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Hamid Hammad Abid
The Unequivocal Spiritual Death
of the American Family:
A Study in Sam Shepard's True West.
Instructor. Hamid Hammad Abid
Education College for Women
University of Anbar
This paper deals with the absence of the spiritual values
within the American family in modern and sophisticated times.
Apparently, the American family looks great but in reality it is
disintegrated to the extent that the family members are ready to kill
one another for trivial reasons. Sam Shepard is one of the American
playwrights who have tackled the family as a type of his own
society. Throughout the analysis of his True West, one can notice
that it is not always the case where society is responsible of one's
misery but a person might victimize himself via his uncontrolled
instincts and whims.
Sam Shepard was born on an army base near Chicago in
1943 where his father had returned from World War II and
stationed there. His life is somewhat messy and complicated
especially when he was young; he has violent fights with his
alcoholic father. Noted for his bleak portrayal of American family
life, Shepard's own bringing was affected by a very strict father and
indifferent mother. His family moved frequently during his
childhood because his father was in military. Shepard's adult
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perception of his early life, especially that particular sort of
temporary society in Southern California, has led in many of his
plays to investigations of the feeling that a person does not belong
to any specific culture. The sense of non-belonging has urged
Shepard to explore two facets of the American experience; the
Mythical West and the American Family. In most of his plays,
Shepard has explored the American family and in so doing exposed
deep-rooted aspects of the national character. In his plays, including
the True West, the West is not just a backdrop to the action but a
state of mind and a complex of values that inform the conflict and
the emotional upheaval of Shepard's dramatic world.1
For Shepard, the West has been connected with considerable
ideological baggage. It has come to represent a range of values such
as; industriousness, taciturn emotion, self-reliance, and
individualism. However, the West also includes a problematic
subset of contradictions; it has long aroused a suspicion of
government, education, and woman. It is reflecting a basic national
dispute between liberation and communitarian positions.2 Sam
Shepard was influenced by Samuel Beckett's plays particularly
Waiting for Godot, which he had read during his study, and
determined to write plays that had the improvisational fluidity of
jazz. He tries to go far from writing the realist plays but he finds
himself diving towards realist issues to cope with the audiences'
tastes.
Eugene O'Neill and Sam Shepard, who resist the call for
realism and experimented with other forms, returned to this form
because the American audience is willing to accept realist drama
than any other form. Why the American audience is hunger for
realism, though other national theatres were presenting other forms
of drama, is a difficult question to answer. But perhaps "dispelling
several myths about the form will suggest why Americans prefer
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this much-criticized but nevertheless popular form."3 Thus, Shepard
responds to his society desires and starts to write plays not away
from their realist life. He intends to seek at this time a wider
audience and the means to speak on a vaster level of cultural
conversation. True West, which is more consciously crafted, is
closer to realism, and represents a turning point in the playwright's
career. It shows Shepard's deep and real concern with family
dynamics and the artist's plight .4
It is safe to say that family is a minimized society, so it is the
main subject for most of the American writers' manipulation and
especially Sam Shepard. He comes to feel that if the family is the
source of a disintegrative pressure, of contradictory needs and
defining tensions, it is also where he can eventually look for these
connections that sense of unity whose lack he constantly laments.
Besides, "the family is itself a connection with world beyond its
parameters--- even a love story has to do with family; crime has to
do with family. We all come out of each other—everyone is born
out of a mother and a father, and you go on to be a father. It is
endless cycle."5 In the complex life of today; the quest for the
unattainable takes several forms. Usually, man strives for what he
does not possess. The poor man wants to be rich, the rich to be
powerful, and the powerful to be happy and so it goes on. And in
man's permanent quest, two things stand out most. Man always
dreams, and this dream is hopeless and can never be realized.
Modern American drama displays the prevalent attitudes in
depicting man as spiritually vacuumed due to the absence of values
in his life. "Whether initiated or not, man remains as a 'child' and in
most cases his innocence makes him vulnerable to the harsh
conditions of his environment." 6 This shows the lack of faith that
causes the people's troubles besides the bad estimation of the
difficult situations.
