Download or read book Conversations with Sam Shepard written by Jackson R. Bryer and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2021-09-30 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A prolific playwright, Sam Shepard (1943–2017) wrote fifty-six produced plays, for which he won many awards, including a Pulitzer Prize. He was also a compelling, Oscar-nominated film actor, appearing in scores of films. Shepard also published eight books of prose and poetry and was a director (directing the premiere productions of ten of his plays as well as two films); a musician (a drummer in three rock bands); a horseman; and a plain-spoken intellectual. The famously private Shepard gave a significant number of interviews over the course of his public life, and the interviewers who respected his boundaries found him to be generous with his time and forthcoming on a wide range of topics. The selected interviews in Conversations with Sam Shepard begin in 1969 when Shepard, already a multiple Obie winner, was twenty-six and end in 2016, eighteen months before his death from complications of ALS at age seventy-three. In the interim, the voice, the writer, and the man evolved, but there are themes that echo throughout these conversations: the indelibility of family; his respect for stage acting versus what he saw as far easier film acting; and the importance of music to his work. He also speaks candidly of his youth in California, his early days as a playwright in New York City, his professionally formative time in London, his interests and influences, the mythology of the American Dream, his own plays, and more. In Conversations with Sam Shepard, the playwright reveals himself in his own words.
Download or read book The One Inside written by Sam Shepard and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-01-16 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This searing, extraordinarily evocative narrative opens with a man in his house at dawn, surrounded by aspens, coyotes cackling in the distance as he quietly navigates the distance between present and past. As memory overtakes him, he sees the bygone America of his childhood: the farmland and the feedlots, the railyards and the diners—and, most hauntingly, his father’s young girlfriend, with whom he also became involved, setting into motion a tragedy that has stayed with him. His complex interiority is filtered through views of mountains and deserts as he drives across the country, propelled by Benzedrine, rock and roll, and a restlessness born out of exile. The rhythms of theater, the language of poetry, and a flinty humor combine in this stunning meditation on the nature of experience, at once celebratory, surreal, poignant, and unforgettable.
Download or read book Two Prospectors written by Sam Shepard and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Pulitzer Prize-winning author of plays such as True West, Fool For Love, and Buried Child, and Academy Award-nominated actor in many films, including The Right Stuff, Sam Shepard is arguably America's finest working dramatist. He has said many times that he will never write a memoir. But he has written intensively about his inner life and creative work to his former father-in-law and housemate, Johnny Dark. This book gathers nearly 40 years of their correspondence, which provides the most honest and complete record of Shepard's professional and personal lives that he is ever likely to publish. The book is illustrated with Dark's candid, revealing photographs of Shepard and their mutual family across many years, as well as facsimiles of numerous letters.It makes a perfect companion to Treva Wurmfeld's recent film, Shepard & Dark"--
Download or read book Sam Shepard written by John J. Winters and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2017-03-15 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “John Winters offers a master class in literary sleuthing, untangling the many lives and unearthing the origin story of America’s foremost Renaissance man of letters.” —Kelly Horan, coauthor of Devotion and Defiance With more than fifty–five plays to his credit—including the 1979 Pulitzer Prize–winning Buried Child, an Oscar nod for his portrayal of Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff, and an onscreen persona that’s been aptly summed up as “Gary Cooper in denim”—Sam Shepard’s impact on American theater and film ranks with the greatest playwrights and actors of the past half–century. Sam Shepard: A Life gets to the heart of Sam Shepard, presenting a compelling and comprehensive account of his life and work. In a new epilogue, added by the author after Shepard’s untimely death in July of 2017, John J. Winters offers a glimpse into the enigmatic author’s last days, when very few knew he was suffering from ALS. “An excellent biography . . . Mr. Winters is especially good on the backstage of one of Mr. Shepard’s most frequently revived works, True West . . . Mr. Winters has an interesting story to tell, and he recounts it ably, bringing us close to a figure who, he admits, avoids intimacy.” —The Wall Street Journal “A new, thoroughly researched biography . . . Winters does indeed capture a personality more anxious and self–doubting than previous biographers have grasped.” —The Washington Post “Meticulously presents the facts of Shepard’s complex life along with incisive descriptions and analyses of diverse productions of Shepard’s demanding and innovative plays . . . Winters portrays Shepard as a magnetic, enigmatic, and multitalented artist drawing on a deep well of loneliness and self–questioning, keen attunement to the zeitgeist, and penetrating insight into human nature.” —Booklist (starred review)
Download or read book Conversations with August Wilson written by Jackson R. Bryer and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collects a selection of the many interviews Wilson gave from 1984 to 2004. In the interviews, the playwright covers at length and in detail his plays and his background. He comments as well on such subjects as the differences between African Americans and whites, his call for more black theater companies, and his belief that African Americans made a mistake in assimilating themselves into the white mainstream. He also talks about his major influences, what he calls his "four B's"-- the blues, writers James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka, and painter Romare Bearden. Wilson also discusses his writing process and his multiple collaborations with director Lloyd Richards--Publisher description.
