Contemporary Western Drama
A
MERICAN CULTURE
since 1960 reflects the chaos of
accelerating
existence. The post-Sputnik, Vietnam, Watts, Wounded Knee,
Watergate, Iran, Moral Majority years have been both a garden
and a wasteland for American dramatists, providing a wealth of
subject matter but requiring a struggle for synthesis. However,
the real battle for western American dramatists since 1960 has
been against the Broadway clawhold on American theater. Two developments–the
growth of powerful regional theaters and the emergence of Off
and Off-Off-Broadway playhouses–have allowed several western
dramatists to gain national prominence. Preston Jones, Sam Shepard,
Lanford Wilson, and Mark Medoff have established themselves as
significant American playwrights since 1960. Such minority and
women western writers as Luis Valdez, Hanay Geiogamah, Frank
Chin, Ed Bullins, and Megan Terry have also influenced the look
of contemporary western drama.
Preston Jones and Sam Shepard represent the extremes of western
drama since 1960. Jones's plays are generally comic examinations
of smalltown southwestern life presented realistically with stock
characters speaking recognizable dialect; Shepard's magical realism
is peopled with mythic figures that often float off into incantatory
monologues. Jones got his start with Paul Baker at the Dallas
Theater Center; Shepard began Off-Off-Broadway. Despite these
differences, both Jones and Shepard have written plays that concentrate
on themes central to much western American literature. Both,
for example, demonstrate a deep ambivalence toward the impermanence
of the values of the mythic West and the heroic images it spawned.
When Preston Jones burst upon the national scene, it was like
an unknown hayseed stepping forth to deck the heavyweight champion.
Suddenly, Jones was famous. His picture appeared on the covers
of Smithsonian and Suturday Review. He was the subject
of a PBS television special. He was compared with Tennessee Williams
and Eugene O'Neill. (Saturday Review's cover asked: "Has
Texas Spawned a New O'Neill?") The three plays comprising
A Texas Trilogy–The Last Meeting of the Knights of the
White Magnolia, The Oldest Living Graduate, and Lu Ann
Hampton Laverty Oberlander– had begun at the Dallas
Theater Center in 1973–74, where Jones had been an actor
since 1960. After their successful Texas performances, the three
plays were presented at the Eisenhower Theater at the Kennedy
Center in
Washington, D.C., in Spring, 1976, to receptive audiences.
Finally, the trilogy opened on three consecutive September nights on Broadway in the fall of 1976. Clive Barnes of the New York Times pronounced that "each play is oddly inconclusive . . . there seems to be no statement, no purpose." Thus, labeled regional plays with lines that sound "like an expanded version of those unmemorably unforgettable quotes from The Reader's Digest," the plays ignobly closed the Broadway run after five weeks.
It was perhaps too much to expect
a New York critic who grew up in England to appreciate plays
that breathe southwestern life as much as Jones's plays do. The
Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia examines
one continuing southwestern concern: racism. Set in 1962, the
play takes place when America was on the verge of a racial revolution.
John Kennedy's New Frontier administration proposed progressive
civil rights legislation that Lyndon Johnson pushed through Congress
after Kennedy's assassination in 1963. The racist face of the
old frontier was about to change. The play chronicles the end
by focusing on a racist group, the Knights of the White Magnolia,
in the fictional city of the trilogy, Bradleyville, Texas, based
roughly on Colorado City, Texas, where Jones once worked for
the highway department.
The Knights stand to the right of the Klan ("anybody that's
got to put on a white bedsheet to kick a coon's ass has got to
be a damn fool," charges one member). But time has passed; their
meetings in the Cattleman's Hotel have turned into Forty-Two
games instead of planning sessions. By the end of the play, filled
with Jones's satiric wit directed against the "bumbledick"
Knights, it is clear that they are finished. While Jones wishes
them a happy good riddance, he is ambivalent about the change.
The world that will replace them, represented by Colonel Kincaid's
son, Floyd, does not offer much better.
Jones makes this point clear in The Oldest Living Graduate,
the best-known of the trilogy because of the live NBC television
production starring Henry Fonda and Cloris Leachman. Colonel
Kincaid, who is one of the Knights, is the oldest living graduate
of the Mirabeau B. Lamar Military Academy. To boost sales for
his lakefront development, Floyd tries to get his father honored
by his old school. The Colonel, however, refuses to go along
with Floyd's plans for either the celebration or the development.
