Conversations with Sam Shepard

By Jackson R. Bryer and Robert M. Dowling

A prolific playwright, Sam Shepard (1943–2017) wrote fifty-six produced plays, for which he won many awards, including a Pulitzer Prize. He was also a compelling, Oscar-nominated film actor, appearing in scores of films. Shepard also published eight books of prose and poetry and was a director (directing the premiere productions of ten of his plays as well as two films); a musician (a drummer in three rock bands); a horseman; and a plain-spoken intellectual. The famously private Shepard gave a significant number of interviews over the course of his public life, and the interviewers who respected his boundaries found him to be generous with his time and forthcoming on a wide range of topics.

The selected interviews in Conversations with Sam Shepard begin in 1969 when Shepard, already a multiple Obie winner, was twenty-six and end in 2016, eighteen months before his death from complications of ALS at age seventy-three. In the interim, the voice, the writer, and the man evolved, but there are themes that echo throughout these conversations: the indelibility of family; his respect for stage acting versus what he saw as far easier film acting; and the importance of music to his work. He also speaks candidly of his youth in California, his early days as a playwright in New York City, his professionally formative time in London, his interests and influences, the mythology of the American Dream, his own plays, and more. In Conversations with Sam Shepard, the playwright reveals himself in his own words.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Sep 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781496837110

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Sam Shepard: Writer on the Way Up

Mel Gussow / 1969

From New York Times, November 12, 1969, p. 42. © 1969 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under license. Mel Gussow was a theater critic for the New York Times for 35 years. He is the author of Don’t Say Yes Until I Finish Talking: A Biography of Darryl F. Zanuck (1971), Theater on the Edge: New Visions, New Voices (1998), Edward Albee: A Singular Journey (1999), and Gambon: A Life in Acting (2005).

For five years, young Sam Shepard—he just turned 26, and got married—has been the most prolific and prominent playwright in the underground theater.

Only rarely has he surfaced even to Off-Broadway, but in the coming months he will be all over the place.

The Unseen Hand, directed by the author, opens the second week of December at Café La MaMa. Two of his one-acters, Back Bog Beast Bait and Forensic & the Navigators, are scheduled for Off-Broadway in mid-January. He is the co-author of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, which opens in mid-December.

Most important of all, his full-length play Operation Sidewinder will mark the climax in March of the Lincoln Center season of American plays.

If up to now the commercial theater has been blissfully unaware of Mr. Shepard, he in turn has cherished his invisibility. I prefer it that way, he said last week. It’s like the primitive feeling that if they take your photograph, your soul gets stolen. When someone’s work becomes popular, you lose something.

At least once before he was in danger of success. Several seasons ago he barred critics from seeing his La Turista. But Elizabeth Hardwick, the critic, saw it, and proclaimed it a work of superlative interest. I didn’t think it was a finished thing, says Mr. Shepard, and after a limited run, he coolly packed the play away.

Mr. Shepard, a lanky, loping figure, with the handsomeness and the style of a movie cowboy hero, was born in Fort Sheridan, Ill. In New York at 18, he looked for work as an actor, and took a job as a busboy at the Village Gate and began writing plays.

He never stopped writing, batting out more than 100 plays, some in less than a week. They were done throughout Off-Off-Broadway, many at Theater Genesis in St. Mark’s in the Bowery, and by theater groups around the country. To support his non-commercial art, he has had to live on foundation fellowships and, this season, on income from his contribution (a slice of one [of] his plays) to Oh! Calcutta! For it, he is paid $68 a week.

Besides writing plays, his major interest is rock music. Recently he played drums and guitar with a group called the Holy Modal Rounders, whom he has written into Operation Sidewinder. In music, he said, what’s commercial is what’s really good—such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. (He has written a movie for the Stones called Maxagasm.)

In the theater, as he sees it, quite the opposite is true. He hardly ever visits Broadway, and in fact, has never seen a play at Lincoln Center. I couldn’t bring myself to go up there, he said. It’s a total bourgeois scene.