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In keeping with belief that literature should concern itself
primarily with spiritual values, the wise speeches and the
instructions inside schools and other institutions are necessary for
all to avoid committing sins and mistakes. It is not always true that
a man in modern times is viewed as a victim than as a sinner. God
has distinguished human beings by the mind and this is a great
grace which is not given to other creatures. Thus, man should see
with his mind's eyes not to justify his mistakes by relating that to
the bad conditions of his environment. True West which is written
in (1980) can be seen as an essential expression of Shepard's vision,
exploring the core concerns of his career; masculinity, Western
identity, and the individual's stance toward communal relations.7
As a strict social critic, Shepard attempts to confirm in this
play that the search for a "true west" no longer exists. Most of the
Americans are members of a damned family, all victims: fathers are
seen in Shepard's works drunken misfit, mothers are indifferent and
disassociated observers, and brothers are seen as mortal enemies
forgetting blood ties and willing to achieve the demands of their
whims. The title of Shepard's play, True West, is significant in
many ways but one clear reference is to American frontier West as
an ideal of masculine forcefulness and independence. Though
cowboy and gunslingers have disappeared, the idea of rough and
aggressive men continues to persist in America. True West is
basically a drama of sibling rivalry, as two brothers (Lee and
Austin) occupy their mother's home while she is away on a
vacation. The relationship of the brothers is clearly difficult to be
understood, as each has a radically different life path. The play
starts with new meeting, Austin and Lee are together for the first
time in five years. From the beginning, Lee the oldest is jealous
because his mother has chosen Austin to take care of the house
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while she vacationed in Alaska. He is also unsatisfied and indignant
by Austin's status and refinement.
One of the key elements of True West's dramatic world is its
pervasive uncertainty. The brothers suffer from deep anxieties
regarding the direction and meaning of their lives. Both have a
longing for assurances and for confirmation but in improper way.
On one level the brother's tentative condition stems from the
profound lack of parental authority and care. The mother figure is
disconnected and delusioned and she doesn't care for her disordered
house, the father of the play (off-stage and unseen) also proves
ineffectiveness and withdrawn, having retreated to live in alcoholic
isolation in the desert.8 Most of the old American people prefer to
live in isolation because of the boredom from the intolerable life.
Shepard has depicted the real portrayal of American family. The
two brothers are left alone without any attention from their parents.
Thus, they will be subdued for their illusions and wrong mythical
western dreams because of their parents' absence. In Sam Shepard's
recent works, in addition to super realism of the dialogue and sets,
there is a continuing fascination and probing of favorite American
myths. One of "the most compelling is the interrogation of the
concept of the West in the ironically titled True West, where the
most impoverished and cliché- ridden notions of this imaginary
space jostle incongruously with the frustrating experiences of life in
suburban Los Angeles."9
Undoubtedly, the story of this drama is so important for the
reader to know the details about the common American family
which represents the American society and especially the West.
Austin is a screenwriter informs his brother Lee that the Hollywood
movie producer (Saul Kimmer), he is writing for, is coming to visit
and Lee agrees to leave for a few hours if he can takes Austin's car.
Austin is meeting with Hollywood movie producer, who loves the
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great story that Austin described for him and only needs the
synopsis to convince the studio executives to record this screenplay.
Lee returns after a short while, carrying a stolen television set. He
looks as if he found no task just the thefts, and this occurs because
he lives in a disordered family.
After the introduction, Lee ingratiates himself with Kimmer
the producer to go golfing with him the next morning. Lee tells
Kimmer that he has an idea for a contemporary Western movie; the
producer suggests having Austin write an outline for consideration.
Undeliberately, the producer will be the key for the antagonism
between the two brothers. Thus, it is funny when the illiterate Lee
has persuaded Kimmer even though Lee can't get Kimmer's name
right. True West is more contemporary in its presentation of two
brothers encountering each other for the first time in five years."