The land Floyd wants is too important to the Colonel: "Ah
like to keep it for remember-in'. That's important to an old
feller like me, havin' places that stay the same for rememberin'
on." Finally, though, realizing that time is quickly closing
in on him, Colonel Kincaid gives Floyd the land and laments impermanence.
Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander
builds time's passage into the play's three acts. Act I takes
place in 1953 when the title character is a Bradleyville cheerleader
planning a glorious future. Act II is set ten years later in
1963. Lu Ann has married Dale Laverty, and they live miserably
in a trailer park until Dale runs off and leaves her. In Act
III another ten years have passed during which time Lu Ann has
met, married, and been widowed by Corky Oberlander. Now she is
in charge of the Howdy Wagon in a dying town. She has endured
only to see her dreams die, her life turned into one of boredom.
After the trilogy closed, Jones returned to the Dallas Theater
Center where he presented three more plays. A Place on the
Magdalena Flats (1976), Santa Fe Sunshine (1977),
and Remember (1979) are set in New Mexico rather than
Texas. Jones was born, reared, and educated in New Mexico. His
father, J. B. "Jawbone" Jones, was once lieutenant governor
of that state. Magdalena Flats concerns the relationship
between an artistic boy and his older brother, a rancher trying
to survive the drought of 1956. Santa Fe Sunshine, the
lightest of Jones's full-length plays, deals with an artist colony
in Santa Fe in 1957. Remember is about a second-rate actor
who finds himself in his hometown, Albuquerque, with a touring
dinner theater company on his fortieth birthday. In a reunion
with an old schoolmate, a former teacher, and an old girlfriend,
he reinforces his awareness that time has ravaged all their dreams.
This last play suggested that Jones was moving into a new realm.
Unfortunately, within six months of its opening, Jones died unexpectedly
from complications due to bleeding ulcers. He was only forty-three.
When he died, Preston Jones was a national figure in American
drama despite his lack of Broadway success. His plays continue
to be performed around the country. They have even been translated
into several
languages, making him an international figure.
Sam Shepard has likewise developed
an international reputation, partially by living and working
for three years in England. His national stature has risen so
much that Richard Gilman wrote in 1981, "Not many critics
would dispute the proposition that Sam Shepard is our most interesting
and exciting American playwright." Shepard was born in Ft. Sheridan,
Illinois, in 1943, but he grew up in South Pasadena, California,
where he was influenced by life close to the earth. He once had
the Grand Champion yearling ram at the Los Angeles County Fair
and planned to be a veterinarian. Instead, though, Shepard headed
east in 1963. First he became a waiter at the Village Gate, a
popular jazz club, where he met Ralph Cook, the founder of Off-Off-Broadway's
Theater Genesis. Cook encouraged Shepard to write, and Shepard's
two one-act plays, Cowboys and The Rock Garden, were
presented by Theater Genesis in 1964. Since that time Shepard
has written over forty plays and won ten Obie awards and a Pulitzer
Prize for Buried Child (1978).
Where Jones's strength was the
realistic southwestern comic language of his characters, Shepard's
vitality stems from his mythic imagination. Both writers, though,
have been concerned with the loss of heroic ideals and coherent
values the American West formerly represented. In Jones's plays
the contemporary Southwest is often effete, enervated, or materialistic.
Old patterns embracing racism, sexism, and corrupted individualism
hang on in unsympathetic ways. Shepard, often in dazzling, absurdist
fashion, presents a similar world that has fallen or is falling
away from something valuable. While Jones's plays concentrate
on the ennui of small-town southwestern life, Shepard's emphasize
the fragmentation of a world searching for characters who can
continue to embody positive mythic values in new ways.
Legendary western figures such as Pecos Bill, Mickey Free, Paul
Bunyan, and Jesse James appear in Shepard's plays; other characters
are recognizable western types: the title characters in his first
play Cowboys (1964) and its revision Cowboys #2
(1967), the Morphan brothers in The Unseen Hand (1969),
the old prospector in Operation Sidewinder (1970), Slim
in Cowboy Mouth (1971), Hoss in The Tooth of Crime
(1972), Cody in Geography of a Horse Dreamer (1972),
the cowboy side of Niles in Suicide in B(flat)
(1976), and Lee in True West (1980).
