Patti Smith / My Buddy

Sam Shepard and Patti Smith
Hotel Chelsea, New York, 1971
Photo by David Garhr

My Buddy

By Patti Smith

Patti Smith / Mi amigo Sam

August 1, 2017

He would call me late in the night from somewhere on the road, a ghost town in Texas, a rest stop near Pittsburgh, or from Santa Fe, where he was parked in the desert, listening to the coyotes howling. But most often he would call from his place in Kentucky, on a cold, still night, when one could hear the stars breathing. Just a late-night phone call out of a blue, as startling as a canvas by Yves Klein; a blue to get lost in, a blue that might lead anywhere. I’d happily awake, stir up some Nescafé and we’d talk about anything. About the emeralds of Cortez, or the white crosses in Flanders Fields, about our kids, or the history of the Kentucky Derby. But mostly we talked about writers and their books. Latin writers. Rudy Wurlitzer. Nabokov. Bruno Schulz.

Sam Shepard / Nina Simone

Nina Simone

Nina Simone

by Sam Shepard

BIOGRAPHY

I used to bring Nina Simone ice. She was always nice to me. She used to call me "Daahling." I used to bring her a whole big gray plastic bus tray full of ice to cool her Scotch.

She'd peel off her blonde wig and throw it on the floor. Underneath, her real hair was short like a sheared black lamb. She'd peel off her eyelashes and paste them to the mirror. Her eyelids were tick and painted blue. They always reminded me of one of those Egyptian Queens like I'd seen in National Geographic. Her skin was shining wet. She'd wrap a blue towel around her neck then lean forward resting both elbows on her knees. The sweat rolled off her face and splashed on the red concrete floor between her feet.

She used to finish her set with the "Jenny the Pirate" song from Bertolt Brecht. She always sang that song with a deep penetrating vengeance as though she'd written the words herself. Her performance was aimed directly at the throat of a white audience. Then she'd aim for the heart. The she'd aim for head. She was a dead shot in those days.

The one song she sang that really killed me was, "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To." It always froze me in my tracks. I'd be out on the floor collecting Whiskey Sour glasses and she'd start that rumbling landslide piano with her ghostly voice snaking through the accumulating chords. My eyes would go up to the bandstand and stay there while my hands kept on working.

I knocked over a candle once while she was singing that song. The hot wax spilled all over a businessman's suit. I was called into the manager's office. The businessman was standing there with this long splash of hardened wax down his paints. It looked like he'd come all over himself. I was fired that night.

On the street outside I could still hear voice coming right through the concrete walls:"You'd be Paradise to come home to".

9/28/80

San Francisco, Ca.

By Sam Shepard. From his book 'Motel Chronicles', inspiration for the 1984 Wim Wenders film 'Paris, Texas'.

Sam Shepard and Jessica Lange

Jessica Lange Spoke About Longtime Partner Sam Shepard and Their Children Shortly Before His Death

BIOGRAPHY OF SAM SHEPARD

BIOGRAPHY OF JESSICA LANGE

By Nicholas Hautman July 31, 2017

Jessica Lange spoke about her longtime partner Sam Shepard and their children, Hannah and Samuel, in an interview published just hours before the news of his death.

“I wouldn’t call Sammy easygoing and funny, but everybody has their dark side, and he always does it with a sense of humor,” the Feud: Bette and Joan actress, 68, told AARP The MagazineOpens a New Window. of the famed playwright, whom she dated from 1982 to 2009.

Sam Shepard on 'Blackthorn' / The man who puts the butch into Cassidy

Sam Shepard on 'Blackthorn': the man who puts the butch into Cassidy

With his rangy good looks, Sam Shepard is perfect in an updated western about the exiled outlaw.

BIOGRAPHY OF SAM SHEPARD

By David Gritten

8:24AM BST 13 Apr 2012

'I don’t get offered many lead roles in movies these days,” Sam Shepard says, laughing. “And if I do, they’re not very good scripts. So I haven’t been jumping on that bandwagon. But when one comes along…” He lets the thought dangle.

