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Negotiating the American West in Sam Shepard's Family Plays

2005; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 48; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mdr.2006.0039

1712-5286

J. Chris Westgate,

Theatre and Performance Studies

Negotiating the American West in Sam Shepard’s Family Plays J. Chris Westgate (bio) In Cruising Paradise, Sam Shepard celebrates the American West as a Paradise, as the locus of rebirth and redemption, as an American Eden – all with Whitmanesque certainty – in his paean to long-distance driving: I love long-distance driving. The farther the better. I love covering immense stretches in one leap: Memphis to New York City; Gallup to L.A.; Saint Paul to Richmond; Lexington to Baton Rouge; Bismarck to Cody. Leaps like these. Without a partner. Completely alone. Relentless driving. Driving until the body disappears, the legs fall off, the eyes bleed, the hands go numb, the mind shuts down, and then, suddenly, something new begins to appear. (156) On the network of highways that crisscrosses the continent – a conspicuous doubling of the ever-receding frontier – Shepard simultaneously seeks to revitalize the vestiges of the American West and to be revitalized by the transformative power associated with the West. He implicitly endorses Frederick Jackson Turner's romantic conviction that the frontier,1 even if mediated by more than a century of urbanization, cultivates the individuality, self-reliance, and morality that are essential to the "American character." Out there, away from overcrowded cities, Shepard merges with the frontier, with the journey, with America. And in so doing, he undergoes a distinctly American blend of epiphany, metamorphosis, and transcendence. Or, at least, the largely uncritical response to Shepard's fascination with the American West is maintained. Such readings, which dismiss the playwright as unapologetically nostalgic for the West, though, overlook the admittedly more atypical – though still unmistakable – apprehension about an ideology perhaps only ever efficacious within dime novels. In Motel Chronicles, he writes, "I was turning back into the land and wondering how far to go. Exactly the same question I'd had before when swimming out in the ocean. What's the point where it becomes dangerous [End Page 726] to go any further? And I recognized that the point of wondering comes when you think you've gone too far" (116). This excerpt does more than temper the enthusiasm of the preceding passage; it depicts the landscape – which was formerly so empowering – as dangerous, unknown, and even unknowable. Shepard's transcendental affinity with nature is replaced by a modernist alienation from nature. Rather than welcoming or sustaining his westering impulse, this landscape – now an indifferent ocean thanks to Shepard's self-reflection – threatens him with annihilation. The metaphorical loss of legs and eyes in the earlier passage now suggests literal predation; the numbing of his hands suggests hypothermia; and the disappearance of his body suggests extinction. "The farther the better" is supplanted by anxiety about going "too far"; "relentless driving" is superseded by comprehension of limitations. What emerges in Shepard's writing, then, are competing, even contradictory, visions of the West. Simultaneously welcoming and menacing, unequivocal and unfathomable, redemptive and ruinous, the West becomes an intriguing, and largely overlooked, crux within his semi-autobiographical writing, interviews, and plays – particularly his family trilogy, Curse of the Starving Class (1978), Buried Child (1978), and True West (1980). The prevailing, almost hegemonic, reading of the West in these plays parallels a distinctively American interplay of identity, geography, and history. According to Eric Heyne, "Many Americans continue to live as though they had a frontier available, to remake them as they need it, and to have their way with when they want it" (5). Harold Simonson goes further, arguing that the myth of the West remains central to American identity: "The myth proclaimed that on the open frontier a person could be reborn; he could have a second chance. Freed from the heavy accretions of culture, the frontiersman again could experience the pristine harmony between himself and nature" (4–5). In this vision of the frontier, which characterizes American thinking more than a century removed from the age of free land and westward migration, the West is more than merely an antidote to a moribund society; it approximates a Platonic ideal. It is a world intrinsically accessible to Americans yet entirely distinct from the vagaries of American industry, urbanization, or institutions. It is a world where they can start...