"Emotional Territory": An Interview with Sam Shepard

Abstract

Sam Shepard is, of course, a conundrum. He is undoubtedly one of the most intuitive practitioners of what Cocteau called "poetry of the theatre," creating a personal, concrete, physical language of the stage to be apprehended sensually. This encoder of American signs onstage is also an actor's playwright, among the most subtle and sympathetic chroniclers of characters' emotional states since O'Neill. Yet although he occasionally still produces a new play, most recently States of Shock in 1991, Sam Shepard now works primarily in prose and films. He has just completed filming Silent Tongues, a "truly different Western" about an 1870s Indian Medicine Show, which he both scripted and directed.