The American Century: Literature since 1945 693it seems, is taught by American culture to feel incomplete without the endless chain
of commodities the institutions of capitalism produce. Starvation is the natural
condition of this family, and Americans generally, because they are stimulated to
wants, to experience a need, that can never really be satisfied. Another family in
A Buried Child supplies an even more powerful emblem for the corruption of the
American spirit. The child that supplies the title of the play is the product of an
incestuous union whom the family have killed and buried. Clearly, what Shepard is
rehearsing here, personifying in this family, is what he sees as a general national
compulsion to bury the past, to conceal guilt and deny responsibility: to rewrite
history so as to retain the illusion of innocence. The process is not irreversible,
the play intimates. In the final scene, the father of the buried child enters with its
exhumed body in his arms. As he does so, the offstage voice of the mother of the
family announces a miraculous abundance of vegetables springing up on a farm
that, up until then, had been a waste land. “I’ve never seen such corn,” she declares.
“Tall as a man already.... It’s like a paradise out there.” The resurrection of the family,
and by implication America, is possible, it seems. All it needs is courage to face and
embrace the past, to recover the best and recognize the worst. With that, it will again
be “paradise out there.”
The power of A Buried Child, and of so many of Shepard’s plays in his mature
style, stems from his weaving together of the domestic and the mythic, volcanic
emotions and vast landscapes. His people are the stuff of raw experience and
legend, barely able to contain immeasurable emotions within measurable frames
of flesh and bone. So, in True West, Shepard explores a uniquely American myth,
perhaps the defining one of the continent, through the intensely claustrophobic
tale of two brothers writing a script. The script is about a chase: one man pursuing
another across the country in a drive for vengeance without a definite start or
finish. Gradually, the two brothers become the two men in the script. The real and
the fictional, the story of the play and the story in the play, coalesce; and this
answers the question slyly posed in the play’s title. The myth of America is its
reality, Shepard suggests, the dream of the West is the true West. What dream and
truth, myth and reality both involve, in turn, is the immensity of human feeling
and setting: drives and desires that sweep through men and women like a whirlwind,
mysteries that move, only partly hidden, through the vastnesses of the world that
surrounds them. In Fool for Love, for instance, the two central characters are lovers,
half-brother and sister, who cannot live apart or together. They are victims and
agents of a passion that is like an elemental force; lurching from one extreme to
another, tenderness is inseparable from violence for them, and love from hate. The
motel on the margins of the desert where the passion is acted out translates their
condition into material terms. It is, like each of them, each of their bodies, a small,
frail enclosure in the middle of an empty immensity, which can barely contain the
elements careering within it. To be human, it seems for Shepard both here and in
all his work, is to be in the eye of the storm: a fragile structure in and through
which powers both material and magical circulate, caught in a turbulence that has
no measurable beginning or end.GGray_c05.indd 693ray_c 05 .indd 693 8 8/1/2011 7:31:39 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 39 PM