Written on the death of Sam Shepard, July 2017, published by Digital Theatre Plus.

A Sam Shepard Ending

Great artists are hard to define and it can trouble some people. Was Sam Shepard an actor, a movie star, a playwright, a director, a screenwriter, a drummer? Their art too, stubbornly refuses to conform to the easy definitions and straight lines of what popular culture tells us the world is like. Is Shepard ‘gothic’, ‘American Gothic’, ‘Greek’, ‘expressionist’, ‘absurdist’, ’surrealist’, ‘mythic’? One thing’s for sure, it wouldn't have interested him. 

His work leaves the wound open, it has gaps, deep mysteries and insoluble problems. A lot is written about Shepard as the poet laureate of the rotting American Dream or whatever that means - but not being American, that aspect of his work was really only of academic interest to me. He knows the heart. He knows what it yearns for. He knows that we don’t know ourselves and never will - but seems drawn to the heroism of our trying to find out. In the mid-period ‘family plays’ in particular, people are destroyed by trying to find their ending and their answer. It eludes them. Like Sam and his work, both resistant to definition and anything resembling conclusion. He told the Paris Review in 1997.

‘I hate endings. Just detest them. The temptation towards resolution, towards wrapping up the package, seems to me a terrible trap. Why not be more honest with the moment? The most authentic endings are the ones which are already revolving towards another beginning. That’s genius. Somebody told me once that fugue means to flee, so that Bach’s melody lines are like he’s running away’.

Which is precisely what Sam Shepard did. Born in 1943 to an alcoholic father who’d served as a pilot in the USAF and a teacher mother - by the time he was nineteen he’d left the edge of the Mojave desert in California and joined a touring acting company, winding up bussing tables in New York. A cowboy in the big city. He was present at a great beginning, instrumental in creating the scene that became known as off-off Broadway; writing experimental plays in the day and having them play at night in warehouses and above bars. Playing in bands and collaborating with poets.

We were hanging out in Glasgow the day Lou Reed died. Sam recalled how he had suggested to Lou that he might try to put some music to his poems, which he did.

‘So you suggested writing songs to Lou Reed?’ I asked.

There was a pause.

‘Yeah. I guess I did’.

But all Sam wanted to be was a drummer. Lou Reed the great musician who wanted to be a poet and Sam the great poet who wanted to be a musician. It’s pure Sam Shepard. 

The world came to him of course. After a raft of theatrical happenings throughout the 1960s and the legendary Cowboy Mouth a love-story of a Rock and Roll Jesus being captured at gun point by another rock star, written in collaboration with Patti Smith; the director Michaelangelo Antonioni approached him to write the screenplay for his new movie Zabriske Point. It was a comparative artistic failure. This set up a dilemma in Shepard that he continued to dramatise throughout his career, between inspiration and form, heart and head, art and commerce. These dichotomies were perhaps most fully explored in True West, but in Geography of a Horse Dreamer Shepard writes a scenario about a country boy who makes a fortune dreaming the winners of horse races; gangsters then come to the country, take him away from his landscape and tie him to a bed in the big city to compel him at gunpoint to dream winners for them. He can’t and begs to be set free. He ran next to London.

Horse Dreamer was premiered at the Royal Court in London in ’74 directed by Shepard, starring Bob Hoskins and Stephen Rea. He couldn’t keep race horses in his tiny Shepherd’s Bush flat, so he adopted a couple of racing Greyhounds much to the chagrin of one of his neighbours who complained bitterly night after night. ‘Some politician who was upstairs reading’. We later worked out that the irate neighbour in question was Michael Foot. 

He had a great many notable collaborations in the UK and Ireland. He was very loyal to directors he liked, ones that ‘didn’t interfere’, who let the actors ‘get on with it’. He and Nancy Meckler had a long association from the early Royal Court days, most recently on A Particle of Dread - his 2014 response to the Oedipus Story in Derry. James MacDonald was a favourite too, who directed Sam in Caryl Churchill’s play A Number off-Broadway and the premiere of Simpatico at the Royal Court. A young Matthew Warchus directed Mark Rylance in True West at the Donmar Warehouse in 1994 and directed it again on Broadway in 2000 starring Philip Seymour Hoffmann and John C Reilly alternating the leading roles. It’s always been a play that has made actors in to stars rather than a star vehicle. Seymour Hoffmann and Reilly were preceded by Tommy Lee Jones as unknown actors who’s careers were launched by the play. 

