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Arthur Sainer, Village Voice:
Sam has a kind of B-movie mind. He cuts the plot to
ribbons, zooms in for giant, bubble-gum close-ups, and
stands cheering from the sidelines... The plays cohere
by virtue of an almost primeval enthusiasm.
Ray Loynd, LA Times (January 6,
1989):
Al's Bar and Sam Shepard's early rock 'n' roll one-acts
were meant for each other. The joint is a bar all right,
but it's also a theater that sits on a desolate street
south of Skid Row that looks like a painting by Edward
Hopper. Shepard's play, "Shaved Splits," written in 1969
when he was 25, couldn't have a better Bohemian venue.
Director James Terry brings his personal Actors' Gang
energy to this 976-Players production that thrives on a
dramatic idiom rife with '60s rebellion...
The play can be nasty as a whiplash, and the production,
running a little more than an hour, is unnecessarily
strident. But it's rewarding to have Al's Bar staging
these works--in this case, an obscure one-act by a
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright which had never been
seen before in Los Angeles.
Joyce, McMillan, The Scotsman
(August 11, 1998):
The Los Angeles Times once described Sam Shepard's
Shaved Splits as an "obscene romp through the
sexual, corporate and political gutter of America"; but
in truth, this cheeky little firebomb of a play is both
filthier and more complex than that. First seen at La
Mama in New York in 1970, the play is a genuine - and
sometimes genuinely silly - early-Seventies political
period piece which combines a sweeping contempt for the
pornographic violence and dehumanising commercialism of
American popular culture with a wild sense of sexual
freedom and a vague belief in the inevitability of armed
revolution.
Mark Fisher, The Herald, Mark
Fisher (August 12, 1998):
If you think of the average play as a vertical line, Sam
Shepard's 1970 drama is a horizontal. It's like a
cross-section through the playwright's fevered
imagination, ideas spring to life, burn momentarily,
then disappear as quickly and as inexplicably as they
arrived.
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