Word: sheparded
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...BEST MOMENT in Robert Altman's film version of Sam Shepard's play Fool For Love comes when the heartsick cowboy Eddie pops a quarter in a motel room Magic Fingers machine. Sprawled out on an unmade queen-size bed, dressed in faded jeans and a trailworn denim jacket, and nursing a tin of day-old Skoal and a bottle of worm-blessed Mexican tequila, Shepard rides the bed like a rundown rodeo star, and when he throws his girl May a particularly wistful smile, all the humor and pathos of Shepard's writing comes shining clean through...
...Shepard's voice has often seemed querulous or cruelly funny. Even as he was attracting an avid following as perhaps America's foremost active playwright, critics sensed in his plays a compulsive urge toward violence, a lack of compassion, a reveling in the bizarre. His comic scenes made viewers wonder whether he was laughing with or at his characters. His work has shifted from expressionist flights of fancy to a kind of grim, weird naturalism and has tended more and more to portray families as the poisoned wellspring of human evil. He has brought to life the same fumbling, feckless...
Until now. Shepard, 42, last week unveiled A Lie of the Mind, the newest, longest (3 hours 45 minutes) and best of his 40-odd plays. Staged off-Broadway by the playwright, Lie superficially resembles yet another Shepardian slice of life among borderline psychotics of the underclass. It opens with the confession of an uncontrollably jealous man (Harvey Keitel) who has beaten his innocent wife (Amanda Plummer) and left her for dead. Before it is over, characters have been shot, pummeled, enslaved and murdered. Yet the play's real action is a coming to terms with the past...
More than in any other Shepard play, the combat leads to catharsis. It also results in an apparent union, all but unprecedented for him, between two wholly sympathetic characters. And because Shepard has directed the play to be uproarious, it casts new light on all his work. In retrospect, his eerie lowlifes seem more farcical, less perversely heroic. His characters frequently lack a core of conviction. In this tale, some have so little sense of self that they cannot recall whether events happened to them or to someone they knew. Moreover, Shepard characters rarely speak lyrically; he keeps their language...
...Residents of 20 Walker St., 60 Walker St., Shepard House, and 29 Garden St., vote at the Harvard-Epworth Church at 1555 Mass...