Word: shepards
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Reality Theater and the Suffolk Theater Company, batters us with symbolism and seduces us with humanity. It never fails to provoke, but still comes up short of theatrical mastery. Having garnered an Obie and a Pulitzer (for the recent New York production of Buried Child) in two years, Shepard seems on the verge of his finest work...
...Shepard has the gift of language, which rescues the sledgehammer style of his message. The slang tumbles across the stage like a wild Western river, thoughts as big as the countryside: "You look like forty miles of rough road," says Weston to his son. The frontier reduces life to its primal elements, revealing raw humanity, a force as powerful and perverse as the worthless farm the characters inhabit...
Director Vincent Murphy occasionally falls into the trap of overemphasizing Shepard's already heavy symbolism with a plentitude of baseball, airplane and other "American" images. Like several of his contemporaries--most notably John Guare--Shepard rarely rests content with social realism as a medium for his message. The boldness of his landscape and the near-lunacy of his characters (an extreme to which we all can be driven, he suggests) demand a liberal dose of absurdism which Murphy integrates well into the stream of action. As a result, Shepard's outrageous humor barrels along to the inevitable tragedy...
They sit inconspicuously at the corner of Walker and Shepard Streets, just across from the Quad, two low-slung brick buildings. Are they apartments? offices? passersby will ask. A single metal letter set on each bright orange door gives away the contents: W, K and J, which stands for Wilbur K. Jordan '28, the University official who decided in the late '50s to supplement the Radcliffe education with the practical skills every woman needed--cooking, cleaning, family life--by building some cooperative houses near Radcliffe. These are the Jordan coops...