A couple of years ago, one did come along. “The best I’d seen in years,” says Shepard, who knows something about writing. He would play the famous outlaw Butch Cassidy, widely believed to have been killed (along with the Sundance Kid) by the Bolivian military. In this version of his life, Cassidy lived quietly for 25 more years under the name James Blackthorn in a remote Bolivian village, before yearning to return home and see his family again.

The film, Blackthorn, is a Spanish production with mostly English dialogue, written and directed by screenwriter Mateo Gil (Open Your Eyes, The Sea Inside). Much of it was shot 15,000 feet above sea level in Bolivia, which provided stunning landscapes. It was, Shepard recalls, a unique experience.

“They don’t breed many horses in Bolivia, because of the altitude. They had to import polo ponies from Argentina. I got to do most of my own riding, rather than stunt guys. I did a little singing. And I found the character intriguing. I didn’t want to do an imitation of Paul Newman (from the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) so I did a lot of research about Cassidy.

“I thought the film might be different from other American westerns, especially as it was Spanish and shot in Bolivia. And I think it turned out that way.”

Certainly Shepard, now 68, is a plausible Cassidy; his rangy six-foot frame and weather-beaten good looks make him perfect casting for a western hero. He grew up loving horses, even working as a stable hand in his teens. “To sit on a ranch horse that’s been broken in, it’s like getting in a Porsche,” he says, beaming.

We meet in Paris. He approaches me among the crowds on Boulevard Saint-Germain, a celebrated man who has mastered the trick of going unnoticed in public. He walks alone, without a retinue. As a film actor, he excels at playing soft-spoken, self-contained men; after an hour in his company, one sees why.

He wears his fame lightly. Plays such as True West, Buried Child and Fool for Love established him as a great American playwright, a Pulitzer Prize-winner for drama. He’s a gifted actor, Oscar-nominated for playing legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff. Shepard is also a screenwriter (Paris, Texas), an accomplished musician and a film director (Far North). He has illustrious friends – Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, novelist Cormac McCarthy – who seek out his company as he seeks theirs.

He travels widely, beneath the radar, living the fulfilled life of a successful, versatile artist. He has suggested we have lunch at the famous Left Bank restaurant Cafe de Flore; even before we sit down, Shepard reminds me this was a favoured hang-out of one of his heroes, Samuel Beckett.

But why is he even in Paris? He’s also a friend of legendary theatre director Peter Brook, who lives there. Brook’s daughter Irina, who also directs, is staging a new production of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt at this year’s Salzburg Festival. “I’m helping her adapt some of the monologues, turn them into music,” Shepard says modestly.

Tomorrow he leaves for Dublin, where on Monday at the Abbey Theatre he and Patti Smith take the stage for an evening of music and readings to benefit the Abbey’s programme for new playwrights: “I’ll read from Flann O’Brien at the gig, she’ll be reading Yeats,” he says. Then it’s on to New York to discuss his new two-act play opening later this year at the Signature Theatre; he’s thinking he may call it Artless.

Perhaps it’s the rich variety of his life that allows him to treat today’s film industry with scepticism: “I don’t do much screenwriting anymore, because everyone tries to tell you what to do. On every film, there are producers all over the place, and everyone’s got to have an opinion. I think the screenplay is a beautiful form with great potential, but the environment around it is awful for a writer.

“The wonderful thing about writing for theatre is you can go anywhere you want with the language. There are no limits. With film, they frown on language – it’s always 'Too many words’.” Movies, he thinks, have suffered because of this tendency: “I recently did a film called Safe House [starring Denzel Washington] and I counted the cuts [between shots]. I don’t think there’s a shot longer than three seconds. That doesn’t give you a chance to settle into the characters, it’s unbelievable.

“But that’s the style of popular film-making today. It’s cut so hard and so fast that it takes everyone’s breath away. They can’t catch up to it. So consequently you don’t get the language, you don’t understand the movie. And in the end it really doesn’t matter what’s going on.”

In the same way, Shepard has no time for the cult of fame and celebrity. He has an agent, but never has a team of hangers-on and assistants around him.

“All that stuff just slows you down’” he says. “I think [actors] get trapped in this notion that they have to have a cushion between themselves and the world.”

