Actor and Playwright Sam Shepard
Early Life of Author of "True West", "Far North", "Fool for Love"
A glimpse of the life and work of Sam Shepard as a man, a poet and musician; as well as his imaginative work as an actor, director and playwright for audiences worldwide.
The man who would become a famous American playwright and actor, as well as the screenwriter for such films as Paris, Texas and Zabriskie Point, was born Samuel Shepard Rogers, VII, in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, on November 5, 1943. After military service, the family relocated to rural L A, where he finished high school in 1961, and set aside a notable talent for animal husbandry to join a theater company.
In 1963, as the freewheelin' Bob Dylan sang about "walkin' down the highway with my suitcase in my hand," 19-year-old Steve Rogers was touring one-nighters in churches, playing in the works of British playwright Christopher Fry and others, heading east toward New York City. There he shared a place with high-school friend Charlie Mingus Jr. – son of the talented bassist and jazz composer Charles Mingus – who helped him find work.
At the Village Gate on Bleeker Street he met Ralph Cook, founder of Theater Genesis, which led to the production of two one-act plays, performed at St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery – among the first ever to be produced "Off-Off-Broadway" – and his prolific work thereafter gave heft to a lively movement toward alternative venues, where live theater would become accessible to a wide range of audiences. As Ross Wetzsteon, longtime editor of The Village Voice, wrote "It was a revolutionary moment, as artists in Greenwich Village and in Europe proposed a radically new theater, hands-on and do-it-yourself, more immediate and frank than the polished displays behind the fourth walls of commercial practice." (The Village Voice).
Shepard explains that this is what he values still. "It really gave you a sense of the makeshift quality of theater and the possibilities of doing it anywhere," he stresses. "That's what turned me on most of all. I realized suddenly that anybody can make theater. You don't need to be affiliated with anybody. You just make it with a bunch of people.” (Sam Shepard, p.124)
Sparked early on by a chance encounter with the work of Irish-born playwright Samuel Beckett, Shepard soon established a relationship with Edward Albee, who collaborated with Clinton Wilder and Richard Barr at the Cherry Lane Theatre to produce Shepard's play Up to Thursday, in 1964, featuring a young Harvey Keitel as an Army conscriptee who feigns a heroin addiction to duck military service.
Sam Shepard Reborn
In 1966, Shepard's first full-length play, La Turista was produced; he was drumming with the Holy Modal Rounders and now beginning to incorporate music into his dramatic work. In 1967, La Turista was recognized with an OBIE Award, and he published Five Plays.
Shepard collaborated on the screenplay for – and appeared in – the film Me and My Brother, in 1968; and a year later married actor/composer O-Lan Jones. By 1970, a production of Operation Sidewinder: A Play in Two Acts, had opened to critical acclaim and he and O-Lan and their son, Jesse Mojo, moved to London where five of his plays were produced simultaneously, and where he co-wrote the screenplay for Zabriskie Point, with Michaelangelo Antonioni.
A following article continues Shepherd's biography.
Sources:
- University of Delaware Library, Special Collections Department, Sam Shepard Collection
- Sam Shepard, Beyond the Writing and Acting, by Will Joyner, NY Times, July 8, 1998.
- Sam Shepard by Don Shewey, Da Capo Press (1997 edition).
- "Remembrance of Obies Past," Ross Wetzsteon, The Village Voice, May 10, 2005.
Suggested Other Reading:
- The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard, by Matthew Roudané, Ed.
- The Theatre of Sam Shepard: States of Crisis, by Stephen J. Bottoms (Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama)
- Joseph Chaikin and Sam Shepard: Letters and Texts, 1972 - 1984, by Barry Daniels, Ed. (Dutton, 1989)
- Rolling Thunder Logbook, by Sam Shepard, (Viking Press, 1977).
