Blood and bones yet dressed in poetry:The drama of Sam Shepard

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

Tom Stoppard

32 p.; 20 cm