Certainly he keeps the details of his life discreet. He seems to be single these days, dividing his time between New Mexico and his farm in Kentucky; in 2010, he apparently separated from his long-time partner, actress Jessica Lange, with whom he has two adult children. But there were no screaming headlines about it.

In New Mexico he lives a quiet, almost donnish life. He is affiliated to a think-tank called the Santa Fe Institute: “It’s mostly scientists, some of them very well-known, Nobel Prize-winners. There’s only a couple of writers – me and Cormac McCarthy, who introduced me there.

“We all meet up every day. It’s a way of seeing if there’s a dialogue between different [disciplines]. There’s a lot of discussion about complexity theory and neuroscience, how things control human behaviour. You run across people with different areas of expertise. It’s very cool.”

He talks about this far more enthusiastically than being in movies. “With acting you can find a way to make it interesting for yourself, if nobody else – even on big-budget films.” He sighs: “But you’re very much on your own.”

THE TELEGRAPH

Sam Shepard / Interview about Buried Child

Sam Shepard
BIOGRAPHY

Things at Stake Here 

Interview about BURIED CHILD

Interview by Stephanie Coen

September 1, 1996

Playwright Sam Shepard says that the rewritten version of his play 'Buried Child' is much better than the original version first staged in 1978 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama the following year. Shepard cites the development of the character of Vince as one of the improvements in the new version. He reveals that his plan to rewrite his 1972 play 'The Tooth of Crime' is being spurred by a feeling of incompleteness regarding the play. 

An interview with the playwright by Stephanie Coen 

In a 1983 interview, you called Buried Child "verbose and overblown" and "unnecessarily complicated." Is it still something of a problem play for you? 

No, not any more. I think I solved it. (Laughter.) But it was due to this production being able to cast a new light on it - and I guess, too, the amount of time between when it was originally written and the current production. It gives you a different perspective. 

What changed the most for you? 

There were a lot of things that were hanging, particularly with the character of Vince and his lostness and dismay at not being recognized. His predicament became clearer in retrospect. My emphasis was on the old man, on Dodge. 

It's interesting that your focus went from the older character to the younger. 

It's because of the structure of the play. You see the weaknesses, and one of the weaknesses is that Vince hadn't been fully explored. For one thing, the old man was a lot more fun. I could really go with him, but the kid wasn't so much fun. Now the kid is starting to become more and more apparent to me. 

The revised text makes it clear from very early on that Tilden is the father of the buried child, something that is much more mysterious in the original play. 

It was always implicated that he was, even in the original. I didn't want anything in the play to be gratuitously mysterious. And I felt that certain questions that were ignited in the play should find - not resolution, they shouldn't be resolved - but they should be at least followed through. One of them was this insinuation that Tilden was the father. And I thought, yes, of course he is, go with that. 

Were you surprised that the Steppenwolf production was hailed as so funny? 

I geared the play towards this humor, because I felt that the play in our first production was too heavy. There's a lot of humor in it - based mainly on Dodge's kind of out-of-the-side-of- the-mouth humor, his sarcasm, that strange World War II humor - that I wanted to emphasize. I think the play works because the audience is allowed into this kind of strange humor in spite of themselves. They have to laugh at this character, even though he's killed a child. Otherwise, it's deadly. 

For this year's Signature Theatre Company season, you're rewriting your 1972 play The Tooth of Crime. What is the impulse for revisiting that play? 

Well, I felt again that there was something incomplete about it. There's a strength to the play, and it doesn't go where I hoped it would go. 

These are not easy plays. Buried Child and Tooth of Crime were tough plays to write. Other plays are easy to write, like Curse of the Starving Class, True West - they just kind of happened. But these plays were straggles. Not to say that I didn't have fun with them, but they were not the same breed of animal. 

Which of your plays wouldn't you touch? 

(Laughter.) I don't think any of them are perfect, but there are certain ones I wouldn't mess around with, because I think they are what they are, like Action, for instance. Probably True West. But again, nothing is perfect, it's just I have no desire to elaborate on them. They work. 

Is it fair to say that your work suggests that the past is something you can deny, but you can't escape from? 

