The Late Work of Sam Shepard

When we think of Sam Shepard, most of us probably think of his family sequence of plays—Curse of the Starving Class (1976), Buried Child (1979), True West (1980), and some scholars argue Fool for Love (1983) and A Lie of the Mind (1985). Some of us might think of his wild, experimental, and largely unrevised early work. Some of us might not be able to extricate the work from the playwright's persona: slim, lone ranger, a rugged man with crooked teeth forging the American—and the dramatic—frontier. Much of the public sees him only as an actor. But few, if any, of us think of Shepard's career post-1985. These impressions of Shepard and his work lead to The Late Work of Sam Shepard by Shannon Blake Skelton, instructor in the School of Music, Theater, and Dance at Kansas State University. By analyzing Shepard's later work, Skelton not only examines how...