The differences between Lee and Austin become blurred as they
each try to take on characteristics of the other, provoked by envy
for the life each sees the other as leading, and in a search of their
missing egos." 10 The envious fraternal relationship in this drama is
so obvious to the degree that it will turn the family affairs upside
down. Sam Shepard attempts to expose the spiritual death of the
virtues that the family members have never kept for one another
and there is a wide gap which needs to be bridged by mutual
familial understanding.
In True West, Shepard explores a uniquely American myth
through the intensely fearful tale of two brothers writing a script.
The script is about a chase: one man pursuing another across the
country in a drive for a vengeance without a definite start or finish.
Step by step the two brothers became the two men in the script. The
real and the fictional, the story of the play and the story in the play,
joined; and this answers the question that one would find in the
play's title. The myth of America is its reality, Shepard suggests, the
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dream of the West is the true west.11 The seeds of hatred and
jealousy are implanted between the brothers as a result of the
producer's clear interference and his promise for Lee. From now on,
Lee is encouraged to force his brother Austin to write him the
outline while Lee is dictating the story, saying "not until you write
this thing! You're gonna' write this outline thing for me or that car's
gonna' wind up in Arizona with a different paint job."12 Lee is
desperate to finish and subtly threatens Austin if he doesn't help.
Lee is an illusionary dreamer; he begins to have visions of a steady
income and a prosperous life. He insists that Austin has to write
him the outline even the later is going to inform the police for the
threat. Lee behaves according to his stormy desire away from the
rational conduct by warning his brother:
They don't mean a thing. You go down to the L. A.
Police
Department there and ask them what kind
people kill each other the most. What do you think
they'd say? --- family people. Brothers. Brothers-inlaw. Cousins. Real American-type people. They kill
each other in the heat mostly. In the Smog-Alerts. In
the Brush Fire Season. Right about this time a year. (I.
iv.,p.24).
The path of misunderstanding is prepared that Lee is ready to
kill his brother for trivial aims and this reflects the decay of the
American family morality. Although ostensibly about two opposed
siblings, Shepard uses their confrontation to express concerns about
the dual nature of the self and America itself, especially the
seductive myths of the West in which Americans often place their
hopes to avoid facing reality. The play's title is taken from a defunct
(dead) magazine that used to tell stories of the Wild West, but
created a romanticized vision for its readers. In the same way the
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brothers endeavor to create a 'true' image of the West, but cannot
conjure up anything convincing beyond their own struggle, the
reality of which they all, including the mother, fail to recognize as
what the West has become.13
Austin, not an artist but a contriver of entertainment,
nevertheless represents the imagination against Lee's literalness.
The artist should be patient in front of the challenges since he
carries a message. Their battle shifts its ground until Austin, in the
face of Lee's claim that his story reveals the 'true' West, retorts that
"it's stupid! It's the dumbest story I ever heard in my life.
(II.v.p.30). Austin refuses to write the script, even though Saul, (the
producer) says "three hundred thousand, Austin. Just for a first
draft. Now you've never been offered that kind of money before."
(II.vi.p.34). Saul tries to join them together and admits that he
prefers Lee's story to Austin's, adding that he likes Lee's plan to use
some of the money from the sale of the script to set up a trust for
the brother's father. In spite of all these temptations, Austin is angry
saying violently " I'm not doing this script! I'm not writing this crap
for you or anybody else. You cannot blackmail me into it. You can't
threaten me into it. There's no way I am doing it. So just give it up.
Both of you."(II.vi.p.34). Austin seems so obstinate because he
knows the real value of his writing.
