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Eward Albee, Village Voice,
November 25, 1965
For those of you who are busy people, facts first,
implications later. (And by facts I mean, of course,
nothing closer to the truth than my opinions.) Sam
Shepard is one of the youngest and most gifted of the
new playwrights working off-Broadway these days. The
signature of his work is its unencumbered
spontaneity—the impression Shepard gives of inventing
drama as a form each time he writes a play. His new
theatre piece, “Icarus’s Mother,” is presently on view
at the Caffe Cino. Sad to say, it gives the impression
of being a mess.
Implications and general ruminations (for those of you
who have the time): The playwright in the United States
doesn’t have a particularly healthy environment to work
in these days; audiences, by and large, think less for
themselves than they might; not all of our theatre
critics are sufficiently informed about the past or
tuned in to the contemporary; the majority of our
serious playwrights find they must do battle with
exterior as well as interior devils; as a society, we
tend to judge quickly and superficially.
The value of off-Broadway and its cafe adjuncts lies not
only in its enthusiasm for sustaining plays without
which the uptown theatre is unreal and preposterous—the
work of Beckett, Genet, Pinter, Claudel, deGhelderode,
for example—but, as well, in offering new, experimental
playwrights (such as Sam Shepard) a proper ambiance in
which to try things out, over-reach, fail and, if they
have the stuff, finally succeed.
If Shepard’s new theatre piece, “Icarus’s Mother,” fails
to please, by which I mean fails to engage one, the
failure is of no importance so long as the piece is
merely one random experiment, one spontaneous throw-off,
one way-stone on the path toward the creation and
recreation of theatre. If, on the other hand, this play
signals, as I have the disquieting suspicion it does,
the beginnings of a premature crystallization of
Shepard’s theatre aesthetic, then the failure of the
play is a good deal more serious.
I have no way of telling you what “Icarus’s Mother” is
about, but, then again, up until now, at any rate, what
Shepard’s plays are about is a great deal less
interesting than how they are about it. His “Up to
Thursday,” for example, was about a boy about to be
drafted, but in that play the resonance, the overtone
was far more interesting and important than the note.
Usually, the sparks which rise and shower in Shepard’s
plays are far more pertinent than the nature of the
stone to which he touches his talent. In “Icarus’s
Mother” though—oddly enough a play in which fireworks
are an important motif—the sparks which rise and shower
seem arbitrary and unmotivated, we are not allowed to
assume we know (or sense, rather) the nature of the
experience, and we are forced to look for the
touchstone, and we cannot find it.
This is the first of Shepard’s plays in which I have
felt he was merely levitating, and it is also, curiously
enough, the first of Shepard’s plays in which I have
felt that he was inhibitedly more concerned with the
note than with the resonances. It is the nature of
Shepard’s art, so far, that while his plays are, of
course, ABOUT something, we must SENSE his intention—his
subject, if you like—and react through intuition. In any
but the most didactic play it is uninvolving to have to
know the nature of the concern at once in order to
participate in the reality of it. In a Sam Shepard play
it is fatal.
Of course, “Icarus’s Mother” may be about nothing at
all. It may be stream of consciousness pure and private,
or it may be calculatedly random and unintegrated, but I
doubt it. I suspect that it is very much about
something, but it is Shepard’s way that if we have to
ask ourselves what it is, then it becomes nothing. I
like to think that this play is nothing more than a
blunder, a misstep along the way, but if Shepard is
beginning to super-impose message, or symbol, or story,
or, indeed, naturalistic motivation on the existing,
very great “reality” of his plays, he must start taking
into account the very different artistic
responsibilities these usually very normal elements
impose on him.
For whatever the reason, the spontaneity and
inevitability that are the best things about Shepard’s
work are lacking in “Icarus’s Mother.” Having only seen
the play, not read it, I have no way of knowing if this
may be, in any part, a fault in the direction by Michael
Smith. Smith is one of our few enlightened critics and
is himself a playwright. He knows it is the function of
the director to illuminate the playwright’s intention
and I would imagine that he and Shepard worked together
on the project and are convinced that the wattage is
fine. |
