Surface Vs. Depth

Entering the theatre scene as a "renegade" in the 1960's,the self-educated American playwright Sam Shepard,though very prolific and widely produced,has been received with scanty critical enthusiasm before the advent of his family plays--from Curse of the Starving Class(1977),through Buried Child(1978),True West(1980) and Fool for Love(1982) to A Lie of the Mind(1985).This seeming adoption of a traditional bent has brought Shepard considerable critical acclamation.Buried Child wins for Shepard a Pulitzer Prize and A Lie of the Mind is a winner of the New York Drama Critics Award for the best play of the year.While some critics applaud the family quintet as "full-length American plays" they have been long expecting of the dramatist,others accuse Shepard of abjuring his uncompromising theatrical genius for sake of accessibility.But all of them agree on their confusion when approaching Shepard's realism in the quintet--one feels the need for a word such as nova-realism to describe the style into which Shepard's plays have settled;a word that suggests not only newness,but also the process whereby the newness is attained--a regenerative decimation of a strict old-fashioned realism in the service of a world beh(?)nd forms,beneath surface(Demastes, 1988,98).Stemming from a curiosity to peruse the new version of realism, the present study is not only intended for a coherent Super Realistic rendering of the quintet,but also suggests that Shepard evoke a fresh scheme for understanding and explaining reality in the contemporary time.The dissertation consists of five parts.In addition to a review of major Shepard criticism,the part of introduction makes an overview of the movement of Super Realism that first took shape in the context of fine arts in the United States and then was adopted in literature and theatre.Besides a pronounced pop sensation,Super Realists make a point of seeing the world as it is by presenting their work of art as a confrontational surface of their immediate experience that speaks to body,not mind.And in doing so,the mediation involved in the work becomes a subject of aesthetic meditation.Based on such an overview,this part argues that what one finds in Shepard's quintet is a Super Reality,where intensified focus on physical reality in the popular cultural terrain and on the immediate present is severed from adherence to a meaning or a solid past,discontinuous action is juxtaposed with the "humdrum and familiar" world of domestic family life.Chapter One to Three study the family quintet as a cultural discourse, literary work,and a performance text respectively.The first chapter deals with the surface reality in the quintet--a domestic scene infected by a cultural malaise in those media-generated myths grow to such extent that they soon lose all the connection to the reality from which they once sprang.Adopting a stance inside the pop culture territory rather than above it,Shepard's family quintet is populated with people whose lives turn out to be formed by the simulacra projected by the mass media that shape the pop culture.Whereas his characters are incapable of locating meaning for their experience and at the same time fall desperate victims to the invasion of the images from the media into their physical and emotional world,they are so eager to accept and identify with the simulacra.Shepard's failure to process the distorted surfaces into a logical composition is intentional.Without bridging the gaps in reality,the dramatist succeeds in turning the mundane into the strange and thus fostering other dimensions of existence underneath the surface reality.In fact,Shepard accentuates and magnifies the gaps in reality with conscious techniques of dramaturgy and stage production.Chapter Two undertakes the task of dissecting Shepard's Super Realistic dramaturgy. Though within a realistic spatial-temporal framework,the actions and events in the family plays are structured in a circular and repetitive pattern with an open-ending.Language,even in the form of normal conversations,manages to blur any given information and refute the audience's wish to rationalize the narratives of the plays.In characterization,tangential details outshine any unifying psychological motivations,making characters containers of arbitrary energy going in unexpectable directions.The Super Realistic dramaturgy enables Shepard to sow in the illusion of surface reality the seeds of other layers of being.Shepard is a playwright,actor and director at the same time.Chapter Three argues that,with stronger effect,the staging practices involved in the family quintet carry the audience beyond the apparent solidness and causality of surface appearance.The apparent fourth-wall realism is betrayed by the equivocal space division within the three-sided enclosure.Being able to build itself up during the procession of the play,the stage set structure calls the audience's attention to the artificiality of what we are preconditioned to believe as reality.Images,visual,aural or olfactory,though seeming to be in sync with the family scene on stage,assault the audience's senses directly before they could be read as symbols suggesting any shared system of values. Acting in the family quintet also challenges actors physically and emotionally because they have to give up any effort to restore a logic relationship between their characters to the environments while emotionally live the disconnected moments that constitute the characters' existence.With no set method for performance in the family plays,the actor has to be flexible and strong-minded to perform under the guidance of the sensation and experience shared by him/her and the character.Though far from being able to define the family quintet,declares the part of conclusion,Super Realism proves a revealing path to approach it--a term that suggests not only newness,but also that the newness is attained through its dynamic interplay with the old.In text and on stage,all the techniques and practices not only abort any attempt to put the story of the play into a meaningful whole,but also are used in a self-conscious way to draw attention to the human mind of the playwright at work.That mind,starting from a surface reality,plays off our familiarity,subverts our expectations,and exposes the underside of images we've grown accustomed to.In doing so,the playwright manages to present a Super Reality and fabricates a new version of realism,which is flexible enough to contain the extending experience of the individual in the context of contemporary popular culture.This rejuvenated realism is founded on a vision of reality as dynamics among different layers of beings characterized by discontinuity,simultaneity,difference and change rather than a solid truth that is always there to be reached through intellectual pursuit.But the toppling of the accepted scheme of understanding denotes hope more than despair.Although it may be beyond human limits to locate the Truth in the universe,a mind ready to accept that indeterminacy is impossible to overcome and is the constant condition in existence is certainly able to find life,in the dynamics of order-generating disorder,is all the more worthwhile.