When he was asked by a Theatre
Quarterly interview why he used cowboys, Shepard replied:
"Cowboys are really interesting to me–these guys, most
of them really young, about sixteen or seventeen, who decided
they didn't want to have anything to do with the East Coast,
with that way of life, and took on this immense country, and
didn't have any real rules." In fact, throughout Shepard's work
the mythic West of cowboys–the wideopen landscape offering
unlimited freedom and potential for individual self-fulfillment–enters
and provides the conflict. Many of Shepard's characters wish
to re-embody the cowboy figure, but the fragmented world in which
they live offers little possibility of satisfaction. The cowboy
is out of place in this world; those who wish to adhere to his
mythic image are limited by their attempts. A changed world requires
new images, but the chaos of contemporary life provides no coherent
ones to supersede the cowboy.
In Cowboys #2, for example, Stu and Chet, reminiscent
of Samuel Beckett's Didi and Gogo in Waiting for Godot, act
out a stereotyped Indian fight. As the play ends, with horse
sounds clashing against car horns in the background, two suited
men begin to read the play's script over again in monotone. Here,
Shepard emphasizes the way that old images become crutches to
support the contemporary world. In each reembodiment, however, the gap between the original and the copy grows wider.
The old images need to be transformed
rather than imitated. In Cowboy Mouth, Cavale has kidnapped
Slim, planning to make him a rock-and-roll star. What the world
needs, she exclaims, is a "saint . . . a rock-and-roll
Jesus with a cowboy mouth." Slim provides no redemption, but
Mickey Free in Operation Sidewinder is able to transmute
the Air Force computer made in the form of a gigantic sidewinder
rattlesnake, representing the industrial, violent world, into
an Indian god that provides the way to an apocalyptic redemption.
Even if the old images have to be changed, their positive value
needs to be recognized and retained. Niles, the musician who
is to kill various aspects of his former self to begin anew,
praises the cowboy in Suicide in B(flat):
Niles's emphasis on taking new forms may have presaged Shepard's
own changes. Toward the end of the 1970s Shepard pursued acting,
appearing in the films Days of Heaven, Resurrection, and
Raggedy Man. His plays written during that time, Curse
of the Starring Class (1978), Buried Child
(1978), and True West (1980), are much more realistic
than his earlier work. More accessible and less irreverent, they
nonetheless confront similar themes. What is the effect of the
past, these plays seem to ask, especially ties to the family?
The mythic West calls for independent isolation, but the family,
often in strangling, debilitating ways, remains connected to
the present, as Austin in True West discovers. How does one establish
his own identity with past images looming so large in the mind's
eye? The old West, the "looks within" place, is dead, Lee
says in True West: "There's no such thing as the
West anymore. It's a dead issue!" What will replace it is ambiguous,
but as the fertile field behind the house in Buried Child
suggests, possibility and opportunity still exist: they simply
must be perceived through the fog of the present.
Of all Shepard's plays, the most representative and the most
imaginative is The Tooth of Crime, set in a mythic space
where rock-and-roll stars control territory like old gunfighters.
The reigning hero, Hoss, is being challenged by a "Gypsy
Killer," Crow. It goes against "the code," but Hoss knows
that the "big ones" have gone against it in the past: "Go
against the code. That's what they used to do. The big ones.
Dylan, Jagger, Townsend. All them cats broke codes. Time can't
change that." He has been successful following the code; thus
he is perplexed by the changes that have produced Crow. When
Becky tries to explain, he asks: "What about the country?
Ain't there any farmers left, ranchers, cowboys, open space? Nobody just
livin' their life."
When Crow arrives, the duel takes
on the flavor of an old-fashioned walkdown between the established
gunfighter and the young challenger. The fight, though, involves
verbal performance. When the referee calls Crow a winner by T.K.O.,
Hoss responds with a "true gesture that won't never cheat
on itself cause it's the last of its kind"–suicide.
The old world represented by Hoss is a kaleidoscope of past pop
culture images: cowboy, outlaw, rock star, gangster, sci-fi hero.
