Abstract
Welding subject and form, the opening essay recapitulates with great lyricism Shepard's life and work in an attempt to map the excessive emotional terrain of the playwright's characters: fragmented, traumatized transients ruthlessly given over to incomprehensible, elementally violent passions that relentlessly attract and repel, consuming past and future. Composed with the traces of a reclusive, sensitive yet impetuous father who taught his son a love of poetry and music, and a sixties performance aesthetic, setting great store by immediacy and physical expression but gradually deepened with myth, archetype and costly candour, the emerging portrait is a highly paradoxical one: romantic, contemporaneous and timeless, vibrantly personal and American, showing affinity with the poetic, passion-infused drama of Tennessee Williams and Federico Garcia Lorca.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 19-30 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| Journal | Contemporary Theatre Review |
| Volume | 8 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Jan 1998 |
Keywords
- Father
- Fragmentation
- Lorca (Federico Garcia)
- Myth
- Performance aesthetics
- Realistic detail (absence of )
- Williams (Tennessee)