaced Frazer as president in
1949).
Kaiser-Frazer (kf) cars began rolling out of the . . . assembly plant at Willow
Run, Michigan, only seven months after their spectacular New York introduction. . . . [S]trong 1947 and ‘48 sales moved kf to first place among the independent [car companies]. The following year, however, brought a head-on collision
with the Big Three’s first new postwar models. In spite of innovative hatchback
sedans, four-door hardtops, and four-door convertibles, kf sales plunged by 56
percent.
kf’s failure, and eventual abandonment of the car business in 1954, can be
attributed to fixed costs spread over too small a volume, and the $42-per-car
premium the company paid for steel. Ultimately, kf simply misjudged the costs
of competing against the Big Three. (Don Sherman, “A Few Who Failed:
Unsuccessful Automakers,” Automotive Industries, September 2000)
i could hear stock cars squealing down the street.
Originally “stock car” meant any automobile that retained its original factory configuration.
Now, stock cars are used primarily in racing, and the term refers to production-based automobiles that are used for racing (as opposed to racecars built specifically for competition).
tiger rose
Tiger Rose no longer seems to exist in wine or liquor stores, so it was probably a wine of its
time. From a variety of brief mentions, however, we can determine that it was an extremely
inexpensive wine:
In high school, my girlfriends and I sang about wine (but didn’t drink it) in a
convertible, the radio blasting. . . . We were probably warbling about Ripple,
best nursed from a paper bag. Around the same time, there was a secondstring football player caught imbibing in a high school stairwell. The culprit?
Tiger Rose. (Susan Fleming Morgans, editor-in-chief, Mt. Lebanon Magazine,
http://www.mtlebanon.org/DocumentView.asp?did=837)
After school let out in the afternoon, I hung out with my boys in the old
neighborhood. That’s when I started drinking cheap Thunderbird and Tiger
Rose wine, which made me violent and crazy whenever I drank too much.
(Reginald Sinclair Lewis, “Reflections of an Ex-Gang Member,” September 22,
2005, reprinted from Where I’m Writing from: Essays from Pennsylvania’s Death
Row,http://www.reginaldslewis.org/writing/ reflections.html)
I remember her referring to their apartment as distinctly Philadelphian “like
a vin au pays,” she said. In Philadelphia the only vin au pays I remember was
Tiger Rose. At graduate-student wine-and-cheese parties, we used to drink
Almaden Red, which was even worse. (E. Michael Jones, Degenerate Moderns:
Modernity as Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior, Ignatius Press, 1993)
4-h club
According to its official website (http://www.4husa.org/), 4-h is “a community of young
people across America who are learning leadership, citizenship, and life skills.” 4-h is
a youth organization run by the Cooperative Extension System of the United States
Department of Agriculture; it serves more than 6.5 million members in the United States
from ages 5 to 19 in approximately 90,000 clubs (2007). The four hs stand for “Head,
Heart, Hands, and Health.”

The 4-h government website (http://www.national4-hheadquarters.gov) sums up the
history of the program:
4-h didn’t really start in one time or place. It began around the start of the
20th century in the work of several people in different parts of the United
States who were concerned about young people. . . . The seed of the 4-h idea of
practical and “hands-on” learning came from the desire to make public school
education more connected to country life. Early programs tied both public and
private resources together for the purpose of helping rural youth. . . . [R]ural
youth programs [also] became a way to introduce new agriculture technology
to the adults. . . . In 1948, a group of American young people went to Europe,
and a group of Europeans came to the United States on the first International
Farm Youth Exchange. Since then, thousands of young people have participated in 4-h out-of-state trips and international exchanges. 4-h began to
extend into urban areas in the 1950s. . . . Later, the basic 4-h focus became the
personal growth of the member. Life skills development was built into 4-h
projects, activities, and events to help youth become contributing, productive,
self-directed members of society.
disc the orchard once in a while
A discer is a farm implement made of two rows of round metal blades that attach to a tractor. The tractor drags the discer through the soil and it breaks up and cultivates the soil.
b. traven, treasure of the sierra madre
According to the publisher (on www.amazon.com):