His replacement is an imitation of an imitation. Hoss is more
sympathetic than Crow, suggesting that as this violent cycle
continues, each change is weaker than the original.
Neither Jones nor Shepard began in a vacuum, of course. Jones's
work was greatly influenced by his work with Paul Baker at the
Dallas Theater Center and by the significant roles he had played
as an actor. He identified Thornton Wilder's Our Town and
Arthur Miller's The Price as plays that had affected his
work. He also pointed to various Texas writers–Robert Flynn,
Eugene McKinney, Larry McMurtry, and others–as influences.
Shepard's work is closely aligned to the extrarealistic drama
of other California writers like Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael
McClure. Ferlinghetti, best known as a poet of the Beat Generation,
wrote several verse plays in the early '60s. In some of them
Ferlinghetti borrows images from western figures who confront
significant existential questions. In Motherlode
(1963), for example, Ferlinghetti's main character is a miner
who is confronted by the commercial Schmucks. McClure, who continues
to write plays, had early success with The Beard (1965),
in which Billy the Kid entices Jean Harlow to give in to her
natural impulses.
Shepard's lament for a lost past is often submerged beneath the
frenetic energy provided by images of the present, but Lanford
Wilson, another writer who first toiled in Off-Off-Broadway obscurity,
often makes the disappearing past a central issue in his plays.
Unlike Shepard, however, who has never "made it" on Broadway,
Lanford Wilson has finally received Broadway's blessings. Wilson
is a midwesterner, born in Lebanon, Missouri, in 1937. After
a brief education at Southwest Missouri State and San Diego State,
Wilson headed east, first to Chicago, then to New York where
he worked odd jobs. After a chance meeting with Joe Cino, who
encouraged young artists by producing plays at his Cafe Cino,
Wilson's Off-Off-Broadway career was underway.
While the real or mythic West is always important to Jones or
Shepard, Wilson varies his subject matter and setting. He has
written more plays with eastern, urban settings than with midwestern
ones. The Hot L Baltimore
(1973), for example, an urban play, was his first popular success.
But several of his plays move west, such as the early plays This
Is the Rill Speaking
(1965), The Rimers of Eldritch (1966), and the autobiographical
Lemon Sky
(1968). Recently Wilson has achieved his greatest acclaim with
three plays of a planned five-play cycle concerning a Missouri
family, the Talleys. Fifth of July (1978) takes place
on July 4th and 5th, 1977, in the Talleys' sprawling house near
Lebanon, Missouri. Ken Talley, Jr., who lost his legs in Vietnam,
has returned to the family home with his homosexual lover, Jed.
During the play, past betrayals are exposed, and eventually the
Talleys are reconciled to their past. Talley's Folly (1980),
winner of the Pulitzer Prize and New York Drama Critics Circle
Award, continues the family cycle. Set thirty-three years before
Fifth of July, Talley's Folly takes place in a boathouse
where Matt Friedman courts Sally Talley by revealing his past
and forcing her to understand hers. A Tale Told (1981)
focuses on the events in the Talley house while Matt and Sally
are in the boathouse. Angels Fall (1982) is not about
the Talleys but is reminiscent of The Petrified Forest and
When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder? because it concerns a
group of people in New Mexico who are forced to stay together
and examine some of their essential motivations. Wilson's concern
for the need to unearth, confront, and communicate the past connects
him with other contemporary western dramatists.
Communication, often forced or labored, is important to Mark
Medoff, who has successfully taken both the regional theater
and the Off-Off-Broadway routes. Born in Mount Carmel, Illinois,
in 1940 and educated at the University of Miami, Medoff became
associated with the West in 1964 when he started working on a
master's degree at Stanford. Since 1966 Medoff has been a faculty
member at New Mexico State University at Las Cruces. The Southwest
provides the setting for several of his plays, such as his first
one, Doing a Good One for the Red Man: A Red Farce (1969),
which was first produced in San Antonio, Texas, by the Dallas
Theater Center. His first popular success, When You Comin'
Back, Red Ryder? (1973), took the Off-Off-Broadway route,
initially produced by the Circle Repertory Theater Company. Like
Shepard, Medoff dramatizes a contemporary West where traditional
heroes have vanished. In a quiet New Mexico diner, a freaky doper
smuggling marijuana to California menaces the patrons and the
night attendant, Stephen Ryder. Stephen cannot transform himself
into the cowboy hero, Red Ryder, nor can he summon Red's faithful
Indian companion, Little Beaver. To confirm his point about lost
heroes, Medoff uses a Paul Simon line as an epigraph: "Where
have you gone Joe Dimaggio/ A nation turns its lonely eyes to
you. . . ."