True West is a play about writing a screenplay. Lee can be
seen as a postmodern character that does not need an absolute and
stable sense of reality. His truth is an illusion, a potential
Hollywood script, and he is completely comfortable with that dark
line between reality and representation. Austin, on the other hand,
needs to feel fixed, even though his rigid version of reality is so
frustrating to him that "he winds up begging Lee to take him out to
desert to live a life of freedom from the restraints of the modern
world. He is both disdainful and envious of Lee's physical and
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existential mobility, telling Saul that Lee has been camped out on
the desert for three months."14 No doubt there is a gap between the
brothers and it is expanded by Saul's interference. The two brothers
are about to fight each other out of envy neglecting the blood ties
and the brotherly love. This play is a real image of the western
American disintegrated family. The family members care only for
their own interests whereas the essential virtuous principle of
sacrifice is absent. William W. Demastes has stated that the two
brothers of True West's play end up in pursuit of each other, locked
in bitter struggle, resisting any form of closure, exactly like the two
characters of Lee's unfinished script, as life to imitate a debased
version of art.15 This emphasizes the shallow and fragile roots of
brotherhood in American modern west.
Like most human beings, the two brothers, take their
identities for granted and would consider those identities stable and
unchangeable if they thought of them at all. Austin is a little more
self-assured of himself and he is more confident even when he was
threatened by his brother but it does not last long. Austin's sense of
identity is shattered when the producer Saul rejects his movie idea.
Thus, Austin confirms his personality and his importance when he
states that" I drive on the freeway everyday. I swallow the smog. I
watch the news in color. I shop in the Safeway. I 'm the one who is
touch! Not him!" (II.vi.p.35). But later on we find Austin is only in
touch with the alcohol he consumes as his hazy mind aspires for a
new sense of identity. His life becomes unbearable therefore he
decides that he is going to live in the desert, like his brother Lee:
I do Lee. I really do. There's nothin' down here for me. There
never was. When we were kids here it was different. There
was a life here then. But now--- I keep comin' down here
thinkin' it's the fifties or somethin'. I keep finding myself
getting off the freeway at familiar landmarks that turn out to
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be unfamiliar. On the way to appointments. Wandering down
streets I thought I recognized that turn out to be replicas of
streets I remember. Streets I misremember. Streets I can't tell
if I lived on or saw in postcard. Fields that don't even exist
anymore. (II. viii. p.49).
Perhaps most significantly, Austin begins to envy Lee's
strength, testing the idea that he might be able to hold his own with
Lee in terms of brute strength. Austin, throughout his speech
stresses the idea of being on picnic or vacation to feel the
authenticity of the world that he usually writes about. Shepard's
True West is an illustration of theories of post modern identity, and
contends that Austin and Lee allegorize two ways that modern man
attempts to solve his feelings of displacement, alienation, and nonbelonging. While Austin initially clings to lessen nostalgia for a
stable sense of identity, relationships and history," Lee registers a
potentially positive sense of freedom which accompanies man when
he loses his nostalgia for history and realizes that identity and the
past are only myths to be performed and manipulated."16 Lee is
much more defensive about his self-image and he feels that he has
been insulted and stung by his mother's preference for Austin as a
house-sitter. Lee confirms his competence in domestic matters that
their mother could also ask him to water plants. However, it is as a
natural man, as a desert survivor, that Lee most confidently defines
his sense of self. But after the producer tempts Lee with the hope of
becoming more conventional and sophisticated, Lee discards his
desert-rat identity and tries to assume a new one.
The absence of the spiritual values is repeated widely
throughout the brothers' behaviors. They are really contradicted,
unsatisfied with their places in life, each wishes to be in his
brother's shoes. True West, on a fundamental level dramatizes the
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problematic aspect of a Western mentality, and the play's action
finally leads to a violent assertion of dominance.17 It is noticed in
some of Shepard's plays that men are violent, struggling one
another, at the women they love or at inanimate objects. They are
unable to express their feelings and to understand their own
intentions. Rarely do they have a job and if they do it is occasional
or marginal. They are shown as "failed farmers, minor rodeo
performers. They ride on the intensity of their emotions. They take
the inside track. Something is missing from their world, above all a
rational control. They live by instinct. The subconscious become
conscious."18
The two brothers have lost faith in the values that had allowed
them to define themselves as normal human beings. Austin has
transformed himself into a pale imitation of Lee by stealing toasters
instead of TVs. Meanwhile Lee has become an even more frustrated
writer than Austin. He smashes a golf club into Austin's typewriter
with the regularity and passivity of a metronome, and burns the
pages of script. Both men are now drunk and the house in shambles.