After his off-off Broadway work, came the so-called ‘family plays’, and the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Buried Child. He was surprised that it was Buried Child that he won for, he didn’t regard it as highly as other plays he’d written. And throughout this time there were movie roles. They were always surprising choices, never turning up where you’d think, but always somehow the broken cowboy - the real thing, but somehow also its satire. A walking Andy Warhol painting. And just when you thought you had him pegged he gets an Oscar nomination for his performance as all American hero Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff. But along with all the other tags he resisted the stereotypical leading man tag too. He had an uncanny knack as all great film actors do of always being Sam Shepard, being the film but being somehow outside the film at the same time. His independence intact, like he might walk out of the scene at any time. In one of his final film performances he played the  father who dies in the first scene in August: Osage County, by Tracy Letts - a writer he admired very much - who probably wouldn’t have written this play if it wasn’t for Sam Shepard. Of course, he was the best damn thing in it.

He was working on A Particle of Dread when filming August: Osage County, and after the film wrapped he flew to Derry to start rehearsals. Sam didn’t like to fly, so I didn’t think he’d accept my invitation to see True West at the Citizens theatre in Glasgow. I hoped. He’d come this far, so maybe one more flight might not have made much difference. I’d assisted Nancy Meckler at the RSC eight years ago, much to my surprise she gave me his phone number and said that I should call. Which I did. Turns out he’d never been to Scotland and had always wanted to visit Edinburgh.

Early November 2013, I was pacing in the arrivals lounge at Glasgow airport. It seemed like such a good idea at the time - it had all happened at such speed that I hadn’t quite considered what I’d talk to Sam Shepard about and how we’d fill our time over a few days in Glasgow and Edinburgh. It was cold, the weather was pretty terrible and I didn’t imagine that he’d want to spend his time walking around Kelvingrove looking at Rennie Mackintosh chairs and making polite chit chat. You could have missed him walking out of arrivals, but he looked exactly as I’d imagined. Jeans, cowboy boots and a crumpled denim jacket, rucksack slung over his shoulder. 

We’d barely shaken hands before he’d spotted a poster advertising a Bob Dylan concert in Glasgow that weekend.

‘Bob’s in town’ he said.

‘So it seems’.

‘Can you get hold o’ him?’

‘Now Sam, I’m very flattered that you think I have an in with Bob Dylan, but…’.

He pulled out a battered notebook and gave me Bob Dylan’s number.

‘Shall I give him a call?’

‘Sure’.

The phone got me through to Dylan’s manager who was just about to take off from Heathrow to get back to New York, he said that Bob would love to see Sam, and that I should give him my number and Bob would call me.

‘Will Bob want tickets for True West?’ I asked querulously.

‘Yeah, he’d love to see it’.

Within five minutes of meeting the great man, my task had become a little trickier, the next time my phone rang it may have been Bob Dylan.

The show was sold out that night and I called the Citizen’s to see If I could have couple of tickets put aside for Bob, I was trying my best to remain calm and cool in front of Sam while I was making the call. ‘Yes Denise, Bob Dylan Bob Dylan’. I didn’t see that there’d be any trouble accommodating him at dinner either.

So we hit Glasgow.

‘Where do you want to go?’ I ask?

‘Just take me where the people go’.

So we walked up Buchanan Street among the Saturday shoppers, me doing my best to be a passable tour guide - I ended up nervously filling silences with remarks about Rennie Mackintosh and brutalism. And because I sound like a tour guide I get asked for directions by an Irish family from Cork in town to watch Celtic. We get chatting, they ask me what I do. They ask my tall friend what he does.

‘I’m a writer’, he says.

‘And I play the drums’.

‘Cool’ they say, and they go on their way blithely not having recognised him. 

It starts to rain.

We relax a bit more with each other when I realise that one of his great passions is horse racing. We spend the rest of the afternoon in the Wetherspoons on Sauchiehall Street drinking Guinness and poring over the Racing Post making small bets and watching the races on my laptop. We about break even. What makes him intimidating and charismatic is how present and still he is. Sometimes when we’re talking he’d just say “Whut? Whut did you say?” It’s bracing, but it’s just because he’s listening so intensely to every word. It makes you chisel off the decorative edges of your conversation and say what you mean. I find out he’s not long turned seventy and at that he’s writing a novel in the next door study to Cormack McCarthy at the Santa Fe Institute and that he’s quite interested to see True West but it feels like someone else has written it. Bob Dylan still hadn’t called.