With Firekeeper (1978), Medoff resumed his relationship
with the Dallas Theater Center. The play revolves around the
activities of a priest, a mentally disturbed Hispanic girl, a local sheriff
(played by Preston Jones at the DTC), and an old Indian. The
Indian at one point recalls the legend of the firekeeper, the
shaman who could determine the right path for men to follow.
Neither law nor religion seems to be able to provide this information
in Medoff's contemporary Southwest.
Medoff's most successful play, Children of a Lesser God (1979),
does not have a southwestern setting, but it did have a western
beginning. It opened in Los Angeles at the Mark Taper Forum,
whose artistic director Gordon Davidson has influenced western
theater significantly. Like Medoff's other plays, Children
of a Lesser God examines the difficulty of human communication;
the play's subject is the love affair between a deaf woman and
her hearing husband. A success on Broadway for the 1980–81
season, Children of a Lesser God has firmly established
Medoff's name among contemporary American dramatists.
Other western and southwestern playwrights began to find greater
acceptance for their work in the seventies. Although Preston
Jones was not well received by New York critics, his plays seemed
to inspire other Texas writers. Jack Heifner in Vanities (1977)
follows Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander's lead in focusing
on three Texas girls at various times of their lives. His two
one-acts about Texas women–sisters in Patio and motherdaughter
in Porch–achieved moderate success. James McLure,
trained at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, received
acclaim for Laundry and Bourbon, Pvt. Wars, and Lone
Star (1979). Lone Star, first presented by the Actors
Theater of Louisville, combines light, folksy humor with a weightier
analysis of the effects of the war on a Vietnam veteran. D. L.
Coburn, a Dallas friend whom Preston Jones encouraged to write,
won a Pulitzer Prize for The Gin Game, an unsentimental
play about old people in a nursing home that could be anywhere.
Texas chic also aided Larry King's and Peter Masterson's The
Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1978). Whorehouse grew
out of a Playboy article that Texas journalist King had
done about the closing of the legendary Chicken Ranch, a brothel
outside LaGrange, Texas. Using the traditional western theme
of individual freedom versus the constraints demanded by civilization
(represented by a meddling television journalist), this musical
(songs by Carol Hall) has enjoyed an extended Broadway run and
a less successful film version with Dolly Parton and Burt Reynolds.
At the Dallas Theater Center, Paul Baker, until his retirement
in 1982, continued to encourage his company members to write
plays with regional settings. John Logan's Jack Ruby, All-American
Boy played along with Jones's plays in 1973. More recently,
Mary Rhode's Ladybug, Ladybug, Fly Away Home (1977) uses
a clash between a small-town Texas beauty parlor operator and
some urban women as its conflict. Baker also received acclaim
for his presentation of Texas writer Robert Flynn's adaptation
of William
Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, called Journey to Jefferson.
Another regional theater that has
become significant to western drama is Luis Valdez's El Teatro
Campesino, originally a traveling company that played to California
farm workers. In 1981 Valdez moved into a permanent structure
in San Juan Bautista, California, and opened with David Belasco's
Rose of the Rancho. As a traveling company, El Teatro
Campesino's most significant work was Valdez's Zoot Suit,
originally commissioned by Gordon Davidson, director of the
Mark Taper Forum. After its success at the Mark Taper, Zoot
Suit moved to New York in 1979 and was filmed in 1981. The
play is based on the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial of 1942 when
seventeen Mexican-Americans were tried for the murder of another
MexicanAmerican in Los Angeles. The trial and its aftermath,
riots by American servicemen who began beating and stripping
zoot-suited Hispanics, allow Valdez to dramatize the treatment
of Mexican-Americans in the West and to examine the difference
between a mythic western hero–in this case, the pachuco–and
his modern follower, Hank, the leader of the gang.
