Word: sheparded
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LIKE THE PROVERBIAL, little girl who, when she was good was very very good, and when she was had was horrid. Sam Shepard's style spans an unusually wide range of quality. Unlike the little girl, though. Shepard has evolved out of the bad into the good, and if his latest play. True West, is any indicator, he will not return from whence he came...
...Shepard's earlier works are weakened by attempts to universalize uninteresting and generally ludicrous particulars. The characters are two-dimensional, artificial constructions; their conversations are heavy-handed and foolish. Shepard's early tendency toward bald, over stated symbolism has mellowed to produce the subtle, relevant statements of his most recent works, Buried Child and True West...
True West possesses all the qualities that make Sam Shepard one of America's greatest living dramatists--biting humor, pungently realistic characters, emotional appeal, and an arresting, poignantly developed central conflict. The play treats the struggle between civilization and primitivism; more specifically, between an Ivy League-educated Hollywood screenwriter and his brother, a near-illiterate renegade who has just emerged from five months of solitary foraging in the Mojave Desert. Thrown together in their mother's house--she is vacationing in Alaska and her well-behaved son is baby-sitting her plants--the do-good and the no-good brothers...
...does. Austin's larcenous achievement serves as the vehicle for a favorite Shepard effect: the symbolic over-abundance of food-stuffs. In Buried Child vegetables from the backyard garden were heaped on the stage in Rubens-esque quantities. True West serves up toast made in the five toasters Austin steals. These masses of toast represent Austin's hostile offering of his own success in his brother's line of work...
...Shepard at his best is galvanizing. It is impossible not to be affected by the conflict between Lee and Austin. But True West provides more than good dramatic tension, because its symbols endure. After years of trying, of registering heavy-handed, ponderous failures, Shepard has achieved a style that hits its mark. The West may be a thing of the past, or--as Shepard believes--it may endure because of the irrepressible nature of human beings. Whether or not the days of sheriffs and gunfights are over, Shepard himself wields a mean gun. His range is long, his sights...