Sam Shepard takes on cowboy poseurs - and his own
iconhood.
It turns out there’s a real craft to building a dead
horse you can believably kick around onstage. Sam
Shepard, who recently had to bury his own horse, made it
clear what he was looking for in the stage directions
for his new one-man, one-horse play, "Kicking a Dead
Horse", which begins previews at the Public June 25 and
stars Stephen Rea. “The dead horse should be as
realistic as possible,” he writes, “with no attempt to
stylize or cartoon it in any way. In fact, it should
actually be a dead horse.”
So when the show premiered in Ireland, the Abbey Theatre
dutifully located an actual already-dead horse (“With
this PETA thing, you’ve got to be very careful,” Shepard
says), made a cast from it, and used the horse’s real
hide. “We were thinking it would have more realism,”
says Shepard. “But when he kicked it, it reacted like a
cardboard box or something. It flopped around. This
one’s much heavier, has more resistance.”
He points to a still-hideless taxidermy form (complete
with articulated movable parts), which lolls
cartoonishly in the middle of the Public’s grand,
columned rehearsal space. Shepard sits at a table twenty
feet away, looking not quite so countrified as you’d
imagine: checked gray shirt tucked into neat jeans and a
pair of stylish black sneakers. He almost seems to
regret putting in that line about the horse—partly
because of the technical issues and partly because it
invites questions about what the horse “means,” and
asking Shepard to “intellectualize” his work is like
asking him to ride sidesaddle.
Still, it’s impossible to read Shepard’s new play—so
different from the Western-family dramas he’s famous
for—without coming to the conclusion that he is, at 64,
mocking his own iconic image. Hobart Struther, a
fiftysomething city man with vaguely country roots, has
made a fortune plundering the honky-tonks of the
interior for horse-filled landscape paintings bordering
on kitsch, which he’s resold for millions thanks to a
craze for Americana. Obsessed with “authenticity,”
Struther leaves his family and sets off on an identity
quest, only to have his horse choke on its oats and drop
dead on the first day. Talking to himself while clumsily
trying to bury the immovable horse, Struther ends up
casting aside his Western implements one by one, along
with notions of a mythology he now regards as
“sentimental claptrap.”
This is written by a man who’s alternated between
Hollywood film roles and black-box theaters, who’s
ridden in rodeos only to come home to Jessica Lange
(they split their time between here and Kentucky).
Shepard will certainly not help you reach any
conclusions about the play— “I think it takes all the
life out of a piece of work”—but Public Theater head
Oskar Eustis confidently says, “It’s the most personal
play that Sam’s ever written: simultaneously really
personal and existential, about the specific dilemmas of
Sam’s age and experience, and also about America.”
It’s notable but not at all surprising that Shepard
wrote this very American play on a commission from the
Abbey, specifically for Rea. Europe is where Shepard
first figured out how to write great plays. Having grown
up in Duarte, California, he escaped his alcoholic
father at 19 and landed on the Lower East Side. By the
early seventies, he was writing experimental but “not
long-lasting” work, romancing Patti Smith (she wrote a
poem about his “playing cowboys”), and doing lots of
drugs. “The Off–Off Broadway thing kind of lost its
original zest,” he says. He’d heard London was still
swinging, and off he went. There he met actors, like
Rea, who were far removed from the earnest “Method” and
excessive psychologizing of the Actors Studio, “far more
eclectic in their gathering of stuff. They can sing and
dance and carry on, they can do Brecht and all that
stuff.” He directed a play for the first time -
"Geography of a Horse Dreamer", his own, at the Royal
Court, starring Rea - and picked up the tools that, when
you come down to it, make him as much a European
playwright as an American one. In 1979, after he’d
returned to the U.S., he won a Pulitzer for Buried
Child.
Rea admits it took a while to warm up to the writer.
“One didn’t approach him warily,” he says, “but you
approached him, you know, with some respect for his
self-containment.” But they drank lots of beer and
whiskey and talked about Vietnam and Rea’s Northern
Ireland, which was exploding at the time. They also
bonded over a major idol, someone Rea had actually met:
Samuel Beckett.
As Shepard ages, he looks more and more like Beckett -
the squinting eyes, the deep furrows, the air of
shrugging amusement. "Kicking a Dead Horse" could be
superficially glossed as Endgame in the desert with an
animal carcass instead of two clowns in garbage cans.
“His mind, it’s awesome,” says Shepard. “I don’t want to
keep beating a dead horse, but Beckett turned my head
around about thinking about theater. It doesn’t have to
be realistic, it doesn’t have to be buried in this cause
and effect, it doesn’t have to be?…? dull.”
Reuniting with Rea and also with his old patron the
Public (where he was last seen in 1994)Shepard thinks
his plays are becoming even more interesting. He admires
August: Osage County, but “I don’t want to do long
family dramas. I’m just not interested in thrashing
through those fields again.” He’s working on a new play
for Rea, "Ages of the Moon", about two old friends
turned enemies. Sounds a little like "True West" or
"Simpatico", but he insists it’s a different breed. “I’m
not interested in categorizing,” he says, “but [the new
ones] seem to become themselves. They’re not
calculated.”
His last play, "The God of Hell", was unusually
political; he claims the only time he voted was in 2004,
mainly out of contempt for George W. Bush. For all of
Bush’s blunders, Shepard seems most offended by his
exploitation of cowboy tropes. “For George W. to be
construed as a cowboy is about as far from the truth as
you can possibly get. It’s ruined the reputation of
Texas, which actually has more authenticity than many,
many states—not in Dallas.” He’s also no fan of
Hillary’s “riding around in trucks and talking about how
she’s a blue-collar girl.”
But what really turns him off politics is the media’s
phony typologies. Mention Obama’s “Appalachian problem,”
and he says, “You find more racists in Chicago, New
York, and Los Angeles than you would in West Virginia—I
guaran-damn-tee it.” The red-blue divide is “media
manipulation” at its worst. So are we all—Bush, Clinton,
Americans, Sam Shepard—a little like Hobart Struther,
saddled with the baggage of obsolete myths? Is that what
the dead horse is about? He leans back and sighs loudly.
“Look, look, there’s a saying in the cowboy culture that
a real cowboy has the horseshit on the outside of his
boots.” Which is our cue to ride off into the sunset.
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