Valdez is committed to exploring the Hispanic background of the
West in his plays. He states: "I have concentrated on theater
images rooted in the realities of the Southwest. Ethnic and regional
as those images might be, I feel we have nevertheless penetrated
through the superficial differences that separate us all into
a level of universal significance. Our study of Chicano culture
has led us into investigations of the entire history of America.
. . . We feel we are inexorably a part of the evolution of America
and assume the right to participate as artists in the creation
of its future." Valdez furthers his search into the Chicano past
in Bandito! (1981), a play about Tiburcio Vasquez, a Mexican-American Robin Hood hanged in 1875.
Native American culture has been
the subject of Hanay Geiogamah's plays. Geiogamah, a Kiowa-Delaware,
established the American Indian Theater Ensemble in the 1970s
with Ellen Stewart's help. Later called the Native American Theater
Ensemble, the company has toured America and in Europe presenting
Geiogamah's plays, among others. Although oral performance is
central to Indian tradition, drama is a European literary form.
Geiogamah combines the two and explores Indian culture and history.
Most of his plays focus on contemporary Indian life with glimpses
into the past. Body Indian (1972) examines the way the
Indian body politic undermines itself. Bobby Lee is an alcoholic
who has lost his legs to the archetypal American machine in the
garden–the train. When he gets drunk in some friends' apartment,
they steal his lease money. Foghorn (1973) takes its title
from the foghorns used to harass the Indians who occupied Alcatraz
in 1969. It presents a variety of Indian stereotypes from Pocahontas
to activists at Wounded Knee in an effort to exorcise them. In
49 (1975) the subject is an Indian celebration broken
up by police.
The Chinese-American experience in the West has been explored
by Frank Chin in The Chickencoop Chinaman (1972) and The
Year of the Dragon
(1974). David Henry Hwanguses an encounter between a recent Chinese
immigrant to Los Angeles and two Chinese-Americans in FOB
(1980). (The title means "first off the boat.")
In The Dance and the Railroad (1981), familiar to cable
television viewers, Hwang's subject is Chinese railroad workers
in 1867 who dream of striking it rich in the California gold
fields and then returning to China, where one of the characters,
Lone, was a dedicated artist in Chinese opera before he was kidnapped
and forced to come to America. In Family Devotions (1981)
Hwang has an elderly citizen of present-day China visit his two
sisters in Bel Air, an exclusive section of Los Angeles.
Black dramatists have found western motifs less compatible than
southern or eastern-urban ones, but Ed Bullins, who was educated
in California, uses Californian settings in The Electronic
Nigger (1968), Goin' a Buffalo (1968), and The
Pig Pen (1970). Although Goin' a Buffalo's title may
sound as though it will investigate a western theme, it does
so only iron-ically. The main characters are not searching for
the wide-open spaces where the buffalo roam; rather the only
frontier available to them is Buffalo, New York, where the drug
pushers, prostitutes, and thieves who are Bull-ins's subject
hope they can thrive. In his more recent plays Bullins, like
Geiogamah, examines how an American minority often betrays its
own interests by failing to look carefully at the past's lessons
on the need for group cooperation.
One black playwright who has used a southwestern setting is Ted
Shine, playwright-in-residence at Prairie View A&M west of
Houston. Shoes (1970) takes place at a fashionable Dallas
country club. In the play the group identification is broken
down by materialistic self-interest: one character's desire to
spend the money he has made working at the country club for $85
alligator shoes. Shine's other plays, originally presented by
Douglas Turner Ward and the Negro Ensemble Company, use Shine's
Louisiana background.
Another play with a southwestern setting presented by Ward and
the Negro Ensemble Company was Charles Fuller's The Brownsville
Raid (1978), based on a 1906 incident. When the town of Brownsville,
Texas, was shot up, white townspeople charged that members of
a black regiment were responsible. Eventually the entire regiment
was dishonorably discharged. Fuller, who grew up in Philadelphia,
won the Pulitzer Prize for A Soldier's Play.
