The Late Work of Sam Shepard

Hailed by critics during the 1980s as the decade's 'Great American Playwright', Sam Shepard has since continued to produce work in a wide array of media including short prose, films, plays, performances and screenplays. Like Samuel Beckett and Tennessee Williams in their autumnal years, Shepard relentlessly presses the potentialities and possibilities of theatre. This is the first volume to consider Shepard's later work and career in detail and ranges across his work produced since the late 1980s.

Shepard's motion picture directorial debut Far North (1988) served as the beginning of a new cycle of work. He returned to the stage with the politically engaged States of Shock (1991) which resembled neither his earlier plays nor his family cycle. With both Far North and States of Shock, Shepard signaled a transition into a phase in which he would experiment in form, subject and media for the next two decades. Skelton's comprehensive study includes consideration of his work in films such as Hamlet (2000), Black Hawk Down (2001), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) and Brothers (2009); issues of authenticity in the film and screenplay Don't Come Knocking (2005) and the play Kicking a Dead Horse (2007); of memory and trauma in Simpatico, The Late Henry Moss and When the World was Green, and of masculine and conservative narratives in States of Shock and The God of Hell.

Introduction
Chapter 1: "How Many Lives . . . Within This One?": The Performances of Sam Shepard
Chapter 2: "What's Beyond Authentic?": Authenticity and Artistry in Don't Come Knocking and Kicking a Dead Horse
Chapter 3: "One of Us Has Forgotten": Memory and Trauma in Simpatico, The Late Henry Moss and When the World was Green
Chapter 4: "I Miss the Cold War So Much": Interrogating Masculine and Conservative Narratives in States of Shock and The God of Hell
Chapter 5: "Surrounded by My Primitive Captors": Hybridity and Hegemony in Silent Tongue and Eyes for Consuela
Chapter 6: "Where's All the Men?": Men, Women and Homosociality in the Late Style of Sam Shepard
Conclusion
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index

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