{"id":130537,"date":"2017-07-31T19:24:56","date_gmt":"2017-07-31T23:24:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=130537"},"modified":"2017-08-02T11:59:36","modified_gmt":"2017-08-02T15:59:36","slug":"r-i-p-sam-shepard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=130537","title":{"rendered":"“Is that a man?” “You damn right it is.” R.I.P. Sam Shepard"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nMaybe you’d have to be a theatre person to really – and I mean really – “grok” what Sam Shepard meant. It’s one thing to be an audience member, listening to his words, experiencing his plays, Fool for Love<\/i>, True West<\/i>, Buried Child<\/i> (etc.), and it’s another thing entirely to be a part of that world, to have to grapple with his plays by actually PLAYING them, or directing them or – as a playwright – trying desperately to get out from under his awesome shadow in order to find your OWN voice, a voice AS indelible as his. You get to know a playwright on an intimate level when you get up in an acting class or a rehearsal studio and say his lines, be those characters, try to work stuff out, get into his dreamspace. Because it is a dreamspace. He is one of the dreamiest of playwrights. The yowls of pain from theatre people today have a particularly personal sound to it, one I share. It was already a bad morning because of the loss of Jeanne Moreau (not to mention the general state of the world: every morning is a bad morning), but Sam Shepard too? He was one of OURS. We grappled with him, loved him, were intimidated by him, NEEDED to work on his stuff … because if you’re an actor, you need to try Shepard, just like you need to try Chekhov, Shakespeare, and Williams.<\/p>\n

I want to share one of my favorite things I’ve read today, from my friend Dan Callahan, actor, writer, theatre folk:<\/p>\n

When I lived in the East Village, I would sometimes see Sam Shepard at Cafe Orlin off Second Avenue and St. Mark’s Place. He was always by himself, and always seated under the Brassai photograph of a man and an ecstatic-looking woman in a booth. Shepard was always reading a book, brow furrowed, unsmiling, very solitary, very romantic in the Eugene O’Neill sense of that word. He wrote many major and very funny plays; they’re tragic plays, but there’s usually a laugh every other line, too. When I saw him, I would often say under my breath, “Why Harry York,” which is what his long-time partner Jessica Lange says to him in the last scene of “Frances” (1982). I liked having my eggs and coffee near him because he was clearly not pleased about anything, and I felt like that was an example. He had our number.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are a couple of famous productions I wish I could go back in time to see. Sam Shepard and Patti Smith in Cowboy Mouth<\/i> is one of them.<\/p>\n

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Many have written gorgeous essays about his film career. His presence as an actor. The indelible mark he made whenever he appeared.<\/p>\n

But the plays … THE PLAYS … <\/p>\n

In that spirit, I want to point you to my pal Isaac Butler’s beautiful essay in Slate, told from a theatre artist’s perspective. The Genius of Sam Shepard Was Relentless, Without a Break<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maybe you’d have to be a theatre person to really – and I mean really – “grok” what Sam Shepard meant. It’s one thing to be an audience member, listening to his words, experiencing his plays, Fool for Love, True … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,23,16,9],"tags":[2491],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130537"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=130537"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130537\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":130557,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130537\/revisions\/130557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=130537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=130537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=130537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}