We get to the theatre that night and I find out that the box office have sat us together. In the middle of the stalls. Nowhere near an aisle. It’s only when the lights go down and I hear the chirrup of the crickets and the shutters open slowly that my heart starts pumping and I realise that I suddenly feel very claustrophobic and more nervous than I’ve ever felt.

Lee: So Mom took off for Alaska, huh?

I hadn’t countenanced the idea that he might hate it. There was no-where to run. I tried to look everywhere but at Sam Shepard. The first scene went by. Some nervous laughs from the audience. As usual. Then the second scene. The most perfectly written scene. It’s beautiful. It sings. It’s funny. It’s a perfect portrait of loneliness. Sam starts to laugh. At the same time as the audience. He leans over and whispers

‘Who’s that guy?’

‘Alex Ferns’, I say.

‘Who’s that guy?’

‘Eugene O’Hare’.

‘You fucken nailed this man’.

I try not to cry. The man in front turns round to admonish the whisperers. Sam laughs some more. He laughs.

We do a Q&A afterwards. And just before we go on stage, he tells me I remind him of a director he knows, but whose name escapes him - he keeps trying to remember but the name won’t come. I mean we’ve had a lot of Guinness at this stage. I don’t know whether it’s my manner, my looks, or my directing style, but it’s on the tip of his tongue. 

The rest of the night is a blur. Me, Sam and the cast drink until way after four. He comes alive in the company of actors and artists. He’s one of them, he understands. It’s why he loves theatre, for the company. He loves the camaraderie and the rough edged humour and the battle stories. He asks the actors time and again.

‘He didn’t get in the way this guy did he? He didn’t interfere? He didn’t get in the way?’. 

‘No’ they kindly lie.

As I leave I weave through the people who were surrounding him to say good bye. He grabs me rather forcefully by the wrist and says. ‘Frank
Capra. Frank fucken Capra’.  I ask no further questions. I found it was best to do that, it’s always much more fun that way with Sam, just
to enjoy the mystery.

I called for him at his hotel the following morning as planned, to take him through to
Edinburgh. After a long pause, he says.

‘Hey Phillip, I don’t think I wanna go to Edinboro’.

‘Ok Sam, um, how about Sunday lunch?’

‘Sure. Lets say about 4 o’clock’.

We went to the Ubiquitous Chip mightily hung over, but he’s present, he wants to talk about last night. After one hiatus he looks me in the eye and says

‘Phillip’  

Pause. 

‘What do you think is the future of tragedy?’

‘Um…’

The meal lasts for hours talking about horses, the Kentucky Derby, how to butcher a cow, the death of American culture, Glasgow, Irish history, space travel, Patti Smith, the possibility of stage tragedy and finally when True West will transfer to London. I explain that the rights are tightly guarded and we only had the rights for this two week run in Glasgow anyway we’d had liked to have done more but that this was a passion project for me and the cast; y’ know…

And this is how this film comes to exist. Sam gave us the rights to play True West in London and a letter of recommendation. No commercial producers would touch it unless I recast it with movie stars, I explain that this is not an option, it’s a play about he vapidity of celebrity among other things. They glaze over. Indhu Rubasingham at the Tricycle, to whom I will be forever grateful, gave us a slot for a transfer in the autumn of 2014, where Digital Theatre came to capture it. This whole period was very special for our little band. Robert Delamere the film director did the most fantastic job of capturing the muscle of Sam’s language and the extreme bravery of Alex Ferns and Eugene O’Hare’s central performances. This is a nascent art form and DT is in its vanguard. Of all the productions I’ve directed, I’m happy that I have this one as a memory - of the start of a kind of  relationship with Sam.

We kept in touch. We’d talk on the phone every now and again. He had a habit of throwing cell phones in to a lake when they ran out of battery. We talked about meeting up in Kentucky, about doing a London production of his Heartless, we talked about Cormac McCarthy, his own novel and he asked me what I thought of Patti’s like I’m on first name terms with her. It was never not thrilling. I phoned to tell him that Bob Dylan did eventually call me on the Monday, when I was in a queue at a sandwich shop in Birmingham. Dylan couldn’t understand why he was speaking to me, why I was in Birmingham, where Sam was, or what was going on. It won’t make any major Bob Dylan biographies, but it sure as hell will make mine. Sam got excited when I told him.

‘Bob called? What did he say?’.

I never got to meet him again.

We made some plans. But it’s not the end. This tiny fragment in his life and a major episode in mine now spins off in to something new. It’s a classic Shepard ending.


© Phillip Breen