Word: sheparded
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...SHEPARD lives in that very rare space between hallucination and vision. It is the place inhabited by all manner of fakes, fakirs, savants, pseudos and seers. It is the testing ground of gullibility and genius, and sometimes these are just the qualities Shepard exhibits. When he tips to one side, he's our best playwright and he has the ability to short circuit the intellect with all the subtlety of a file on the teeth. When he tips in the other direction, his short circuits more resemble the random firing of brain synapses and he is in danger...
...Pablo (Christian Clemenson) come in out of the mainstream and attempt to reconstruct the crime. What follows is a collage of random psychic violence and free association, philosophy and claptrap, all so intricately conceived that to follow it in any sort of literary sense is ridiculous. They talk about Shepard writing in dream language, and the bearded wunderkinds at NYU write introductions to his plays that speak of ritual Indian drug use and the tradition of the shaman--and all of them are full of shit. You can't follow Shepard from word to word, because his transitional sentences...
...full of discordant, funny bits. All of this changes, however, when Randolph gives his theory of the cases--an increasingly bizarre trip through the reaches of what pilots call the envelope--a theory of music, of being, a crypto-musical little speech which marks the real opening of Shepard's floodgates. When Petrone, a neighboring saxophonist (played by Nick Wyse looking for all the world like DeNiro in New York, New York) and Laureen, a neighboring bass player (Grace Shohet), arrive, an inner circle rears its head, signalling the end of the commonplace relationship which have gone thus...
...this is where the play is at its most beautiful. Memory and random images are Shepard's vocabulary and they are used to striking effect as vignette after vignette comes across--from Laureen a meditation on time and appearance, and one of the most haunting speeches Shepard has ever written (which is unfortunately undermined by the music.) Niles and Paulette wander through the music and madness, acting out a ritual exorcism of his personalities, Pable and Louis find themselves sucked further and further in. You can drive a truck twixt the shadow and the reality, Shepard seems to be saying...
January 3, 1956--It was the only mail in my box that Thursday after New Year's. The heavy, white envelope was addressed to me, Janet Pressell, 55A Shepard Street. The engraved return address read...