Download or read book Day Out of Days written by Sam Shepard and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-01-12 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of our most admired writers: a collection of stories set mainly in the fertile imaginative landscape of the American West, written with the terse lyricism, cinematic detail, and wry humor that have become Sam Shepard’s trademarks. A man traveling down Highway 90 West gets trapped alone overnight inside a Cracker Barrel restaurant, where he is tormented by an endless loop of Shania Twain songs on the overhead sound system. A wandering actor returns to his hometown against his better instincts and runs into an old friend, who recounts their teenage days of stealing cars, scoring Benzedrine, and sleeping with whores in Tijuana. A Minnesota family travels south for a winter vacation but, caught up in the ordinary tyrannies of family life, remains oblivious to the beauty of the Yucatán Peninsula. A solitary horse rancher muses on Sitting Bull and Beckett amid the jumble of stuff in his big country kitchen—from rusted spurs and Lakota dream-catchers to yellowing pictures of hawks and galloping horses to “snapshots of different sons in different shirts doing different things like fishing, riding mules and tractors; leaning up against their different mothers at radical angles.” Made up of short narratives, lyrics, and dialogues, Day out of Days sets conversation against tale, song against memory, in a cubistic counterpoint that finally links each piece together. The result is a stunning work of vision and clarity imbued with the vivid reverberations of myth—Shepard at his flinty-eyed, unwavering best.
Download or read book The Rolling Thunder Logbook written by Sam Shepard and published by Bobcat Books. This book was released on 2012-01-19 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Autumn, 1975: The Rolling Thunder Revue - a rag-tag variety show, a travelling gypsy circus - swept across the Northeast US. Bob Dylan helmed the chaotic caravan, gathering a host of stars in his wake: Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, T-Bone Burnett, Joni Mitchell and others. The Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright Sam Shepard was invited to write a Fellini-esque film out of the chaos. Throughout the many moods and moments of his travels he kept an impressionistic logbook of life on the road, replete with poetry, sketches and intimate accounts: This is that logbook. Updated with a myriad of candid photographs - many never before published - a foreword by T-Bone Burnett and a poetical preface from Sam Shepard, The Rolling Thunder Logbook perfectly captures the camaraderie, isolation, head games and pill-popping mayhem of the tour, providing a window into Dylan's singular talent, enigmatic charisma, and vision of America. “The Rolling Thunder Revue was more fun than the law allows. By a long shot. It was a bus full of musicians and singers and painters hurtling through the dead of night, making a movie, writing songs, and playing some of the most incendiary, intense, and inspired rock ‘n’ roll, before or since.” T-Bone Burnett
Download or read book Spy of the First Person written by Sam Shepard and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-11-20 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The final work from the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, actor, and musician, drawn from his transformative last days In searing, beautiful prose, Sam Shepard’s extraordinary narrative leaps off the page with its immediacy and power. It tells in a brilliant braid of voices the story of an unnamed narrator who traces, before our rapt eyes, his memories of work, adventure, and travel as he undergoes medical tests and treatments for a condition that is rendering him more and more dependent on the loved ones who are caring for him. The narrator’s memories and preoccupations often echo those of our current moment—for here are stories of immigration and community, inclusion and exclusion, suspicion and trust. But at the book’s core, and his, is family—his relationships with those he loved, and with the natural world around him. Vivid, haunting, and deeply moving, Spy of the First Person takes us from the sculpted gardens of a renowned clinic in Arizona to the blue waters surrounding Alcatraz, from a New Mexico border town to a condemned building on New York City’s Avenue C. It is an unflinching expression of the vulnerabilities that make us human—and an unbound celebration of family and life.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard written by Matthew Roudané and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-05-27 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few American playwrights have exerted as much influence on the contemporary stage as Sam Shepard. His plays are performed on and off Broadway and in all the major regional American theatres. They are also widely performed and studied in Europe, particularly in Britain, Germany and France, finding both a popular and scholarly audience. In this collection of seventeen original essays, American and European authors from different professional and academic backgrounds explore the various aspects of Shepard s career - his plays, poetry, music, fiction, acting, directing and film work. The volume covers the major plays, including Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child, and True West, as well as other lesser known but vitally important works. A thorough chronology of Shepard s life and career, together with biographical chapters, a note from the legendary Joseph Chaikin, and an interview with the playwright, give a fascinating first-hand account of an exuberant and experimental personality.