Just as Hispanics, Indians, Chinese-Americans,
and blacks have found playwrights to dramatize their concerns,
so have women playwrights had great success since 1960. One woman
playwright with a western background is Megan Terry, who was
born in Seattle, Washington, in 1932. Educated at the University
of Alberta, Edmonton, and the University of Seattle, Terry worked
at the Seattle Repertory Playhouse before traveling east. She
was a founding member of the New York Open Theater, where her
most important play was Viet Rock (1966). After serving
as writer-in-residence at Yale University Drama School, Terry
returned to the West, where she became the writer-in-residence
at the Omaha Magic Theater in
Omaha, Nebraska.
Terry's plays are often meant more
to be seen and heard than read, and several of her plays that
began at the Open Theater in New York grew out of an acting technique
called transformation in which an actor "transforms" from
one character into another in one scene. Likewise in her plays,
the characters often undergo transformation. Terry, like Shepard,
often draws from recognizable western figures, such as Ranchman
in The People Vs. Ranchman. Ranchman is tried for rape
and electrocuted. Later he reappears and his victims reenact
his crime. Finally, in eternity his accusers ask his forgiveness.
Hothouse (1974) is set in Washington, near Seattle. Its
main characters are a grandmother, mother, and daughters who
contrast with the enervated men worn out by the wars in which
they have fought. Like other western writers who search for heroic
figures to replace the ones that have been lost, Terry offers
these strong women.
All this activity demonstrates that western drama since 1960
is thriving. Just as Mark Twain's and Bret Harte's local color
helped post–Civil War Americans regain a sense of identity,
so contemporary Americans have turned to regional artists to
help make sense of the whirl modern life presents. The theater,
as an experience that combines the vitality of a live physical
event, language, and spectacle, helps us take stock of ourselves.
Regional theater directors, recognizing the contributions already
made, will no doubt continue to encourage western playwrights.
The Off-Off-Broadway movement, unless it is seduced by financial
demands to become another Broadway, will persist in providing
a testing ground for young writers' work. Live theater will not
take television's place as the major entertainment in America,
but neither will television cause the sun to set on drama. The
show will go on, and often when it does it will be written by
a western writer.
Primary Sources
Bullins, Ed. Five Plays. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968. Includes Goin' a Buffalo; In the Wine Time; A Son, Come Home; The Electronic Nigger; and Clara's Ole Man.
Chin, Frank. The Chickencoop Chinaman, The Year of the
Dragon: Two Plays. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981.
Also contains a fine introduction by Dorothy Ritsuko McDonald.
Coburn, D. L. The Gin Game.
New York: Samuel French, 1978.
Geiogamah, Hanay. New Native American Drama. Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press, 1980. Contains Body Indian,
Foghorn, and 49 as well as an excellent introduction
by Jeffrey Huntsman.
Heifner, Jack. Patio/Porch.
New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1978.
Hwang, David Henry. Broken Promises: Four Plays. New York:
Avon Books, 1983. Contains Family Devotions, The Dance and
the Railroad, FOB, The House of Sleeping Beauties, and a
foreword by Maxine Hong Kingston.
Jones, Preston. Santa Fe Sunshine. New York: Dramatists
Play Service, 1977.
King, Larry L., and Peter Masterson. The Best Little Whorehouse
in Texas. New York: Samuel French, 1981.
McClure, Michael. Gorf New
York: New Directions, 1974, 1976.
McLure, James. Lone Star. New York: Dramatists Play Service,
1980.
Medoff, Mark. Children of a Lesser God. New York: Dramatists
Play Service, 1981.
Also contains "Home Movie," another autobiographical
introduction by Medoff.
Shepard, Sam. Buried Child.
New York: Urizen Books, 1979. Also contains Seduced, and Suicide in B(flat).
Shine, Ted. Contributions. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1970. Contains Plantation, Shoes, and Contribution.
Terry, Megan. Hothouse. New York: Samuel
French, 1974.
Wilson, Lanford. Fifth of July. New York: Hill & Wang, 1978.
Secondary Sources
Aaron, Jules. "The Mark Taper Forum: Gordon
Davidson's Balancing Act." Theater 10 (1979): 55–63. Entire issue concerns
regional theaters.
Brustein, Robert. Critical Moments. New
York: Random House, 1979. Contains the essay "Theater in
the Age of Einstein: The Crack in the Chimney," which discusses
theater of causation (David Rabe) versus absurdist, anti-causal
theater (Durang, Shepard).
