"'I just dropped out of nowhere,' Sam Shepard said of his arrival in New York, at nineteen, in the fall of 1963. 'It was absolute luck that I happened to be there when the whole Off-Off Broadway movement was starting.' Shepard, a refugee from his father’s farm in California, had spent eight months as an actor travelling the country by bus with a Christian theatre troupe, the Bishop’s Company Repertory Players. Acting had been his ticket to ride; he’d been so scared at his Bishop’s Company audition that he’d recited the stage directions. ... Shepard’s early plays, written between 1964 and 1971, were full of surprises and assaults on the senses—people spoke from bathtubs or painted one another, colored Ping-Pong balls dropped from the ceiling, a chicken was sacrificed onstage. The plays express what Shepard called the 'despair and hope' of the sixties; they act out both the spiritual dislocation and the protean survival instinct of traumatic times. ..."
New Yorker: The Pathfinder
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Archive: Seven Plays
2017 August: Sam Shepard (November 5, 1943 – July 27, 2017), 2019 July: Sam Shepard Saw It All Coming
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