I suppose you could say that. (Laughter.) It's not the main deal. The past is a memory. I mean, what is the past? Of course, as you grow older, the past looms a lot larger - you don't have as much future. (Laughter.) 

As you grow older, are you more conscious of writing for history? 

No, but I am aware of this chain of being, which takes on a different value than when I was 19, for instance, when you're trying to deny the chain of being - whatever came before me doesn't matter. That's cool for a while, but now it becomes important to me to understand the way my stuff is interconnected, the way it's a result of the past. I'm beginning to understand that I'm the direct product of something that's wild and woolly. They probably never even really had a notion about where they were going back then. Nobody could foresee this disaster. 

Vince says in Buried Child, "His face became his father's face." Do you see that speech as a signature, of sorts? 

This problem of identity has always interested me. Who in fact are we? Nobody will say we don't know who we are, because that seems like an adolescent question - we've passed beyond existentialism, let's talk about really important things, like the fucking budget! (Laughter.) Give me a break! There are things at stake here - things of the soul and of the heart - and we talk about the budget! Sorry to get excited. I'm sure that won't appear in Esquire. 

In what? 

What is this, Esquire? 

American Theatre. 

Sorry. 

So do you think we'll just crash and burn? 

Something good always comes out of it. I'm not a doomsday person. No matter what, the creative forces are powerful. Publicity is on the side of negativity, but it doesn't mean it's more powerful. 

Is there anything about popular culture that's interesting you now? 

Rodeo. There's some good music going on. The commercial aspect of what's going on deadens everything. It's very hard to get to something that has heart anymore, because everything's for sale, and it's for sale real cheap. You end up with a lot of what my Granddad used to call poppycock.

Buried Child review / Ed Harris is brutally compelling in Sam Shepard's dark drama 3 / 5 stars

Sanctimonious babbler … Halie (Amy Madigan). Photograph: Johan Persson

Buried Child review – Ed Harris is brutally compelling in Sam Shepard's dark drama

3/5stars

    

Trafalgar Studios, LondonHarris impresses as a whiskey-soaked old wreck in Shepard’s gothic story of loveless inertia and poisonous guilt in a dysfunctional family

BIOGRAPHY

Michael Billington
Thursday 1 December 2016 23.00 GMT

I

t is good to see Hollywood veteran Ed Harris and his wife, Amy Madigan, gracing the London stage for the first time in Sam Shepard’s 1978 slice of American gothic. Shrewd casting also brings us the youthful Jeremy Irvine from Steven Spielberg’s War Horse and Charlotte Hope from Game of Thrones in their West End debuts. Yet, haunting as Shepard’s play is, a faint air of portentous reverence overhangs Scott Elliott’s production.

What fascinates me is Shepard’s ability to play variations on the classic US family drama. Down on a decaying farm in Illinois, the patriarchal Dodge is an old wreck slugging whiskey and gazing fixedly at the television. His wife, Halie, is a sanctimonious babbler who dreams of erecting a town statue to a dead son. Of the pair’s living progeny, Tilden is a sad halfwit and Bradley a one-legged sadist. It is a sign of the general dysfunction that when Tilden’s son, Vince, turns up with his Californian girlfriend, he goes unrecognised. The family is palpably paralysed by some past event involving the buried child of the title.

Attack on the American household gods … Ed Harris as Dodge and Barnaby Kay as Tilden in Buried Child.
Photograph: Johan Persson

You could easily list the influences at work on Shepard: Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and even Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming. You also feel Shepard shrouds the play in symbolism: why the sudden fecundity of the mysterious field at the back of the house? But what keeps one riveted is Shepard’s attack on the familiar household gods. The close-knit American family, long cherished as a political ideal, is shown to be filled with dark secrets, poisonous guilt and loveless inertia. It is also, Shepard suggests, an institution from which there is no escape.

Much as I admire the piece, the detailed naturalism of Elliott’s production downplays the comedy that Matthew Warchus found in his 2004 National Theatre revival and slows the pace: every leak in the roof and overhead footstep is minutely registered. But at least there is ample time to dwell on the performances. Harris is totally compelling as Dodge. He captures the second childishness of old age as he pummels the sofa in a tantrum demanding another bottle of whiskey.

