ROSS WETZSTEON
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playwright we have. Like musical improvisations, in which the notes
(or in Shepard's case, the words) are not as important as the rhythms
and harmonies and sense of spontaneous feeling, Shepard's arias
seek to soar into a disembodied freedom, to create emotions beyond
rational structure,
to
induce in both player and audience a trancelike
state of grace.
This is not to say that the fantasy/monologues have only private
reference. The long monologue at the end of
Curse of the Starving
Class,
for instance - broken up and given to two characters, mother
and son - is as powerful a statemen t of the American tragedy as any
passage in our literature: "That eagle comes down and picks up the
cat in his talons and carries him screaming off into the sky....And
they fight. They fight like crazy in the middle of the sky. The cat's
tearing his chest out, and the eagle's trying to drop him, but the cat
won't let go because he knows if he falls he'll die. And the eagle's
being torn apart in midair. The eagle's trying to free himself from
the cat, and the cat won't let go. And they come crashing down to
earth. Both of them come crashing down. Like one whole thing."
As for Shepard's sense of stage imagery, as the Howard Hughes
character says in
Seduced:
"One story's as good as another. It's all in
the way you tell it." The way Shepard tells his stories is in flashes of
light , leaving a radiant afterimage silhouetted in our minds. At the
end of
Red Cross,
the young man stands with his back to the audience
- the set and costumes are completely white, and when he suddenly
turns to face us, we see a stream of bright red blood trickling down
his forehead, an image of horrifying pain no words could evoke. At
the end of
La Turista,
the hero races full speed toward the back of the
set and crashes through the wall, leaving the outline of his body
before our startled eyes, an image of terrorized flight no speech could
convey. In the final scene of
Angel City,
slimy green ooze seeps slowly
across the stage-who has ever said so much about Los Angeles so
succinctly? And as
Melodrama Play
comes to an end, the captor stands
over his captive: beaten, tortured, insane with pain, slowly circling
the stage on hands and knees, wailing like a dying animal, his mouth
dripping with blood, his eyes glazed with death, the victim cries out
in long anguished sobs - the most visceral image in our theatre of the
brutality of man to man.
"If
I don't actually get the feeling of it," the
Hughes character says, "then there's no point in tell in' it. Am I
right?"
.
The second group of Shepard plays concerns the writer as
visionary: sometimes in parable form (the Howard Hughes figure of
Seduced,
the man in
Geography
oj
a Horse Dreamer
who dreams the
