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Two-act play. Cody is a sleeping psychic for gamblers who
earns his miserable keep while chained to a hotel bed, predicting winners during
fitful snoozes. His jailers are jumpy tough guy Santee and softie sidekick
Beaujo, who pace the hotel room arguing about horse-dreamer productivity
philosophy. They’ve moved the REM operation from the States to the UK and fear
the arrival of their English boss, Fingers. That’s where geography comes in:
When he isn’t channeling an Irish greyhound guru, Cody, who has no clue where he
is, pines for his native Wyoming. |
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First performed at the Royal Court Theater in London on
February 13, 1974. It was directed by Shepard and starred Stephen Rea and Bob
Hoskins.
The first American production was staged at the Yale
Repertory Theater on March 7, 1974. It was directed by David Schweizer.
The first NY production was staged at the Manhattan Theater
on December 4, 1975. It was directed by Jacques Levy.
It was later revived in 1981 at the Ensemble Studio Theater
and in 1985 at La Mama. |
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Yale Performance:
Mel Gussow, NY
Times (03/18/74):
The best way to meet Mr. Shepard is on his own terms
- to relax and enjoy his abrupt changes of mood,
jump-cut action and free-hand humor. His hero, as
usual, is a cowboy... The tale of Cody's mad ride
through the night is the comic geography of the new
Shepard. It is a high-spirited comedy-melodrama that
lashes away at profiteers, bettors and brainwashers.
It ends, as one might expect, with the violent
reassertion of pioneer values - a shootout between
the cowboys and the crooks.
Manhattan Theater performance:
Mel
Gussow, NY Times (12/13/75):
This is one of the author's most accessible works,
but it operates on several levels at once. Cody is
not just a horse dreamer, he is an archtypical
Western hero and he is also the artist who has been
bought and packaged by society. In "Horse Dreamer",
as in his other plays, Mr. Shepard has a passionate,
almost patriotic, longing for a sensibility that has
disappeared. It is not nostalgia, but a search for
forgotten values. That search and his landscape make
Mr. Shepard one of the most indigenously American of
playwrights.
Edith Oliver, The New Yorker magazine (December
22, 1975):
"Geography of a Horse Dreamer," yet one more work of
Sam Shepard's incomparable dramatic imagination,… is
edged with mystery, satire, fantasy, parody, and
tongue-not-quite-in-cheek nostalgia for the Old West
and for old Westerns. In other words, we are in
Shepard country - a poet's country. There is much
action; there is a lot of comedy and suffering, too;
and many thoughts - witty and serious - are
expressed.
Harold Clurman, The Nation, (January 6, 1976):
Shepard is one of the better of our young
free-wheeling playwrights. His writing is
vernacularly colorful, at moments even eloquent; he
possesses an extravagant imagination. There is in
him an old-time American saltiness, a
quasi-mysticism mixed with a present-day
metropolitan vulgarity that manages to be rather
sympathetic. He has little discipline, a certain
wildness is inherent in his dramatic behavior and
very few of his plays hold together. "Geography of a
Horse Dreamer" is not his best work, but there is a
personal authenticity in it.
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