Strong performances … Jeremy Irvine as Vince and Charlotte Hope as Shelly.
Photograph: Johan Persson

Harris also catches perfectly the contradictions of a man who denies the past – claiming the present is “the whole shootin’ match” – while being oppressed by it. It is a fine performance that suggests a once-fruitful titan reduced to a hollow-eyed husk.

Madigan as Halie deftly mixes self-delusion with downright flirtiness in the presence of the local pastor. The young actors also impress: Irvine is all angry perplexity as Dodge’s unacknowledged grandson and Hope, as his girlfriend, wittily conveys the bafflement of the outsider who suspects she has wandered into a madhouse. Barnaby Kay as Tilden has a touch of the pathos of Lennie in John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and Gary Shelford is suitably brutal as Bradley, even if you wonder precisely what led him to hack off his leg with a chainsaw. But that is one of the touches of grotesquerie that are part and parcel of Shepard’s vision. Loving as Elliott’s production is, you get the anguish without the absurdity that for Shepard is inseparable from family life.

THE GUARDIAN

Buried Child by Sam Shepard / Review by Clare Brennan

Buried Child – review

Curve, Leicester

BIOGRAPHY OF SAM SHEPARD

Clare Brennan
Sunday 20 November 2011 00.06 GM

T

o say that the action of Sam Shepard's 1978 Pulitzer prize-winning play revolves around the death of a child is hardly a plot spoiler. The title tells us everything, yet nothing. Sure, there was a child and it was buried; we learn where it lies and how it got there; we even get to know a bit about the why of its death. However, even though this is the big "secret" shared by four of the characters, Shepard's jagged dramatic form does not rely on suspense to rivet interest. Plot, as Paul Kerryson's incisive and insightful direction shows, is less important than the complex, tortured relationships between the aged mother and father, their two adult sons, a visiting grandson, his girlfriend and a local priest.

Matthew Kelly excels as Dodge in Sam Shepard's Buried Child.

Photograph: Johan Persson

Shepard's writing here poses a challenge to actors. The vivid dialogue, its everyday language vibrating with mythic resonances, shuffles rapidly between comedy, horror and tragedy. These characters make split-second shifts from naturalism to grand guignol via melodrama. Most of this strong cast rise to meet it, but Matthew Kelly's wily, desolate patriarch, Dodge, deserves special mention.

Paul Wills's set gives perfect form to Shepard's ideas. The opening of a masking curtain reveals tall ranks of maize stalks covering the stage (a farm in Illinois). Almost hidden among them is a battered sofa on which sits an old man (Dodge) in a red baseball cap. Slowly, the corn rises above him on a pallet of wooden slats which then tilts back to become a sloping ceiling above a naturalistically shabby room looking out over a veranda. House and man are simultaneously on, above and under the ground. The living and the dead are inextricably bound.

THE GUARDIAN

Sam Shepard / I don´t have a computer

Sam Shepard
Poster by T.A.

Sam Shepard
BIOGRAPHY

I don´t have a computer

"I don't have a computer. I don't have an Internet. I don't have the e-mail. I don't have any of that shit." 

Sam Shepard

Matthew Warchus on Sam Shepard: ‘He found extremity and folly funny’

Matthew Warchus: ‘He found extremity and folly funny’

BIOGRAPHY OF SAM SHEPARD

Interviews by Chris Wiegand
Wednesday 2 August 2017 14.06 BST

When I directed True West in 1994 at West Yorkshire Playhouse, I alternated the roles of the two brothers. Sam heard about it and sent a message to me enthusing about the idea. Then, when I was preparing to direct the film adaptation of Simpatico, I met him for the first time in a restaurant in New York. He was sitting there – leather jacket, windswept hair, rugged looks – and it was like meeting a cowboy. 

When I was a teenager I had watched True West on TV, sitting on the sofa at home in a village in the middle of nowhere in North Yorkshire. I don’t think I spoke for about 48 hours after seeing it. On one level, that world of the American west was a long way from my own bleak, arable landscape. But I felt this weird, strong connection to it. And Sam was fascinated with England and with Europe. So we were extraordinarily different to each other but had much in common. Like me, he loved Yasmina Reza’s plays. There is a lot of wildness in her writing, which looks at the catastrophic breakdown of civilised behaviour. He found extremity and folly to be funny in the same way that she does. He was always chortling – he had a great sense of humour. 