Austin criticizes Lee's behavior, "it's not the machine's fault that
you can't write. It's a sin to do that to a good machine."
(II.viii.p.43). The curse of the brothers' instability and antagonism
stems from the fragment state of their family.
Most of Shepard's characters start and end as blank slates.
They seem as confused characters," their confusion is shared by the
many other Shepard's figures who peel off inherited or inorganic
personalities while simultaneously discouraging us from thinking a
"true" character exists at their cores."19 Not only the two brothers
are misguided but even the parents lured away by a promise of
freedom that nothing more that a refusal of responsibility. The
alcoholic father, living in the desert, abandoned his sons long ago.
The mother similarly escapes by vacationing in Alaska and has
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become totally disassociated from her children. She shows no
concern over her destroyed kitchen or her sons, as one tries to kill
the other in front of her, and she refuses to see what is happening.
Such parents indicate "what Shepard sees as the spiritual death of
the American family, and into this spiritual gap the brothers seek to
place an image of something that might sustain them: the West." 20
Though Austin in his thirties and Lee in his forties but they are in
need of their parents' guidance. They suffer from the same problem
that their parents do, unable to live the unbearable life of their
families. They look for an outlet, so they resort to desert because it
is still pure and unpolluted by human beings' offences. We know
well that nature (desert) is a source of inspiration and contemplation
and at the same time it is a sort of freedom for the two sons. Most
of the American people ignore the practical and serious side of life
and they live in dreams and illusions that never prevent them of
thinking with fight .Instead of looking for solution to their troubles,
they escape to desert to detach from the family responsibility.
Sam Shepard had never felt associated with America, except
at the level of myth. Like the Beats* he admired, he had no roots.
They lived mythically, in search of some spiritual grail. Their
journeys were partly literal and geographical, partly metaphorical
and psychological.21 In Shepard's play, Austin also expresses a
desire to return to a more basic way of life, although his motivation
is based on a different set of circumstances. Given the public
climate at the time that True West was written and produced,
Shepard had encountered more than a few individuals who, for any
number of reasons, wanted to return to the true West. If we trace the
backgrounds of most of the modern American fathers, we find them
maintain their distance partly by their superior manner, but also by
their refusal to become emotionally involved in anything, or with
anyone. They lack the ability to guide their families properly. Not
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only the fathers but even the sons cannot settle their differences
peacefully. Evidently, Austin and Lee are unable to conquer their
essential differences, by which Shepard suggests that the two sides
can never be entirely reconciled, but must be accepted for their
differences .22
Paralleling Godot in Waiting for Godot, the father, a central
figure in Shepard's drama, is absent, but made dramatically present
by their continual reference to him. Most of modern dramas showed
the absent roles of the fathers and even they were present they add
nothing to the development of the plot. They are engaged with their
own troubles and sometimes they have been rejected by their
families since they are unable to correct their defaults.
In most of his works, Sam Shepard suggests that American
guilt is so deep rooted that the evil it generates will inevitably
destroy all that is built on it. True West is the third in a trilogy of
domestic disintegration. In each of the plays, the spiritual death of
the family becomes a metaphor for larger themes; the death of
community, the death of the dream of freedom, promised by the
wilderness. What makes Shepard so archetypal American is that he
so desperately wants to believe in this dream, even though he
cannot fail to recognize betrayals by history. The idea of a (true
west) contains a fierce irony. The brothers in the play seem to have
opposite dreams: Austin, the screenwriter, yearns to make it
commercially; Lee the drifter lives by the tenets of an anarchic,
antisocial individualism. But by the play's end each steals the
other's dream and is victimized by his theft. As Shepard told the
reporter when the play first opened, "I wanted to write a play about
double nature, one that would not be symbolic or metaphorical or
any of that stuff. I just wanted to give a taste of what it feels like to
be two sided…. I think we're split in a much more devastating way
than psychology can ever reveal."23
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In True West, the American family is depicted in an accurate
manner, that Shepard lets the readers sense the absence and the
presence of his figures throughout the dialogue of the available
characters. We hear about the brother's mom till the end of the play.