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is the literary masterpiece for America’s pop
mythology of the Wild West. A savagely ironic novel, it follows the rugged
adventure of three Americans hunting for gold in the mountains of Mexico
who find themselves caught in a morality tale of greed and betrayal. Originally
published in 1935, the book has captivated millions of readers, including the
director John Huston, who immortalized it in his 1948 film starring Humphrey
Bogart. This is a timeless story that has much to teach us, for, as we all know,
finding the treasure is always secondary to the hunt.
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is the most famous of B. Traven’s novels, but the author
known as “B. Traven,” himself, is a mystery worthy of a novel. The name “B. Traven” was
clearly a pseudonym, but the identity of the person (or persons) behind the pseudonym
is a subject of much speculation and debate. (See “His Widow Reveals Much of Who B.
Traven Really Was,” by Larry Rohter, The New York Times, June 25, 1990.)
weber’s bread wrapper
From the minimal information available on the internet about Weber’s Bread, it appears
to have been an equivalent to Wonder Bread. The Weber’s Bread Company factory was
located in Hyde Park in Los Angeles. Weber’s Bread was also criticized for portraying racist Hispanic stereotypes in its advertisements. (See Weber’s Bread ad on YouTube: http://
www.youtube.com/watch?v-vdfjjhwmlqe.)
jai-alai
From http://www.jai-alai.info:
Jai-alai is a ball game that originated in Spain’s Basque region and is played in
a three-walled court with a hard rubber ball that is caught and thrown with a
cesta-punta, a long, curved wicker basket glove strapped to one arm.
Jai-alai is characterized by its fast playing pace, in which a 125 g ball (or
pelota) covered with parchment skin can travel faster than 180 mph. The ball is
volleyed by players wearing the cesta-punta, which is approximately 63 to 70 cm
long.
The game of jai-alai is popular in countries such as Spain and Mexico
where, in some regions, the game is played in almost every town and city.
international
The International Harvester Company of Chicago was created by the merger of
McCormick Harvesting Machine Company and Deering Harvester Company in 1902.
It manufactured farming equipment, construction equipment, gas turbines, trucks, buses,
etc. In the mid 1980s, International Harvester fell on hard times—primarily because of
the poor agricultural economy of the time—and by 1985 all that remained of the company
were its truck and engine divisions. In 1986 the company changed its name to Navistar
International Corporation. Now, Navistar International manufactures commercial trucks,
diesel engines, school buses, and chassis for motor homes and step vans under a variety of
different brand labels, and diesel engines for pickup trucks, vans, and suvs.

california avocado association
The California Avocado Association—now called the California Avocado Society—is a
California nonprofit organization for avocado growers. From www.avocado.com:
California produces about 90% of the nation’s avocado crop.
San Diego County is the avocado capital of the United States, producing 60%
of all the avocados grown in California.
There are about 7,000 avocado groves in California; the average size is around
ten acres.
A single California avocado tree can produce about 500 avocados (or 200
pounds of fruit) a year, although the average is about 150 avocados and 60
pounds.
There are seven varieties of avocados grown commercially in California, but
the Hass is the most popular, accounting for approximately 95% of the total
crop volume.
About 43% of all u.s. households buy avocados.
Thanks to coastal California’s microclimate, California avocados are available year-round.
Avocados are harvested from November 1 through October 31, on 60,000 acres in southern and central California, between San Luis Obispo and the Mexican border. California
avocados rank among the lowest of all fruits and vegetables for pesticide use.
the cost of living in the united states in 1965
From www.thepeoplehistory.com/1965.html:

