PLAYWRIGHT-IN-RESIDENCE
Theatre ultimately won out when Shepard opted to settle in San Francisco as playwright-in-residence at the Magic Theatre in 1975. Over the next 10 years, he wrote his most seminal plays, including Fool for Love, True West, and Buried Child. Shepard recalled his father coming to a performance of the latter play and berating the actors on stage. “He took it personally and he was drunk...he was kicked out and then was readmitted once he confessed to being my father. And then he started yelling at the actors again.” By the mid-1980s, as he reached his forties, Shepard was the second most widely-performed American playwright after Tennessee Williams.
THE INTREPID ARTIST-COWBOY
In additon to playwriting, Shepard had a successful career as an actor. His first film role was as a dying farmer in Days of Heaven (1978). His breakthrough came playing Chuck Yeager, the first pilot to fly at supersonic speed, in The Right Stuff (1983). Biographer John J. Winters wrote that this role established Shepard’s on-screen persona as “the intrepid artist-cowboy of popular imagination,” which would blur with his writing. Other notable movies include Baby Boom (1987), Steel Magnolias (1989), and the Ethan Hawke Hamlet (2000) in which he played Hamlet’s father. He was last seen as the family patriarch in the 2017 Netflix series “Bloodline.” He also wrote several screenplays, including Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984 Cannes Film Festival Winner) and Silent Tongue (1994), a Western that he also directed.
You can see a preview of Silent Tongue HERE. A WESTERN SUNSET
In 2000, Shephard bought a small farm in Kentucky, where he raised horses, continued writing, and enjoyed a low- profile life. His last plays were seen in 2012 and 2014 at New York’s Signature Theatre, where he is a “Legacy Playwright.” (Curse of the Starving Class is slated for revival at Signature in spring 2019). Shepard died in 2017 from complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease. He left behind more than 55 plays, two collections of short stories, and a novel. Loretta Greco, the Magic Theatre’s current Artistic Director, remarked: “His timeless impact is indelible in every new script that lands on my desk to this day; his blood is coursing through generations of playwriting.”
You can learn more about Shepard and his life from THIS TRIBUTE.
TRUE WEST UPSTAGE GUIDE 5
“THERE ARE THESE TERRITORIES INSIDE ALL OF US, LIKE A CHILD OR A FATHER OR THE WHOLE MAN, AND THAT'S WHAT INTERESTS ME MORE THAN ANYTHING: WHERE THOSE TERRITORIES LIE.”
-SAM SHEPARD
Sam Shepard during his time as playwright-in-residence at the Magic Theatre. Photo:Steve Ringman/SF Chronicle/Polaris
Shepard met and fell in love with Jessica Lange on the set of Frances in 1982. They had a 26-year relationship, during which they starred in Country (1984) and Crimes of the Heart (1986).
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