Synopsis

A one-act cartoonish play about a pampered woman named Miss Cherry who sits around eating chocolates, reading porno novels, and insulting her servants until her boudoir is invaded by a revolutionary on the lam named Geez.

 
Performance History

The first production was staged at La Mama in New York in July 20, 1970.  Four midnight performances were directed by Bill Hart.

 
Published
 

 
 
Reviews

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.