Sam Shepard and the Aesthetics of Performance

E. Creedon

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137527417
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

By concentrating on Sam Shepard's visual aesthetics, Emma Creedon argues that a consideration of Shepard's plays in the context of visual and theoretical Surrealism illuminates our understanding of his experimental approach to drama.

C h a p t e r 1

Surrealism and Sam Shepard’s Early Plays: 1964–1967

ICARUS’S MOTHER (1965) AND THE MANIFESTATION OF ANXIETY

In an interview with Pete Hamill for New York magazine, Shepard described his early one-act plays as coping mechanisms that emerged from the adversities of life experience:

I think of them now as survival kits, in a way. [ . . . ] They were explosions that were coming out of some kind of inner turmoil in me that I didn’t understand at all. There are areas in some of them that are still mysterious to me. I don’t want to make them sound cathartic, because they weren’t. They were just these things that came out of the situation inside me that needed a kind of expression. They were just survival techniques, a means of putting something outside rather than having it all inside.¹

Shepard describes writing as a psychic necessity. He discusses his early works as “explosions” or violent outbursts that were not therapeutic or liberating but rather compulsory exorcisms. Icarus’s Mother, which premiered at Caffe Cino in November 1965, directed by Michael Smith, most explicitly dramatized this. In this play, a displaced anxiety relating to the fear of flying becomes manifest in an absurd, surreal drama concerning a Fourth-of-July celebratory barbeque. Near the beginning, a skywriting plane circles overhead as if reminding the characters of a universe outside of their own, despite their attempts to lure it, the exterior, into their insular worlds:

BILL: Are you his wife, Jill?

JILL: That’s right.

BILL: Then we should tell him, so he doesn’t have to waste any more time.

HOWARD: Come on down! Your wife’s down here!

BILL: Come on down here!

[ . . . ]

JILL: Come here, honey! Here I am! (She waves.)

BILL: Come and get her!

[ . . . ]

FRANK: Come and get your wife, stupid!

[ . . . ]

HOWARD: Come on! Land that thing!²

Indeed, any expression of idiosyncrasy from the collective group is undermined in this play. The other characters dissuade Pat from taking a walk alone by threatening that all the group would have to go looking for her if she got lost, thus all of them would miss the fireworks and they “might all trip and be there on the beach for weeks unconscious” (77). Later on, Jill and Pat attempt to entice and flirt with the pilot with their underwear around their ankles, crouched on the sand as they try to urinate, as though the exposure of their bodies will lure the male pilot to the ground. Meanwhile, Bill and Howard, as though involved in an intricate conspiracy theory, attempt secretly to send smoke signals to the plane and constantly tell lies to divert the attention of their companions. However, in an unnerving occurrence, the pyrotechnical demonstration eventually witnessed is not the celebratory fireworks display anticipated. Bill and Howard inform the girls on their return that Frank had actually witnessed the plane crashing. In an ironic twist, this lie materializes and the recurrent themes of fire and flight in the play merge in a kaleidoscopic combustion as the plane explodes and falls to the ground.

The actor Stephen Rea declared of Shepard’s characters,

The people are all dislocated and strange and unconnected in Sam’s plays. It’s all about this kind of terror—you know: the horror. The horror that’s outside, that undefined outside world. Unseen, unknown terror, suddenly striking. If you don’t understand that about Sam’s plays then you can’t do them.³

Rea identifies a sense of isolation in Shepard’s characters and a fear of an exterior encroaching threatening force. Indeed, Icarus’s Mother encapsulates a paranoid atmosphere and an escalating sense of tension that could, at any moment, come crashing to the ground. The stage directions dictate that a low hedge should frame the action upstage suggesting that the characters are removed from the outside world, somewhat cocooned in their insular worlds. Shepard’s stage directions re-accentuate the notion of an encroaching externality near the end of the play: “There is a tremendous boom offstage, followed in a few seconds by flashes of light onstage changing from orange to blue to yellow and then returning to the dim lighting of before; the flashes should come from directly above them [ . . . ]” (90). Additionally, Shepard stipulates that the noise of a crowd should start faintly near the end of the play and increase substantially in volume toward the climax.⁴ The tension between Pat and Howard also contributes to this sense of increasing paranoia: he shakes her violently, then crosses to her slowly and stands behind her in a menacing invasion of her physical space (80). Howard’s subsequent speech, in which he imagines being in the cockpit of a plane “surrounded by glass and knowing that glass is solid, yet it’s something you can see through at the same time” (80), signals a regression to a childlike state and also alludes to feelings of panic and trepidation:

Then you get kind of dizzy and sick to the tum tum and your heads starts to spin so you clutch the seat with both your hands and close your eyes. [ . . . ] But the sky creeps in out of the corner of each eye and you can’t help but see. You can’t help but want to look. You can’t resist watching it for a second or two or a minute. For just a little bitty while. (80–81)

The ending, made even more sinister by the fact that their fears give birth to reality, works as an apocalyptic reminder of the unpredictability of the external universe and its threat to the individual. Yet it also postulates the potential power of unconscious fears and anxieties, in line with Shepard’s definition of these plays as “explosions that were coming out of some inner turmoil in me” (see the first page of this chapter). The sense of paranoia through imagistic transmission becomes palpable to the audience. Christopher Bigsby uses a painterly analogy to express how Shepard relies on a reciprocal appropriation between the audience and the stage to redefine reality: “The image coheres in the mind of the observer rather than the iconography of the stage. It relies on the reality of an anxiety which transcends the apparently insignificant nature of the action. Shepard becomes almost like a painter [ . . . ].”⁵

