Two Words, One Answer.
Sam Shepard
 Kicking a Dead Horse (Vintage) $11.95 I saw this play recently and i think it was not helped by a very declamatory actor in the lead. It is a one-person play that tries to wrestle with some big questions in an unusual way. It felt a little dry, but I applaud the effort and I'd like to see a production of it with an actor who could just honestly talk to an audience and show us his vulnerable side as he deals with feeling helpless, worthless and possible near the end of his life.  Day out of Days: Stories $25.95 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¡Çs 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 Yucat«¡n 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 ¡Èsnapshots of different sons in different shirts doing different things like fishing, riding mules and tractors; leaning up against their different mothers at radical angles.¡É 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.  A Lie of the Mind. $7.50 I bought this for my daughter who read it and is using an excerpt from it for her musical theater auditions. It's a great play.  Motel Chronicles $11.95 I never finished this book. Perhaps my expectations were too high as I like Shepard. Perhaps I'll give it another go later. Maybe not. |
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