Sam Shepard Takes Stock of ‘Buried Child’ and the Writer’s Life
The New York Times, January 28, 2016“You change,” the playwright and actor Sam Shepard said. “You go through all kinds of contortions. But the play is the same.”
Articles & Recent Productions
2019
Sam Shepard Saw ItAll Coming
The Atlantic, August 2019“…Shepard plays are back in season, and they are neither antiquarian nor regional. They are modern—even visionary—and disturbingly universal…”
Emotional Malnourishment in “Curse of the Starving Class”
The New Yorker, May 20, 2019The playwright Sam Shepard’s matter-of-fact observations about where his characters stand in the world tell us so much about the world they inhabit.
True West on Broadway
The New Yorker, January 2019“Ethan Hawke and Paul Dano star in Sam Shepard’s legendary play about fathers, competition, and male angst” at Roundabout Theatre.
2018
True West in the West End
Vanity Fair, November 2018“Exploring the dissonance between two sides of the American psyche—pitting the safe, suburban pleasantries of the American Dream against the chaotic violence of the frontier—True West is a challenge for two actors who acknowledge they are, as Flynn puts it, extremely English.”
2017
Sam Shepard’s Soul
The New Yorker, August 2017“…he merged his love of jazz and jazz culture with stories about impossible love affairs and male competitiveness and young people anxious to eat away at any chance of intimacy—all set in an America made real to its crookedly romantic inhabitants because of the movies, and sometimes real experience.” —Hilton Als
2016
Chad Batka for The New York Times.
2014
Sam Shepard: ‘America is on its way out as a culture’
The Guardian, September 2014As his seminal 1980 play, True West, is revived in London, the influential playwright reflects on the diminishing global role of the US, and the deaths of his friends Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robin Williams
2011
Photo by Grant Delin.
Sam Shepard by Michael Almereyda
Interview, September 24, 2011“There has always been something vaguely punk rock about Shepard’s work—a visceral directness coupled with the sense of never quite knowing what to expect or what he’ll do next—that has made it feel as instantly powerful and iconic as he himself has seemed eternally elusive.”
2010
Sam Shepard opens up
The Guardian, March 20, 2010With a new collection of short stories to his name and two of his plays currently showing in New York, the notoriously private Pulitzer prize-winner discusses masculinity, his battle with drink and his ‘tumultuous’ relationship with Jessica Lange.
1997
Sam Shepard, The Art of Theater No. 12
The Paris Review, Issue 142, Spring 1997“…He said he had been exhausted by the theater’s rehearsals, by a trip to London the previous week, and by a hectic schedule of public readings. Nevertheless, at the end of the meeting he declined to be driven back to his Midtown hotel, saying he would rather walk back through Central Park instead.”
1986
Photo by Bruce Weber.
Sam Shepard on Working With Dylan, Why Jim Morrison Has No Sense of Humor
Rolling Stone, December 18, 1986“It was Franz Kafka who wrote that “a book must be the ax for the frozen sea in us.” And in the more than 40 plays that Sam Shepard has written since 1964, this American playwright has been breaking open that frozen sea with an originality of vision, a jolting intermingling of humor and grief, a profound examination of the hopes and failures of the American family and an astonishing ear for the cadences of the American idiom.”