‘Coyote’ review: New Sam Shepard biography could use more context

“The theater is a big bust,” Sam Shepard told Newsweek in 1967, as his star was rising in the off-Broadway world. “Nobody takes risks.” It was a bold statement for Shepard, who in subsequent years avoided media attention and often faced a crisis of confidence. But as Robert M. Dowling shows in his biography of Shepard, Coyote, the playwright was more than just a study in contradictions—he was a ball of confusion, and his life was shaped as much by disappointment, failure, and self-destruction as by success on the world's stages and silver screens.

In Dowling's hands, Shepard emerges as an artist who has become an EGOT-caliber talent while making it look easy. (He was nominated for an Oscar, an Emmy, and a Tony, and won a slew of Obie Awards and a Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for Buried Child.) Shepard was born in 1943 and raised in the San Gabriel Valley by a two-handed father who had numerous World War II medals, the source of the playwright's son's lifelong obsession with American power and masculinity. In the early '60s, Shepard decamped to New York and made his way off-Broadway at lightning speed, 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 that his first scripts “felt like a mess.” His groundbreaking 1967 experimental play The Tourist featured chickens being beheaded on stage until animal rights activists took notice. When his work was staged for filming at Lincoln Center, the seats were empty. But he had the support of the intelligentsia in the New York Review of Books and the Village Voice, and a theater culture that was willing to embrace him as long as he found his footing.

In this regard, Dowling's book presents Shepard as a symbol of late 20th-century American culture, as the counterculture provocations of the '60s gave way to the gentle aftershocks of the '80s and '90s. Early in his career, Shepard attacked the conservatism of the Vietnam era, preferring the hippie atmosphere of the Bay Area to what he called “the sprawling, crazy snake of Los Angeles down south.” But he himself moved towards the mainstream, sometimes against his will. Bob Dylan brought him into his orbit, as did rising New Hollywood directors such as Terence Malick; A chance meeting with Joni Mitchell on the road with Dylan turned into a brief, torrid affair, which she chronicled in her classic “Coyote.”

Dowling, the author of a previous biography of Shepard's idol Eugene O'Neill, skillfully unravels the story of a man who was many things – “country boy, playwright, lover, rocker, husband, father.” (And, in no small part, an alcoholic—his drinking mars the final chapters of his life, ruining friendships, affairs, and jobs along the way.) The author takes advantage of Shepard's writing, which includes many plays, short stories, and essays, as well as candid insights from friends and colleagues such as 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 tidal wave crashing through his front door,” Dark says, and Shepard's recognition in the '80s almost overwhelmed him. A series of powerful family dramas like Buried Child and Fool for Love made him as household a 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 production of Steppenwolf, revived their roles on public television in 1984.; it's worth watching on YouTube in all its grainy glory.) Here, Shepard publicly wrestled with every demon the family had spawned, tackling toxic masculinity with rare intelligence and ferocity, determined, as he said, to “destroy the idea of ​​family drama.”

This upward trajectory, as well as the slow decline of rehashes and breakups until his death in 2017, is abundantly clear in Dowling's hands. Less clear, however, is what made these works so powerful in themselves and in the context of their time. Dowling quotes little from Shepard's plays themselves, more of the content to focus on criticism and audience reaction. But it removes a crucial element of the identity of the writer who was absurdly forced to write—Dowling reports that Shepard began writing his 1993 play “Simpatico” while driving his pickup truck down a highway in Tennessee. The taste of manly banter that underpinned True West and Buried Child may have illuminated his special strength as a writer.

Robert M. Dowling TK TK

(Mairread Dowling)

The same can be said about the deeper context of Shepard's place in the theatrical landscape. As Dowling notes, over time Shepard became an international phenomenon, especially in Ireland, where he was treated as Beckett's heir. But he was not the only playwright to work on themes of family and masculinity, and Dowling makes only cursory mention of such compatriots as David Mamet and August Wilson. With the exception of a brief mention of a rousing speech he gave to Lynn Nottage, Shepard seems to have cut himself off almost completely from the theater community. It made him special, but perhaps unintentionally, it made him seem less unique and more lonely.

In this sense, perhaps Coyote embraces too closely the broad-shouldered American mythology that Shepard both traded in and questioned. We have an enduring affection for lone geniuses, people who act alone. In later years, he flaunted his carelessness: “If you don't understand it, I'll just write another one,” he told a reporter about his work. But when his body began to fail him due to progressive muscle atrophy, the myth collapsed. Shepard turned to Dark, wanting to see her old friend at her bedside. Dark, worn down by years of hurtful, alcohol-fuelled behavior, passed. “To hell with him,” Dowling quotes Dark as saying. Shepard's response: “Damn him.” There is a writer who could build a Pulitzer Prize-winning play on this basis.

Afitakis is a Phoenix-based writer and author of The New Midwest.