Her appearance is just like her absence; she neither changes nor
adds anything, and she is not given a name just (Mom) to show her
shallow importance. She enters, having returned early from her visit
to Alaska. She is taken aback by the mess in the house, especially
her dead plants, but she seems more interested in telling her sons
that the famous artist, 'Pablo Picasso', is in town to visit the
museum. Austin informs her that Picasso is dead and that he and
Lee are leaving for the desert, "Me and Lee are going out to the
desert to live." (II.iv.p.53). But Lee insists that he's going alone,
that he's giving up on the screen play, and that he needs to borrow
his mother's antique, something authentic to take with him to the
desert. He says, " I'm gonna' just borrow some your antiques, Mom.
You don't mind do ya? Just a few plates and things, silverware."
(II.iv.p.56). Austin attempts to stop Lee from leaving by strangling
him with a piece of phone cord. It is the climax of the play, and it
reflects a great sort of a deadly fighting in American modern
dramas.
The writer wants to expose that the American family
members are so passive but aggressive because they cannot use
their mind and remember the blood-tie in a time of anger. Their
mother, calmly insists that Austin should not kill his brother and
exits, saying (You'll have to stop fighting in the house. There's
plenty of room outside to fight. You've got the whole outdoors to
fight in. …You're not killing him are you? (II.iv.p.57). She is going
to check into a motel, that she doesn't recognize her house any
more. Austin is sure that if he leaves free, Lee will kill him, "I can't
stoop choking him! He will kill me if I stop choking him."
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(II.iv.p.58). There is no way for tolerance and patience because the
evil has controlled their minds, and this incident may show one of the
most dramatic scenes that affirms the death of the spiritual values.
Being indifferent, no wonder their mother tells Austin that he
"can't kill" his brother. The reflexiveness of a text in which the
characters start a screenplay of their own invention suggests a world
in which reality is modeled on fiction rather than the other way
around, a world which is fascinatingly, echoic, prophetic.24 When
Austin releases the tension on the cord around Lee's neck it appears
that Lee is dead, but after a few moments Lee leaps to his feet. The
most important thing in this incident is the mother's reaction. She
seems that she has accustomed to such behavior and no longer feels a
need to respond to it. Her detached attitude toward her son's irrational
action suggests that this incident is not unique in the brother's
relationship. Shepard's plays are marked by an improvisational feeling
because of their great variety in moving from surreal to the realistic in
treating people and situations ranging from the mythic to the abstract.
25
The playwright is concerned with manipulating the idea of the
spiritual death of the American family and the struggle among the
family members to reveal the real identity of the western American
society. Ultimately, Shepard is suggesting that what is attributed as
personality, character, and a sense of identity might be little more than
public role playing that, upon close inspection, does not come close to
revealing the true nature of the person. This can be concluded that
persons engaged in this role playing may even convince themselves
that their identity is what they have created. When confronted with the
possibility that this role may not be true self, the realization can often
be painful as it is for Austin. In Lee's case, the persona he exhibits at
the beginning of the play is most likely his true self. He has learned
not to care what others think of his behavior and as a result, has
become free to act on any impulse that occurs to him. When his idea
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of the film receives serious consideration from Saul Kimmer (the
producer), however, Lee begins to understand the benefits that can be
reaped from playing the role. As Austin did at the beginning of the
play, he learns to control his basic instincts in the service of attaining
respect and wealth. Both are running after their personal interests and
neglecting the sibling-tie that gathers them together. C. W. E. Bigsby
observes that Sam Shepard has realized in performance a symbol of
lives which are" the enactment of stories with their roots in the distant
past of the ritual and myth as well as in a present in which role and
being, performance and authenticity, is at the center of Shepard's
character's search for a stable identity, a fixed reality that both eludes
and threatens to trap them as they perform the instabilities of post
modern identity in the late twentieth century."26 Really the instinctive
conduct sometimes cannot be controlled by the person's culture and
education.
