Abstract
In its symbolic dramaturgy, catastrophic spectacularized imagery and stratified layers of representation States of Shock (1991), Shepard’s response to the Gulf War,1 illustrates a return to a more visibly identifiable Surrealist expression after the minimalist stage imagery of his works conceived with Joseph Chaikin. On the other hand, the Surrealism of Simpatico (1994), which will be discussed in the latter part of this chapter, although not as overt as States of Shock, emerges in the play’s off-kilter realism, the episodic, collage treatment of time, the physical manifestation of otherwise internalized anxiety, the discrepancies of scale and time, the atmosphere of paranoia, and the realization of fantasy.
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Notes
Sam Shepard, interview with Carol Rosen, Sam Shepard: A Poetic Rodeo (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 235.
Sam Shepard, States of Shock in Sam Shepard: Plays 3 (London: Methuen, 1996), 143.
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Johan Callens, Dis/figuring Sam Shepard (Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2007), 174.
Lesley A. Wade, “States of Shock, Simpatico, and Eyes for Consuela: Sam Shepard’s plays of the 1990s,” in The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard, ed. Matthew Roudané (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 260.
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© 2015 Emma Creedon
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Creedon, E. (2015). States of Shock and Simpatico: Performances of Waste. In: Sam Shepard and the Aesthetics of Performance. What is Theatre?. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137527417_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137527417_6
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