Busby, Mark. Preston Jones.
Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1983. Cizmar, Paula
L. "The Rise of the Regionals." Books & Arts 1
(26 October 1979): 20–22.
Copelin, David. "Chicano Theater."
The Drama Review 17 (1973): 73–89. Haller, Scot.
"The Dramatic Rise of Lanford Wilson." Saturday Review
8 (Aug. 1981): 26–29.
Hill, Errol, ed. The Theater
of Black Americans. 2 vols. Englewood Cliffs, New
Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1980.
Maguire, James H. "A Bibliography
of Western American Drama." Western American Literature 13 (1979): 149–63.
Marranca, Bonnie, ed. American
Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard. New York: Performing
Arts Journal Publications, 1981. Contains an imaginative introduction
by Marranca and collects various essays on most of Shepard's
plays through True West; sections on directing and acting
Shepard, and "Shepard on Shepard."
Marranca, Bonnie, and Gautam Dasgupta.
American Playwrights: A Critical Survey.
Vol. I. New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1981. Sommers, Joseph, and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto. Modern Chicano
Writers: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall,
1979.
Vinson, James, ed. Contemporary
Dramatists. London: St. James Press, 1977.
Weales, Gerald. "American Theater Watch,
1977–1978." Georgia Review 32 (1978): 515–27.
Asserts that New York has become a "receiving station for
pretested goods."
Wong, Yen Lu. "Chinese-American Theatre."
The Drama Review 20 (1976): 13–18.
He discovered a whole way of life. He ate rattlesnakes for breakfast.
Chicago wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for him. He drove cattle
right to Chicago's front door. Towns sprang up whereever he stopped
to wet his whistle. Crime flourished all around him. The law
was a joke to him. In his confusion, though, Niles cannot distinguish
between freedom and anarchy. In Shepard's plays, something of
the old should be retained; the exact characteristics of this,
though, are murky.
. Four Dynamite
Plays. New York: William Morrow, gyp. Includes It Bees Dat Way, Death List, The Pig Pen, and Night of the Beast.
. Vanities. New
York: Samuel French, 1977.
. A Texas Trilogy.
New York: Hill & Wang, 1976. Contains The Oldest
Living Graduate, Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander,
and The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia
as well as a brief introduction by Paul Baker.
. Pvt. Wars. New York: Dramatists Play Service,
1980.
. The Wager & Two Short Plays.
Clifton, N.J.: James T. White, 1976. Contains The Wager,
Doing a Good One for the Red Man, and The War on Tatem,
and a revealingly personal introduction by Medoff recounting
the trials of a young playwright.
. When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder! Clifton,
N.J.: James T. White, 1974.
. Five Plays.
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967. Contains Icarus's Mother,
Chicago, Melodrama Play, Red Cross, and Fourteen Hundred
Thousand.
. Four Two-Act Plays. New York:
Urizen Books, 1980. Contains La Turista,
The Tooth of Crime, Geography of a Horse Dreamer, and Operation
Sidewinder.
. Seven Plays. New York: Bantam
Books, 1981. Contains True West, Buried
Child, Curse of the Starving Class, The Tooth of Crime, La
Turista, Tongues, and Savage Love as well as an introduction
by Richard Gilman.
. Viet Rock. New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1966. Also includes Comings and Goings; Keep
Tightly Closed in a Cool Dry Place; and The Gloaming,
Oh My Darling.
. The Hot L Baltimore. New York: Hill & Wang, 1973
. Lemon Sky. New York: Hill & Wang, 1970.
. The Mound Builders. New York: Hill &
Wang, 1976.
. The Rimers of Eldrich and
Other Plays. New York: Hill &. Wang, 1967. Also includes
The Madness of Lady Bright, This Is the Rill Speaking, Days
Ahead, and Wandering.
. Talley's Folly. New York: Hill & Wang,
1981
. The Culture Watch.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975. Includes a discussion of Shepard's The Unseen Hand.
. "Drama." In
The Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Literature.
Edited by Daniel Hoffman. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1979.
. The Jumping-Off Place:
American Drama in the 1960s. New York: Macmillan, 1969.
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