He is allowing his play to be done up there with many hesitations. The main reason is because no one can really afford to do it any place else.

Sidewinder is a sprawling, highly plotted play that involves a snakelike computer, militant blacks, hawkish generals and flying saucers, all of which he believes in. It’s impossible to stage in a poverty situation, he said. Forty actors! My idea was to write a movie for the stage.

As Mr. Shepard sees it, he is now writing a very different kind of play. For one thing, he is writing slower.

You get a certain spontaneous freaky thing if you write real fast. You don’t get anything heavy unless you spend real time. About his early fast plays, he said, They’re kind of facile. Now I’m dealing more with mythic characters, a combination of science fiction, Westerns and television.

In Sidewinder the snaky computer wanders all over the desert, and one of the strange wonders it performs is to strangle and rape a girl.

How will it be done on stage? The computer does its thing, said Mr. Shepard calmly, and the girl helps it.

On Sunday, Mr. Shepard married O-Lan Johnson, an actress, at St. Mark’s in the Bowery (in a double ceremony with Walter Hadler and Georgia Lee Phillips).

In a broken world and a polluted land, began the Rev. Michael Allen, nothing could be more beautiful than a marriage.

After poetry and folk songs, Mr. Allen asked: Who gives these people to be married to each other? and the congregation, gayly dressed in antique finery, roared happily: We do!

Sam Shepard: Metaphors, Mad Dogs, and Old Time Cowboys

TQ Editors and Kenneth Chubb / 1974

From Theatre Quarterly 4 (August–October 1974): 3–16. Copyright © 1974 TQ Publications. Reprinted with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.

A one-time prodigy of Off-Broadway who lives in London and wrote his most distinctive American plays in Shepherd’s Bush, Sam Shepard has absorbed, during a prolific playwriting career, the accumulative influences of early years in the rich but rootless society of southern California, a period of peak creativity on the Lower East Side—and such untrendy aspects of life in his adopted city as dog racing and draft Guinness. No less than six productions of his plays have been seen in London in the past year, one of the most recent being the first he has himself directed—Geography of a Horse Dreamer at the Royal Court. For this interview, the Editors of TQ were joined by Kenneth Chubb, director of the Wakefield Tricycle Company, who writes on the problems of directing Shepard’s plays later in this issue. An intuitive craftsman, Sam Shepard talks more readily about the experiences that have shaped his work than of the work itself, though he is frank in discussing the lessons he has learned from his directing experience, and the problems of shaping a dramatic idiom that will retain the startling freshness of his best work while remaining accessible to actors. Full descriptive, critical and bibliographic analysis of Sam Shepard’s work is available for the first time in the detailed checklist published in the current issue of TQ’s companion quarterly, THEATREFACTS.

Interviewer: Born 5 November 1943 at Fort Sheridan, Illinois, say my notes….

Sam Shepard: They weren’t kidding, it was a real fort, where army mothers had their babies. My father was in Italy then, I think, and we moved around, oh, to Rapid City, South Dakota, to Utah, to Florida—then to the Mariana Islands in the South Pacific, where we lived on Guam. There were three of us children.

Interviewer: Do you remember much about living on Guam?

Shepard: I remember the tin-roofed huts that we lived in, because it used to rain there a lot, and the rain would make this incredible sound on the tin roof. Also there were a lot of Japanese on the island, who had been forced back into living in the caves, and they would come down and steal clothes off the clothes-lines, and food and stuff. All the women were issued with army Lugers, and I remember my mother shooting at them. At that time everyone referred to oriental people or to Filipino people as gooks, and it wasn’t until the Vietnam War that I realized that gook was a derogatory term—it had just been part of the army jargon, all the kids called them gooks too.

Interviewer: You were in Guam until your father left the army?