Download or read book Conversations with Thornton Wilder written by Thornton Wilder and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 1992 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collected interviews with the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and playwright most widely known today for his play, Our Town
Download or read book Simpatico written by Sam Shepard and published by Dramatists Play Service Inc. This book was released on 1995 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Final draft (working rehearsal script)" Pages 190-194 are labelled "Re-Write- 12/7/93"
Download or read book Sam Shepard written by Don Shewey and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 1997-03-22 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sam Shepard's outlandish, nightmarish, yet lyrical plays—The Tooth of Crime, Buried Child, True West, Fool for Love, A Lie of the Mind, and dozens of others—have garnered him a Pulitzer Prize and a lasting reputation as one of America's greatest living playwrights. His charismatic performances in movies like Days of Heaven, The Right Stuff, Country, and Thunderheart—as well as his screenplay for Paris, Texas—have made him an indelible presence in American film. Rock 'n' roller, rancher, and rodeo prizewinner, he has toured with Bob Dylan, hung out with the Rolling Stones, collaborated with Patti Smith, and raised a family with Jessica Lange. Yet throughout he has remained an enigmatic figure. In this acclaimed biography, now fully updated, Don Shewey explores the life and works of this American visionary, illuminating Shepard's unique success in straddling the divide between serious artist and pop-culture hero.
Download or read book Fifteen One Act Plays written by Sam Shepard and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-08-14 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Filled with wry, dark humor, unparalleled imagination, unforgettable characters, and exquisitely crafted storytelling, Sam Shepard’s plays have earned him enormous acclaim over the past five decades. In these fifteen one-acts, we see him at his best, displaying his trademark ability to portray human relationships, love, and lust with rare authenticity. These fifteen furiously energetic plays confirm Shepard's status as our most audacious living playwright, unafraid to set genres and archetypes spinning with results that are utterly mesmerizing. Included in this volume: Ages of the Moon Evanescence; Shakespeare in the Alley Short Life of Trouble The Unseen Hand The Rock Garden Chicago Icarus’s Mother 4H Club Fourteen Hundred Thousand Red Cross Cowboys #2 Forensic & The Navigators The Holy Ghostly Back Bog Beast Bait Killer’s Head
Download or read book When the World was Green a Chef s Fable written by Joseph Chaikin and published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc.. This book was released on 2007 with total page 46 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE STORY: A hauntingly lyrical memory play, WHEN THE WORLD WAS GREEN is steeped in the elliptical, poetic style for which Shepard is justly celebrated. Sketched out in just a handful of scenes is a world of sensual delight, of great journeys to di
Download or read book Dr Sam Sheppard on Trial written by Jack DeSario and published by Kent State University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The new prosecutor faces an old controversy -- An unlikely setting for murder -- Did Sam murder Marilyn? -- Putting the pieces of the puzzle together -- Final trial preparation : the emergence of the prosecutor's strategy -- Opening statements : setting the stage -- The Sheppard team presents its case -- The prosecutors speak -- Closing arguments and a verdict : the end of a legal era.
Download or read book Conversations with Lillian Hellman written by Lillian Hellman and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 1986 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty-six interviews with the outspoken writer range over six decades of her life and career.
Download or read book The God of Hell written by Sam Shepard and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-02-10 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize winner Sam Shepard’s latest play is an uproarious, brilliantly provocative farce that brings the gifts of a quintessentially American playwright to bear on the current American dilemma. Frank and Emma are a quiet, respectable couple who raise cows on their Wisconsin farm. Soon after they agree to put up Frank’s old friend Haynes, who is on the lam from a secret government project involving plutonium, they’re visited by Welch, an unctuous government bureaucrat from hell. His aggressive patriotism puts Frank, Emma, and Haynes on the defensive, transforming a heartland American household into a scene of torture and promoting a radioactive brand of conformity with a dangerously long half life.
