“Theater is a big bust,” Sam Shepard told Newsweek in 1967, just as his star was rising in the off-Broadway world. “Nobody is taking big chances.” It was a bold statement for Shepard, who in the years to follow tried to avoid media attention and often faced crises of confidence. But as Robert M. Dowling demonstrates in his Shepard biography, “Coyote,” the playwright was more than just study in contradictions — he was a tangle of confusions, with his life shaped by frustration and failure and self-destruction as much as success on the world’s stages and movie screens.
In Dowling’s hands, Shepard emerges as an artist who became an EGOT-level talent while making it look easy. (He earned Oscar, Emmy, and Tony nominations, and won a boatload of Obies and a Pulitzer in 1979 for “Buried Child.”) Born in 1943, Shepard was raised in the San Gabriel Valley by a two-fisted father with a clutch of World War II medals, the source of the playwright son’s lifelong obsession with American might and masculinity. In the early ’60s, Shepard escaped to New York and with lightning speed infiltrated off-Broadway, inspired by Samuel Beckett, Edward Albee and a host of experimental playwrights.
Was young Shepard any good? Even Albee, one of his early mentors, said his first scripts “give the impression of being a mess.” His breakthrough experimental play, 1967’s “La Turista,” featured live on-stage chicken decapitations until animal-rights activists took notice. When his work was staged for the uptown set at Lincoln Center, seats emptied. But he had the support of the intelligentsia at the New York Review of Books and Village Voice, and a theater culture that was willing to accommodate him while he found his footing.
In this regard, Dowling’s book frames Shepard as a symbol of American culture in the late 20th century, as the provocations of the ’60s counterculture settled into the gentle nudges of the ’80s and ’90s. During his early career, Shepard savaged Vietnam-era conservatism, preferring the hippie vibe of the Bay Area to what he called the “sprawling, demented snake of L.A. to the south.” But he was edging toward the mainstream himself, sometimes against his will. Bob Dylan pulled him into his orbit, as did rising New Hollywood directors like Terence Malick; a chance meeting with Joni Mitchell on the road with Dylan turned into a brief, torrid affair she chronicled in her classic “Coyote.”
Dowling, author of a previous biography of Shepard’s idol Eugene O’Neill, expertly untangles the history of a man who contained multitudes — “country boy, playwright, lover, rocker, husband, father.” (And, in no small measure, alcoholic — his drinking clouds the latter chapters of his life, wrecking friendships, affairs and work along the way.) The author has the benefit of Shepard’s writing, which encompasses reams of plays, short stories, and essays, as well as candid insights from friends and collaborators like Johnny Dark and Ethan Hawke. (But not his wife O-Lan Jones, whom he divorced in 1984, or his longtime partner Jessica Lange.)
“Success was like a tide that came crashing through his front door,” Dark says, and Shepard’s acclaim in the ’80s almost overwhelmed him. A string of potent family dramas like “Buried Child” and “Fool for Love” made him as much a household name as his acting and works like “True West” put companies like Chicago’s Steppenwolf on the map. (John Malkovich and Gary Sinise, who starred in the Steppenwolf production, revived their roles for public television in 1984; it’s worth tracking down on YouTube in all its grainy glory.) Here, Shepard publicly wrestled with every demon that family delivered, sorting through toxic masculinity with a rare intelligence and ferocity, determined to, as he said, “destroy the idea of the family drama.”
That upward trajectory, and a slow decline of rehashes and breakups until his death in 2017, are abundantly clear in Dowling’s hands. Less clear, though, is what made those works so powerful in themselves, and in the context of their times. Dowling quotes little from Shepard’s plays themselves, more content to focus on critical and audience response. But that disappears a crucial element of a writer who was absurdly compelled to write — Dowling reports that Shepard started drafting his 1993 play “Simpatico” while driving his pickup on a Tennessee highway. A taste of the macho banter that powered “True West” and “Buried Child” might have clarified his particular force as a writer.
So, too, might some deeper context about Shepard’s place in the theater landscape. As Dowling notes, in time Shepard became an international phenomenon — particularly in Ireland, where he was treated as Beckett’s heir. But he wasn’t the only playwright working through themes of family and masculinity, and Dowling only glancingly mentions compatriots like David Mamet and August Wilson. Except for a brief mention of a pep talk he gave Lynn Nottage, Shepard seems almost entirely divorced from the theater community. It made him singular, but perhaps unintentionally it makes him look less sui generis than lonely.
In that sense, maybe “Coyote” too much embraces the broad-shouldered American mythology that Shepard both traded in and questioned. We have an abiding affection for lone geniuses, men who go solo. In his later years he paraded his nonchalance: “If you don’t understand it, I’ll just write another one,” he told a reporter of his work. But as his body began failing him due to progressive muscular atrophy, the myth crumbled. Shepard reached out to Dark, craving an old friend at his bedside. Dark, exhausted by years of hurtful, alcohol-fueled behavior, passed. “F— him,” Dowling quotes Dark as saying. Shepard’s response: “F— him.” There’s a writer who could’ve built a Pulitzer-winning play around that.
Athitakis is a writer in Phoenix and author of “The New Midwest.”
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