Sam spoke with a drawl. Talking to him, it was as if you were out camping somewhere together, sitting by the fire. He once sent me a note saying maybe we could meet up and “break some bread” – I’ve never heard anyone else use that expression. When he read from his own work, there’d be an incredibly precise, articulated voice mixed in with that drawl and he’d use that when he was reading women. His voice could be surprisingly high-pitched. He read women really beautifully, which I always found strange for someone as snaggle-toothed as he was.

Matthew Warchus

I once visited him at his home in Minnesota. It was on 9/11. My then girlfriend (now wife) and I were travelling to Bismarck, North Dakota, but were stranded at Chicago airport. We got the last rental car and started driving. Twelve hours or so into it, I thought, this is a very Sam Shepard thing to be doing on such an extraordinary day in American history. And I realised we weren’t far from where he lived. I called him and said I thought we were close to his home. He gave me directions and we pulled up at his suburban house. We went up the garden path, met him and Jessica [Lange, his partner] and the TV was on showing the twin towers. We sat there watching it and drinking English tea.

Unlike some writers who balance theatre and film careers, his formative experience with the theatre was off-off-off-Broadway. He was really a part of the underground and alternative movement. Almost all of his theatre-making was like that. That’s a total difference to the world of Hollywood.

When I was preparing Simpatico, we talked a lot about horses. That was one of his great loves – along with driving long distances. He’d really light up on those subjects. Sam was a drifter: he’d appear for a few days in New York, hover at the back of a performance, laugh and drink and move on.

THE GUARDIAN

Lynn Nottage on Sam Shepard: ‘He told me to own all of my words’

Lynn Nottage: ‘He told me to own all of my words’

BIOGRAPHY

Interviews by Chris Wiegand
Wednesday 2 August 2017 14.06 BST

At a time when people were writing plays set in living rooms and gardens, Sam Shepard’s were set in backyards and motels. He took us to a different kind of landscape that hadn’t been explored on the American stage. More than most, he figured out a way to speak to the restlessness of a generation in the 70s and 80s.

I had a one-off encounter with him in Utah. I’m a playwright, not much of a performer, and I had decided to perform some of my own writing. I picked a very remote setting where I figured no one would know me. It was at a bar at about 10pm. When I got there, I was the only person of colour. My piece was about all the times in my life that I’ve been called the N-word. People were pretty drunk. It was almost like doing a comedy night. I was extremely nervous but I muscled through. When I was done, I was sweating profusely. I went immediately to the bar and ordered a drink and someone said: “Can I give you a piece of advice?” I looked up and it was Sam Shepard and I was like, Oh shit! It’s Sam Shepard – of course you can give me a piece of advice!

I guess he was there because he was making a movie. He bought me a drink and we ended up hanging out until 3am. He said he could tell I was really nervous and he was like: “Fuck these people. This is your writing. Next time you do it, you have to live every single moment and own all of your words. And not be intimidated, not be scared.” I’ve always clung to that advice.

THE GUARDIAN

Kathy Burke on Sam Shepard: ‘It was beautiful of him to reassure me’

Kathy Burke: ‘It was beautiful of him to reassure me’

BIOGRAPHY

Interviews by Chris Wiegand
Wednesday 2 August 2017 14.06 BST

I got to speak with Sam on the phone a few times when I directed The God of Hell in London (famously he didn’t fly or have the internet). A couple of calls stand out in my mind – firstly, my ringing him to apologise for the bad reviews the play had received. 

ME: I’m so sorry I’ve let you down. They hate what I’ve done with it here.
SAM: Please don’t apologise, Kathy, they hated it over here too!

The following week, he called me:

SAM: I wanted you to know I’ve just had a call from a friend who saw the show last night. He thought you did a terrific job. He said it was like you KNOW me, so thank you, Kathy, I appreciate your hard work.

He didn’t have to do that. It was charming and beautiful of him to reassure me.

THE GUARDIAN