sam shepard has a new play off-broadway, the god of hell, and is also acting for the first time since starring alongside patti smith in his own play, cowboy mouth, in 1971. although acting and actors have occasionally fascinated me, writing and writers are far more immediate, so i’ll ignore the parts of this village voice article and stick to the parts about shepard’s new play about republicans, totalitarianism, patriotism, etc…
…On the occasion of this West Village/East Village double whammy, Shepard agrees to an interview at the Jane Street Tavern after a preview of The God of Hell. Just a few days after his 61st birthday, he shows up sporting a sleek, grown-out buzz cut.
“I really wanted to write a black farce,” says Shepard, “so I went back and studied Joe Orton. Nobody wrote better farce than him, and he was very dark. Not being as witty and clever as Joe Orton, I used Entertaining Mr. Sloane as a jumping-off place. I started with three characters, the couple and the stranger who comes to stay with them. The notion of somebody coming from out of nowhere and disturbing the peace. It fit perfectly with the Republican invasion. The whole storm that built up after 9-11. The Welch character came in last. I wanted him to be like something out of Brecht’s clown plays. Tim plays him with the perfect tone: the demon clown.”
Shepard’s working title for The God of Hell was Pax Americana, an ironic hint at the play’s theme of toxic patriotism. When Welch appears out of the blue, he pointedly asks Emma why her living room lacks “symbols of loyalty” and tries to sell her patriotic paraphernalia, which she declines. The minute she steps away, he whips out a staple gun and proceeds to cover the inside of her house with strings of little flags. A typically Shepardian theatrical device, this proliferation of objects is both comic and creepy, like the artichokes in Curse of the Starving Class, the vegetables in Buried Child, and the toasters in True West. But it also unmistakably refers to the blanketing of red-white-and-blue that turned the country’s outpouring of post–9-11 grief into something bullying and coercive.
“We’re being sold a brand-new idea of patriotism,” Shepard says darkly. “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 doesn’t appeal to me at all.”
What is that show-your-colors mentality about? “Fear,” he says. “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. It’s 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.”
Wary of being drawn into a political discussion, Shepard insists, “I don’t want to become a spokesman for a point of view. I really want the play to speak for itself.” He chose to write a comedy specifically to keep things ambiguous. An image of torture simultaneously evokes Abu Ghraib and Waiting for Godot. Haynes’s bug-zapper handshake is a metaphor for radioactive contamination, but it’s also a silly, fun theatrical effect. (”I get that static shock thing in the winter whenever I walk across a rug and touch something, which I hate, and I’ve always wanted to put it in a play.”)
and yes, the greatest playwrite and one of the true heavyweight actresses of our generation have left my hometown for greener pastures, so to speak.
keep ‘em coming, mr. shepard.
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