Yearly Inflation Rate: 1.59%
Year-End Close Dow Jones Industrial Average: 969
Average Income Per Year: $6,450
Average Cost of a New House: $13,600
Average Cost of a New Car: $2,650
Gallon of Gas: 31 cents
Loaf of Bread 21 cents
questions to consider
1. Do you find yourself sympathizing with any of the characters? Does your sympathy shift
at different points from one character to another? Which character do you like the least?
Who is the protagonist? Who is the antagonist? How can you tell?
2. What is “the starving class”? Is anyone in the play a member of the “starving class”?
What is the significance of food (or lack thereof ) in this play?
3. What is the “curse” Shepard is referring to in the title of the play? What do you think
of the relationship between father and son in this play? How are Wesley and Weston the
same? How are they different? What about the relationship between mother and daughter? Mother and son? What does Emma mean when she refers to their family having
“nitroglycerin in the blood”?
4. What do you think of Ella and Weston’s relationship? Is Ella unreasonable in trying to
sell the farm and get away? What other options does she have? What would you do under
these circumstances?
5. Each of the characters in the play at some point talks about escaping their circumstances
(Ella to Europe; Wesley to Alaska; Emma to Mexico; Weston to Mexico at the end of the
play). Why are they so desperate to leave? What are they escaping from? What about their
lives will change if they leave the farm?
6. What is the significance of the door in Curse of the Starving Class? What is important
about keeping outside and inside separate? How does that relate to infection and disease?
What do you think of the diseased lamb being brought indoors?
7. What do you think of Mr. Taylor? How does his arrival affect the family?
8. What do you think of the design for this production of Curse of the Starving Class?
How do the design elements (sets, costumes, lighting, sound) affect your perception of the
story? If you were designing a production of this play, how would your design be different?
Why?
9. Do you think the play is realistic? If not, at what point does it no longer seem real?
10. Curse of the Starving Class has been described as “exposing the dark underbelly of the
American Dream.” In what ways does Curse of the Starving Class explore the idea of “the
American Dream”? What do you think Shepard is saying about America?
11. In the play, Weston says:
See, I always figured on the future. I banked on it. I was banking on it getting
better. It couldn’t get worse, so I figured it’d just get better. I figured that’s why
everyone wants you to buy things. . . . They wouldn’t be so generous if they
didn’t figure you had it comin’ in. At some point it had to be comin’ in. So I
went along with it. Why not borrow if you know it’s coming in. Why not make
a touch here and there. They all want you to borrow anyhow. . . . The whole
thing’s geared to invisible money. You never hear the sound of change anymore.
It’s all plastic shuffling back and forth. It’s all in everybody’s heads. So I figured
if that’s the case, why not take advantage of it? Why not go in debt for a few
grand if all it is is numbers? If it’s all an idea and nothing’s really there, why not
take advantage? So I went along with it, that’s all. I just played ball.
What is he talking about? The play was originally written in 1978. Does anything about
Weston’s speech resonate with the financial climate today? What is still true about debt
and the American Dream today?
12. What is the significance of Weston’s eagle story? What might the eagle symbolize or
represent? What might the cat symbolize or represent?

for further information . . .
Almereyda, Michael. This So-Called Disaster. dvd. Metro Goldwyn Meyer, 2004.
Bottoms, Stephen J. The Theatre of Sam Shepard: States of Crisis. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998.
Chaikin, Joseph. Joseph Chaikin & Sam Shepard: Letters and Texts, 1972–1984. Edited by
Barry Daniels. New York: New American Library, 1989.
Coe, Robert. “The Saga of Sam Shepard.” The New York Times Magazine, November 23,
1980.
Cott, Jonathan. “Sam Shepard.” Rolling Stone, December 18, 1986.
Coymoon. Sam Shepard. http://www.sam-shepard.com/index.html.
Grant, Gary M. The Sam Shepard Web Site. http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/
theatre_dance/shepard/shepard.html.
Marranca, Bonnie, ed. American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard. New York:
Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1981.
Mazzocco, Robert. “Heading for the Last Roundup.” The New York Review of Books, May
9, 1985.
Mottram, Ron. Inner Landscapes: The Theater of Sam Shepard. Columbia, mo: University of
Missouri Press, 1984.
npr. “Playwright, Actor, and Director Sam Shepard.” Fresh Air, December 13, 2002. http://
www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyid=876897.
Parker, Dorothy, ed. Essays on Modern American Drama: Williams, Miller, Albee, and Shepard.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987.
Roudané, Matthew, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard. Cambridge, uk; New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Shepard, Sam. Cruising Paradise: Tales by Sam Shepard. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.
———. Curse of the Starving Class: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Dramatists Play
Service, 1976.
———. Great Dream of Heaven: Stories. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.
———. Motel Chronicles. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1982.

———. Seven Plays. New York: Bantam Books, 1981.
Shewey, Don. Sam Shepard. New York: Da Capo Press, 1997.
Taav, Michael. A Body across the Map: The Father-Son Plays of Sam Shepard. New York: P.
Lang, 2000.
Tucker, Martin. Sam Shepard. New York: Continuum, 1992.
VerMeulen, Michael. “Sam Shepard: Yes, Yes, Yes.” Esquire, February 1980.
Wilcox, Leonard, ed. Rereading Shepard: Contemporary Critical Essays on the Plays of Sam
Shepard. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993.
pbs. “Sam Shepard: Stalking Himself / True West.” Great Performances: Drama at a
Glance. www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/shows/samshepard.html. Web companion to the show
that originally aired on July 8, 1998.