The readers or the audiences have understandably devoted much
attention to the mythic elements in Shepard's play True West. The
play's plot has connection with the archetypal story of Cain and Abel;
Cain the peaceful tiller of the soil, is a sympathetic figure, while Abel,
the smug slaughterer of sheep, is implicitly favored the bloodthirsty
deity. The biblical story of Cain is part of our cultural heritage, and
any story of fraternal battle recalls in some measure. Further, the more
closely one looks at Shepard's play, the more reminders there are of
the pre-Christian conflict between Cain and Abel. True West is
"tragic-comic study of Modern Cain and Abel in California."27 Like
Cain, Austin is associated with vegetation; in his mother's absence, he
has vowed to lend her flourishing house plants. Lee is an outcast who
prefers the company of the snakes in the desert to that of other men. A
virtual illiterate, he makes his living by theft. In one sense, the
brothers are two halves for the same person since they are unsatisfied
with their luck in life. Shepard has mixed realist, surrealist, mythical
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and some religious touches to cope with the audience desires and to be
in contact with realism.
True West is a play of two acts, in which Shepard intends to
synthesize the characteristics of the 'true West'. A West that is
represented neither by the love story of Austin nor by the implausible
chase sequence of Lee, but rather by the play itself, in which good
warped until it is indistinguishable from evil and craftsmanship of any
kind is scorned in the pursuit of reality. Sam Shepard seemed at first
glance to have completely deleted traditional dramaturgy and subject.
He used to Starting not" with plot, character, or theme but with an
image. Shepard, partly out of genuine theatrical naïveté, unleashed a
stream what seemed to be automatic writing in the surrealist
tradition."28 Shepard attempts to emphasize that the modern American
person has been influenced by his environment and does not respect
his values and roots. This is one of the American people defects; they
are unstable and behave according to their passions and desires.
Throughout tracing and examining True West, one can find
that mothers and fathers as well as matriarchy and patriarchy, are
equally irrelevant to modern life. The modern west is a place guided
by false materialistic gods who misguide the efforts of men and set
them at each other's throats. Mothers, fathers, gods, and goddesses are
equally comic, trivial, insignificant, and insane in the true West of
Shepard's True West. Shepard's popularity broadened and by the time
of this play which appeared in 1980," many critics felt that he was at
the forefront of new American playwrights was defining a new decade
of theatre. Shepard has won more Obie awards than any other living
playwright and a Pulitzer Prize, while as a film actor he became an
idol of Middle America."29
The brothers of True West are both rips, in their bad and hostile
treatment of each other; they are incarnation for the disintegration and
degeneration of the modern American families. Although this play is
written in a recent modern time, it shows the absence of the peaceful
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Hamid Hammad Abid
dialogue that represents the civilized people, but they are accustomed
to quarrel. Though they live in somewhat sophisticated time and
civilized state, they reflect the outlandish situations that remind the
reader with the savage life of the medieval time and the life of the
forest which stresses the survival for the fittest.
In True West, Shepard has begun his play in a realistic style
and gradually introduces bizarre to achieve a mythic dimension in his
story. Most of the writers believed that art was written for the sake of
art only. But the modern writers whether they are British or
Americans, like Shepard find out that art should be for the sake of
humanity. Art should exhibit the people's suffering and problems to
find an outlet or solution. The dramatists ought to live among their
nation to be in a full understanding of the people's odd conducts. And
this case cannot be achieved unless the dramatist has a wide experience.