Shepard: Yeah, then we went to live with my aunt in South Pasadena, California—she somehow had some money through my mother’s family, so we had a place to stay. But then we found a house of our own in South Pasadena, and I started going to high school.

Interviewer: What were your parents doing then?

Shepard: My dad was still trying to get his degree, after the interruptions of the army, and he had to work for his Bachelors by going to night school. But my mother already had this qualification for teaching kids, so they were working it out with jobs. He was very strict, my father, very aware of the need for discipline, so-called, very into studying and all that kind of stuff. I couldn’t stand it—the whole thing of writing in notebooks, it was really like being jailed.

Interviewer: But you did share your father’s liking for music?

Shepard: Yes, he used to listen to Dixieland music while he was studying, and he had this band—it wasn’t really professional, more of a hobby, though they got paid for it. But he was a drummer, and that’s how I learned to play, just banging on his set of drums. And then I started getting better than him.

Interviewer: What was the town like?

Shepard: Oh, one of these white, middle-class, insulated communities—not all that rich, but very proud of the municipal swimming plunge and the ice-skating rink, and all that small-town-America type stuff.

Interviewer: Did you have many friends?

Shepard: Yeah, I did. I had one good friend, Ernie Ernshaw—the first guy I started smoking cigarettes with. Later he joined the navy, and I went back to see him about ten years afterwards, and he’d turned into this Hollywood slick-guy with tight pants and a big fancy hair-do. It was fantastic.

Interviewer: But you left South Pasadena—when you were how old?

Shepard: About 11 or 12, something like that. We moved to this avocado ranch, it was a real nice place actually. It was like a little greenhouse that had been converted into a house, and it had livestock and horses and chickens and stuff like that. Plus about 65 avocado trees.

Interviewer: You worked on the farm?

Shepard: Yeah. You can’t depend on the rain in California like you do here, so we had to rig up an irrigation system which had to be operated every day. And we had this little Wisconsin tractor with a spring-tooth harrow and a disc, and I made some money driving that for other people in the neighborhood—there were a lot of citrus groves.

Interviewer: Did you like the change from small-town life?

Shepard: I really liked being in contact with animals and the whole agricultural thing, but it was a bit of a shock leaving the friends I’d made. It was a funny community, divided into three very distinct social groups. There were the very wealthy people, who had ranches up in the mountains with white-faced Hereford cattle roaming around, and swimming pools and Cadillacs. And then you’d get these very straight middle-class communities, people who sold encyclopedias and stuff like that. It was the first place where I understood what it meant to be born on the wrong side of the tracks, because the railroad tracks cut right down through the middle of this place: and below the tracks were the blacks and Mexicans.

Interviewer: Did this create tensions in school?

Shepard: Oh yeah, there were a lot of anxieties. There were these Mexican guys who used to have tattoos and stuff, and I remember the incredible terror of looking into their eyes for even a flash of a second, because without knowing anything previously about the racial thing, just by looking at these guys you knew that you didn’t have anything to do with them, and they didn’t have anything to do with you. And that they wanted it to stay that way.

Interviewer: Were you a 97-pound weakling or a tough guy?

Shepard: I had a few fist-fights but I wouldn’t say that I was a tough guy. I didn’t grow until I was about 17 or 18, though, I was about five foot six.

Interviewer: Popular?

Shepard: I found that the friends I had were these sort of strange guys. There was one guy who was from British Columbia—the one I wrote about in Tooth of Crime. He’d just come down from Canada, and he looked exactly like Elvis Presley. He had this incredible black hair-do and flash clothes, which nobody wore in school except for a few Mexicans—the white kids all wore ivy league button-down numbers and loafers. So he was immediately ostracized, but he turned out to be a brilliant student—he didn’t read any books, just got straight A grades. I got to be really good friends with him. And there were a couple of computer freaks, who were working at this aeronautics plant where they build computers for nose-cones. One guy used to bring in paper bags full of amphetamine and Benzedrine from Mexico. I swear to god, those pills—if you took two of them, you were just flying. And these guys would work in the plant on amphetamine, and steal all these parts and sell them. The pay was really good too, and they got something like triple the money if they worked overtime, so they’d buy these incredible cars and go out stealing and looting … all on Benzedrine and amphetamine.