Icarus’s Mother ends with a vivid description of the flames of the fighter jet, the clear demarcation of images and the elimination of extraneous characterizing or circumstantial information. In this way it recalls Roy Lichtenstein’s cartoon painting Whaam! (1963) and would thus appear to satisfy John Malkovich’s detection of an “exalted cartoon mythic plane” in Shepard’s work.⁶ In this painting, Lichtenstein depicts a scene from the story “Star Jockey,” which featured in the January/February edition of the comic book All American Men of War in 1962.⁷ In the original story, the World War II pilot, on witnessing the explosion of his adversary’s plane, declares, “The enemy has become a flaming star!”⁸ Lichtenstein juxtaposes the paradoxical fear of annihilation and death with the fantastic glorification of victims of war as charismatic heroes. However, the primary interpretation of the flames of the plane as a “flaming star” in the artwork also relates to the combined images of the plane’s combustion and the fireworks in Icarus’s Mother. Both Lichtenstein and Shepard are parodying the quixotic misconceptions that construe the gruesome, inhuman realities of World War II; both pieces were produced in the 1960s, an era when the threat of conscription, which was exclusive to the American male, was pervasive. Indeed, according to Luther S. Luedtke, on the opening night of Shepard’s first plays The Rock Garden and Cowboys in 1964, the newspaper headlines declared, “PLAN FOR BOMBING OF NORTH VIETNAM REVIVED BY KHANH.”⁹

THE SURREALISTS AND PARANOIAC ACTIVITY

Although Lichtenstein’s painting belongs to Pop Art, he was greatly influenced by the paintings of Salvador Dalí. An exploration of paranoia was a crucial concern to the Surrealists in the second decade of the movement as artists and writers such as Dalí, Lacan, Crevel, and Bataille came to define its stance. Relating back to Icarus’s Mother, the Greek myth of Icarus was employed by Bataille in his denouncement of the “Icarian” aspirations of André Breton and Surrealism in his essay “The ‘Old Mole’ and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme and Surrealist” (1929–1930). Indeed, it was the subsequent German occupation of France in 1940 that brought Surrealism to America in the first place. By this time, Dalí’s emphasis on the paranoiac experience had come to eclipse automatism’s pivotal position within the Surrealist movement in the 1930s.

The imagism of Icarus’s Mother can be considered in light of what Homer and Kahle refer to as Surrealism’s aim to guarantee “[m]aximum impact and a crisis of the object.”¹⁰ In their article on “A Social Adaptation Explanation of the Effects of Surrealism on Advertising,” they define this as realized through

1) isolation (when an object once situated outside its own field is freed of its expected role), 2) modification (some aspect of the object is altered such that a property not normally associated with the object is introduced, or a property normally associated with the object is withdrawn), 3) hybridization (two familiar objects are combined to produce a ‘bewildering one’), 4) a change in scale, position or substance creates incongruity, 5) provocation of accidental encounters, 6) double images, 7) paradox (using intellectual antitheses), 8) conceptual bipolarity (using interpenetrating images where two situations are observed from a single viewpoint, thus modifying spatio-temporal experiences).¹¹

In light of Homer and Kahle’s classification, the image of fire in this play can be interpreted as a malleable object. Shepard isolates the image; physically, a portable barbeque billowing smoke appears in the stage directions at the play’s opening. The image of fire introduced by the barbeque and its intended function—as an instrument for cooking food—is modified as it becomes a means of communicating through smoke signals with the pilot. In terms of hybridization, the image of the fireworks appears as an amalgam of the representation of the barbeque and the foreboding vision of the plane’s combustion, as Howard’s words illustrate: “We’ll be down here on the grass and he’ll be way, way, way up in the air. And somewhere in between the two of us there’ll be a beautiful display of flashing fireworks” (79). The smoke signals from the barbeque, the fireworks, and the flames from the plane, all suggest discrepancies, hyperboles even, of scale. While the action begins on the ground, we are also encouraged to view the characters from the perspective of the pilot and vice versa. Even though the stage setting suggests an almost claustrophobic exterior, Howard’s ensuing speech contains images of “[m]iles and miles of cow pasture and city and town,” widening the diegetic and contextual landscape of the action.¹² The shifting perspectives in scale add to the aesthetic Surrealism of the images described. These images also allude to a sense of omniscient vision, as though the imaginary internal worlds and the actualized reality of the external universe have merged into one: “So your eyes bob back and roll around in their sockets and you see the silver-sleek jet, streamlined for speed, turn itself upside down and lie on its back and swoop up [ . . . ]” (91). Finally, the three images superimpose in Frank’s final monologue, creating “double images,” a “paradox,” and “conceptual bipolarity,” while simultaneously operating as juxtaposed variations or substitutions on the same image. Describing the fireworks, Frank imagistically predicts, “An eruption of froth and smoke and flame blowing itself up over and over again” (91) and

the pilot bobbing in the very center of a ring of fire that’s closing in. His white helmet bobbing up and bobbing down. His hand reaching for his other hand and the fire moves in and covers him up and the line of two hundred bow their heads and moan together with the light in their faces. (92)

The coexisting images of fire in this play can be considered in terms of Dalí’s theory of “paranoiac-critical activity.” The converging themes on combustion relate to the Surrealist artist’s perception o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1.  Surrealism and Sam Shepard’s Early Plays: 1964–1967
• 2.  Myth, Ritual, and a Search for Selfhood: 1969–1972
• 3.  Surrealism and Sam Shepard’s Family Plays: Representing Gender
• 4.  A Comparative Study of Sam Shepard’s Angel City and Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un chien andalou
• 5.  Tongues, Savage/Love, and The War in Heaven: Angel’s Monologue: Joseph Chaikin and Sam Shepard in Collaboration
• 6.  States of Shock and Simpatico: Performances of Waste
• 7.  Conclusion: Through the 1990s and Beyond
• Notes
• Index