To some modern playwrights, the drama is a factory of thoughts so the
dramatists of lesser experience and different backgrounds yield to the
demands of forces they are not equipped to cope with.30
Shepard's play is a criticism of the criteria Hollywood producers
rely on in evaluating writings. And Shepard is somewhat unsatisfied
with what Hollywood presents. Saul Kimmer, a movie producer in
True West, represents the superficial world of Hollywood. His world
is that of trivial commerce rather than of real art. Obviously, most of
the Hollywood movies are garbage and purposeless because of the
inferior sources that stemmed from the illiterate story narrators like
Lee in this play. The reader may conclude that the father's role in the
modern drama is roughly absent, in addition to the elusive role played
by the mother led to the failure of the sons in having a life shaped by
the spiritual values. Surely, Special parental attention must be paid for
the sons to give their unstable and troubled life a sense of happiness.
Both the vulnerability of youth with indifferent parents and a society
with its language, laws re-enhance despair that causes not only the
family loss but its real destruction.
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96 ‫ العدد‬/ ‫مجلة كلية االداب‬
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Notes
1. David Kranser, ed. A Companion To Twentieth Century American
Drama, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2005), p.291.
2. Ibid. p.287.
3. William W. Demastes, ed. Realism and the American Tradition,
(Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1996), p. ix.
4. Susan C. W. Abbotson, Thematic Guide to Modern Drama,
(London: Greenwood press, 2003), p.224.
5. Matthew Roundane, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Sam
Shepard, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p.21.
6. N. S. Pradham, Modern American Drama, A Study in Myth and
Tradition, (New Delhi: Arnold Heinemann, 1978), p.36
7. David Kranser, ed. A Companion To Twentieth Century American
Drama, p.293.
8. Ibid. p.293.
9. William W. Demastes, ed. Realism and the American Tradition,
p.13.
10. Susan C. W. Abbotson, Thematic Guide to Modern Drama, p.229.
11. Richard Gray, A History of American Literature, (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004), pp.716-717.
12. Richard Gilman, Sam Shepard Seven Plays, (New York: Dial
Press, 2005), p.23. And all the subsequent quotations are from the
same edition.
13. Susan C. W. Abbotson, p.224.
14. Annette J. Saddik, Contemporary American Drama, (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press Ltd., 2007), p.145.
15. William W. Demastes, ed. P.14.
16. Annette J. Saddik, Contemporary American Drama, p.132.
17. David Kranser, p.296.
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96 ‫ العدد‬/ ‫مجلة كلية االداب‬
Hamid Hammad Abid
18. C. W. E. Bigsby, Modern American Drama, 1945-2000,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004,), p.169.
19. Marc Robinson, The American Play: 1787-2000, (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2009,), p.320.
20. Susan C. W. Abbotson, p.230.
* Beat Generation: (1950s-1960s) A term applied to a group of
contemporary poets and novelists who are in romantic rebellion
against the culture and the value systems of present-day America,
and express their revolt through literary works of Loose Structure
and slang Diction asserting the essentially valueless nature of
existence. They gained fame by giving readings in coffee-houses,
often accompanied by jazz music. A Handbook to Literature. p.47
21. C. W. E. Bigsby, Modern American Drama, 1945-2000, p.172.
22Susan C. W. Abbotson, p.230.
23. Sylvan Barnet et al, Types of Drama, Plays and Contexts, 8th ed.
(New York: Library of Congress Cataloging, 2001), p.1223.
24. C. W. E. Bigsby. P.187.
25. James D. Hart, The American Companion to American Literature,
5th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p.687.
26. Annette J. Saddik. p.130.
27. James D. Hart, The American Companion to American Literature,
5th ed. p.687.
28. Sylvan Barnet et al, Types of Drama, Plays and Contexts, 8th ed.
p.1222.
29. Christopher Innes, Avant Garde Theatre 1892-1992, (London:
Routledge Inc., 1993), p.219.
30. Alan S. Downer, Recent America Drama, (New York: Lund Press,
Inc., Minneapolis, 1964), p.7.
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Hamid Hammad Abid
Bibliography
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