Interviewer: Were they older than you, these guys?

Shepard: Yes, everybody was older than me, because I was born in November, so I was always one year younger than everybody in my class.

Interviewer: But you really just wanted to leave high school as soon as you could?

Shepard: Oh yeah, everybody did. I was thinking that I wanted to be a veterinarian. And I had a chance actually to manage a sheep ranch, but I didn’t take it. I wanted to do something like that, working with animals. I even had the grand champion yearling ram at the Los Angeles County Fair one year. I did. It was a great ram.

Interviewer: Quite a break from this very pastoral sort of prospect, when you decided to go to New York?

Shepard: Yeah. At that time the whole beat generation was the big influence. It was just before the time of acid and the big dope freakout, which was then still very much under cover. We talked about Ferlinghetti and Corso and Kerouac and all those guys, and jazz….

Interviewer: But you weren’t writing yourself?

Shepard: No. I mean, I tried poetry and stuff, but it was pretty bad. But I went to New York with this guy Charles, who was a painter, and really just liked that whole idea of being independent, of being able to do something on your own. I tried to get into the acting scene in New York, though I really very soon dropped out of that. We were living on the Lower East Side, and there were these jazz musicians, Dannie Richmond who played drums, and I got into this really exciting music scene. The world I was living in was the most interesting thing to me, and I thought the best thing I could do maybe would be to write about it, so I started writing plays.

Interviewer: Why plays, rather than novels or poetry?

Shepard: I always liked the idea that plays happened in three dimensions, that here was something that came to life in space rather than in a book. I never liked books or read very much.

Interviewer: Did you write anything before you started getting performed?

Shepard: Well, I’d written one very bad play in California—a sort of Tennessee Williams imitation, about some girl who got raped in a barn and her father getting mad at her or something … I forget. But the first play I wrote in New York was Cowboys.

Interviewer: Cowboys, why cowboys? Cowboys figure largely in lots of your plays….

Shepard: Cowboys are really interesting to me—these guys, most of them really young, about 16 or 17, who decided they didn’t want to have anything to do with the East Coast, with that way of life, and took on this immense country, and didn’t have any real rules. Just moving cattle, from Texas to Kansas City, from the North to the South, or wherever it was.

Interviewer: Why Cowboys No. 2, not just another title?

Shepard: Well, I wrote the original Cowboys, and then I rewrote it and called it No. 2, that’s all. The original is lost now—but, anyway, it got done at St. Mark’s. And that just happened because Charles and me used to run around the streets playing cowboys in New York. We’d both had the experience of growing up in California, in that special kind of environment, and between the two of us there was a kind of camaraderie, in the midst of all these people who were into going to work and riding the buses. In about 1963, anyway—five years or so later it all suddenly broke down.

Interviewer: Had you had much to do with live theater?

Shepard: I hardly knew anything about the theater. I remember once in California I went to this guy’s house who was called a beatnik by everybody in the school because he had a beard and he wore sandals. And we were listening to some jazz or something and he sort of shuffled over to me and threw this book on my lap and said, why don’t you dig this, you know. I started reading this play he gave me, and it was like nothing I’d ever read before—it was Waiting for Godot. And I thought, what’s this guy talking about, what is this? And I read it with a very keen interest, but I didn’t know anything about what it was. I didn’t really have any references for the theater, except for the few plays that I’d acted in. But in a way I think that was better for me, because I didn’t have any idea about how to shape an action into what is seen—so the so-called originality of the early work just comes from ignorance. I just didn’t know.

Interviewer: You were writing very prolifically around those early years.

Shepard: Yeah, there was nothing else to do.

Interviewer: So what were you doing for money?

