Sam Shepard’s Authentic West Anonymous College

Growing up on a dusty ranch in rural California, a young Sam Shepard was accustomed to a hardened and seemingly fabled nature of the American West, one that seemed to breathe the kind of utter wildness one might only think imaginable in a John Wayne film. Even before he was widely known as one of the greatest playwrights of his generation, Shepard spent the freedom of his adolescent days placing for blue ribbons on cattle roping teams at local rodeos. “The first team roping that I won gave me more of a feeling of accomplishment and pride of achievement than I ever got winning the Pulitzer Prize”, Shepard testified in a 1984 interview, “there’s more drama that goes down in a rodeo than one hundred plays you can go to see. It’s a real confrontation, a real thing going on. With a real audience, an actively involved audience. You should go to a couple of rodeos after you go to the theatre.”[1] Shepard’s westerly upbringing grounded his earliest perceptions of entertainment and performance, perceptions which most likely influenced the bleak poetics of his nearly-surrealist black comedies, narratives that feature rootless characters who live on the outskirts of American society.

Specifically, in Shepard’s 1980 masterpiece, True West,...