Sam's Day

Garrison Keillor reminds us it's the birthday of playwright Sam Shepard, born in Fort Sheridan, Illinois (1943). His dad flew a bomber for the Air Force during World War II, and the family moved around a lot, finally settling for a while on an avocado ranch in Duarte, California. And it was there, surrounded by farms and trailer parks and tenement camps, ranchers and migrant laborers, that Shepard said, "It was in this place that I first began to smell the real adventure of my life."

But he left after one of his father's drunken bouts — his dad ripped the door off of their house after his mom locked him out. Sam took everything he owned, put it in his car, and left. He ended up in a traveling theater troupe on the East Coast, and he said: "We crisscrossed New England, up into Maine and Vermont. The country amazed me, having come from a place that was brown and hot and covered with taco stands. Finally we hit New York City and I couldn't believe it. I'd always thought of the 'big city' as Pasadena and the Rose Parade. I was mesmerized by this place." So he got a job as a busboy, and the head waiter at the restaurant was Ralph Cook, founder of Theatre Genesis, an off-off-Broadway theater doing experimental work. They needed some new one-acts, so Cook encouraged the enthusiastic busboy to submit work, and Shepard wrote play after play, sometimes writing an entire play in one sitting. In 1964, his first plays were produced, Cowboys and The Rock Garden, at a church in the East Village, St.-Marks-In-The-Bowery. Sam Shepard was 20 years old.

He has written more than 40 plays, including Buried Child (1978), which won the Pulitzer Prize, True West (1980), A Lie of the Mind (1985), and most recently, Ages of the Moon (2009). His early plays tended to be much longer — A Lie of the Mind was six hours long. Now they average about 90 minutes. He said, "I've come to feel that if I can't make something happen in under an hour and a half, it's not going to happen in a compelling way in a three-hour play." He is also an actor and director, and this year he published a collection of short stories, Day Out of Days (2010).

He writes on a typewriter and refuses to do any research online. He said, "The things that I wonder about most are not on the Internet, I promise you that."

He said, "I've been in a few rodeos, and the first team roping that I won gave me more of a feeling of accomplishment and pride of achievement than I ever got winning the Pulitzer Prize."

You can't force a thing to grow. You can't interfere with it. It's all hidden. It's all unseen. You just gotta wait til it pops up out of the ground. Tiny little shoot. Tiny little white shoot. All hairy and fragile. Strong enough. Strong enough to break the earth even. It's a miracle.

SAM SHEPARD, Buried Child

I feel like I've never had a home. You know? I feel related to the country, to this country, and yet I don't know exactly where I fit in. And the same thing applies to the theater. I don't know exactly how well I fit into the scheme of things. Maybe that's good, you know, that I'm not in a niche. But there's always this kind of nostalgia for a place, a place where you can reckon with yourself. Now I've found that what's most valuable about that place is not the place itself but the other people; that through other people you can find a recognition of each other. I think that's where the real home is.

SAM SHEPARD, Don Shewey's Sam Shepard

I like cars. I like travel. I like the idea of people breaking down and I'm the only one who can help them get on the road again. It would be like being a magician. Just open up the hood and cast your magic spell.

SAM SHEPARD, Curse of the Starving Class

The sides are being divided now. It’s very obvious. So if you’re on the other side of the fence, you’re suddenly anti-American. Its breeding fear of being on the wrong side. Democracy’s a very fragile thing. You have to take care of democracy. As soon as you stop being responsible to it and allow it to turn into scare tactics, it’s no longer democracy, is it? It’s something else. It may be an inch away from totalitarianism.

SAM SHEPARD, The Village Voice, Nov. 12, 2004

I'm a writer. The more I act, the more resistance I have to it. If you accept work in a movie, you accept to be entrapped for a certain part of time, but you know you're getting out. I'm also earning enough to keep my horses, buying some time to write.

SAM SHEPARD, Don Shewey's Sam Shepard

I'll develop my own image. I'm an original man. A one and only. I just need some help.

SAM SHEPARD, The Tooth of Crime

We’re being sold a brand new idea of patriotism. It never occurred to me that patriotism had to be advertised. Patriotism is something you deeply felt. You didn’t have to wear it on your lapel or show it in your window or on a bumper sticker. That kind of patriotism does not appeal to me at all.

SAM SHEPARD, The Village Voice, Nov. 12, 2004

I was in the war. I know how to kill. I was over there. I know how to do it. I've done it before. It's no big deal. You just make an adjustment. You convince yourself it's all right. That's all. It's easy. You just slaughter them.

SAM SHEPARD, Curse of the Starving Class

You're never going to see the truth. [It's] what you're shooting for always and you always miss it. Every once in a while, you catch an edge of it. That's what's you hope for, I think, as an artist.

SAM SHEPARD, interview, 2005

I keep comin' down here thinkin' it's the fifties or somethin'. I keep finding myself getting off the freeway at familiar landmarks that turn out to be unfamiliar. On the way to appointments. Wandering down streets I thought I recognized that turn out to be replicas of streets I remember. Streets I misremember. Streets I can't tell if I lived on or saw in a postcard.

SAM SHEPARD, True West

When you see the way things deteriorate before your very eyes. Everything running down hill. It's kind of silly to even think about youth.

SAM SHEPARD, Buried Child

The mind ain't nothing without the old body tagging along to follow things through.

SAM SHEPARD, La Turista

Everyone wants a piece of land. It's the only sure investment. It can never depreciate like a car or a washing machine. Land will double its value in ten years. In less than that. Land is going up every day.

SAM SHEPARD, Curse of the Starving Class

When you die it's the end of your life.

SAM SHEPARD, Tongues

Yes, sir! Nothing like a little amoebic dysentery to build up a man's immunity to his environment. That's the trouble with the States you know. Everything's so clean and pure and immaculate up there that a man doesn't even have a chance to build up his own immunity.... Before you know it them people ain't going to be able to travel nowhere outside their own country on account of their low resistance. An isolated land of purification.

SAM SHEPARD, La Turista

Which presentation of myself
Would make you want to touch
What would make you cross the border

SAM SHEPARD, Savage Love