Shepard: I was working at a place called the Village Gate, which is a big night club. Charles had a job there as a waiter, and he got me a job there too, and later I found out that all the waiters there were either actors or directors or painters or something like that who were out of work. It was a nice place to work because I got to see like the cream of American jazz, night after night for free. Plus I got paid for working there.

Interviewer: It was at night-time so you were free during the day?

Shepard: Right. I worked three nights a week, and got about 50 bucks a week for doing hardly anything, except cleaning up dishes and bringing Nina Simone ice, you know. It was fantastic.

Interviewer: All those early plays give the impression that once you’d got the habit you couldn’t stop….

Shepard: Yeah, I used to write very fast, I mean I wrote Chicago in one day. The stuff would just come out, and I wasn’t really trying to shape it or make it into any big thing.

Interviewer: You wrote without any sort of planning?

Shepard: Yeah. I would have like a picture, and just start from there. A picture of a guy in a bathtub, or of two guys on stage with the sign blinking—you know, things like that.

Interviewer: How important was it to you when your plays started to get performed?

Shepard: It was frightening at first. I can remember defending myself against it mostly. I was really young for one thing, about 19, and I was very uptight about making a whole public thing out of something that you do privately. And I was strongly influenced by Charles—he was very into not selling out, and keeping himself within his own sphere of reference. I felt that by having the play become public, it was almost like giving it away or something. I was really hard to get along with in those days, actually. I would always bitch a lot during rehearsals and break things up….

Interviewer: How did Cowboys first come to get on stage?

Shepard: The head waiter at the Village Gate was a guy named Ralph Cook, and he had been given this church, called St. Mark’s in the Bowery, and he started a theater there called Theater Genesis. He said he was looking for new plays to do, and I said I had one. He came up and he read this play, and two of the waiters at the Village Gate were the actors in it. So it was sort of the Village Gate company. Well, Jerry Talmer from the Post came, and all these guys said it was a bunch of shit, imitated Beckett or something like that. I was ready to pack it in and go back to California. Then Michael Smith from Village Voice came up with this rave review, and people started coming to see it.

Interviewer: Did these early plays change much, between writing and the public performances?

Shepard: The writing didn’t change, I never changed the words. That’s even true now, but, depending on the people you have, the performance changes. I was very lucky to have arrived in New York at that time, though, because the whole Off-Off-Broadway theater was just starting—like Ellen Stewart with her little cafe, and Joe Cino, and the Judson Poets’ Theater and all these places. It was just a lucky accident really that I arrived at the same time as that was all starting. This was before they had all become famous, of course—like Ellen just had this little loft, served hot chocolate and coffee, did these plays.

Interviewer: So how much money did you make from those early plays—not very much?

Shepard: No money. There wasn’t any money at all, until the grants started coming in from Ford and Rockefeller and all these places that were supporting the theaters because of the publicity they started getting. Then they began paying the actors and playwrights—but it wasn’t much, 100 dollars for five weeks’ work or something.

Interviewer: How much did it matter to you that critics like Michael Smith started writing approvingly about your plays?

Shepard: Well, it changes everything you know, from being something that you do in quite a private way to something that you do publicly. Because no matter how much you don’t like the critics, or you don’t want them to pass judgment on what you’re doing, the fact that they’re there reflects the fact that a play’s being done in public. It means that you steadily become aware of people going to see your plays—of audiences. Not just critics, but people.

Interviewer: Did you feel part of this developing Off-Off-Broadway movement?

Shepard: Not in anything to do with stagecraft so much as in the ingredients that go into a play…. On the Lower East Side there was a special sort of culture developing. You were so close to the people who were going to the plays, there was really no difference between you and them—your own experience was their experience, so that you began to develop that consciousness of what was happening…. I mean nobody knew what was happening. But there was a sense that something was going on. People were arriving from Texas and Arkansas in the middle of New York City, and a community was being established. It was a very exciting