2 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
In the decades following Shepard’s disappointing Broadway opening, he
tried to avoid “the mainstream in the arts” (Kakutani), and his career choices
suggest ambivalence toward fame and celebrity. To escape the theater scene in
New York, in 1971 he moved to England with his wife, actress O-Lan Johnson
(whom he had married in 1969 and divorced in 1986) and son, Jesse Mojo.
Several of his plays were produced in London to positive reviews, and his work
remains popular there. Curse of the Starving Class (1976), also awarded an Obie
(his ninth), premiered in 1977 at London’s Royal Court Theatre; its U.S. pre-
miere in New York followed in 1978. After three years in England, Shepard and
his family returned to North America, first to a farm in Nova Scotia and then
to a twenty-acre horse ranch in northern California. As playwright-in-residence
for the Magic Theatre in San Francisco, Shepard debuted several of his best-
known and most successful plays; these include Buried Child (1978) which won
him his tenth Obie and the Pulitzer Prize in 1979, True West (1980), and Fool
for Love (1983). Shepard calls Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child, and
True West a “family trilogy.” The first play dramatizes the disintegration of a
preyed-upon farming family; the second uncovers a literal family skeleton that
has been buried under barren farm soil; and the last features two brothers in
violent competition with one another.
Critics often describe Curse of the Starving Class as point of transition
between Shepard’s earlier and later plays. Influenced by British director Peter
Brook, whom he met while living in England, Shepard had begun in this play
to focus on his characters, developing them more fully and placing them into
more-realistic situations than in his previous plays. Throughout his career,
however, Shepard has highlighted certain themes and experimented with strong
visual or aural metaphor. In Cowboys #2 one of the title characters describes the
“all-American” breakfast, which appears again in Curse of the Starving Class and
is juxtaposed against the family’s empty refrigerator. In both works, it serves
as a metaphor for spiritual starvation. The play also features two characters,
Chet and Stu, whose competitive relationship is resurrected in brothers Lee
and Austin of True West, as is the sound of a single cricket offstage. In Curse
of the Starving Class Shepard begins with a realistic kitchen only to despoil it
and leave any sense of normalcy behind as surreal elements take over in the
form of garbage, food, and finally, the carcass of a lamb, which are strewn across
the floor of the once-everyday setting. In the trilogy’s next two plays, however,
realistic elements dominate.
True West, the first play written after winning the Pulitzer Prize for Buried
Child, marks Shepard’s shift into the kind of realism he rejected as a young
playwright. Consisting of two acts divided into nine scenes, the play replaces
Shepard’s usual large cast with just four characters—two major, brothers Austin
and Lee, and two minor, Saul Kimmer and Mom. The dialogue features natural
rhythms and the set design, “a kitchen and adjoining alcove of an older home
in a Southern California suburb,” is realistic. Shepard also underscores realism
in his stage directions: “The set should be constructed realistically with no
attempt to distort its dimensions, shapes, objects or colors. No objects should
be introduced which might draw special attention to themselves other than the