Tag Archives: Sam Shepard

Books

Nostalgic Reckoning: Viggo Mortensen, Poet and Photographer

February 18, 2019 – 9:49 am

Monday, February 19, 2019 —- Nostalgic Reckoning: Viggo Mortensen, Poet and Photographer

Linda and I saw “Green Book” at the Art Theater last night, and were very impressed with the acting and the screenwriting. While the entire ensemble of actors in the film was superb, the two lead actors held our attention throughout what might have been a tedious biopic. The film seemed closer to an hour and a half, rather than its actual running time, and that is a more of an accomplishment than one might guess.

I had never seen Mortensen in a film before, so it was a pleasure to see just how fine an actor he is. Once again, I wish to thank him for being part of the Beyond Baroque’s 50th anniversary celebration, during which his books were featured at BB’s bookstore. I have been savoring two of them, “Canciones de invierno / Winter Songs” and “Ramas para un Nido.” The latter is a survey of his exquisite work as a photographer; in the former, on page 31, is a poem called “Hillside” / “La Cuesta.” It is one of the best short lyrics I have read in many months, and deserves memorizing in both English and Spanish. If I had some easy way of getting permission to include the entire poem in this blog, I would do so, for it is a poem that deserves to be much better known. Mortensen, it should be noted, did the translations himself.

If memory serves me correctly, the last actor to be nominated for an Academy Award who was also a writer was Sam Shepard, who won a Pulitzer Prize for playwrighting, but deserved it more than once. Mortensen’s volume of photographs concludes with a comment by Shepard, on a page by itself: “I feel like I’ve never had a home, you know? I feel related to the country, this country, and yet I don’t know exactly where I fit in… There’s always this kind of nostalgia for a place, a place where you can reckon with yourself.” In both his poems and photographs, Mortensen makes himself sincerely vulnerable to an intense nostalgic reckoning with himself as a disguised nomad.

“Canciones de Invierno / Winter Songs,” which constitutes a selection of poems written between 1989 of 2010, can be obtained by writing to Perceval Press, 1223 Wilshire Blvd., Suite F, Santa Monica, CA 90403. www.percevalpress.com

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Autobiography Poetry Theater

My “re-discovery” of Sam Shepard’s “The Mildew” in 1983

February 9, 2018 – 7:44 pm

Friday, February 9, 2018

John Brantingham, a poet who teaches at Mount Sac Community College, has announced in a Facebook post that the his college is going to stage Sam Shepard’s first known effort as a playwright. The play, “The Mildew,” was published in the school’s literary magazine, Mosaic, in the early 1960s, when he was still going under the name of Steve Rogers.

I was probably the first person to read the play in many years back in the 1980s, when I stopped by the school and dropped into their library to see if I could find the magazine. I had heard that Shepard had published a play in the school’s magazine back when I was an undergraduate at UCLA in the late 1960s. The theater department was primarily oriented towards turning out set designers, directors, and actors. My emphasis was playwrighting, which I mainly chose because the department didn’t care that much about that particular option. That gave me plenty of time to work on my poetry, which I had an equal passion for. During the summer of 1969, I took a course in “contemporary experimental theater,” and it may have been through that teacher that I heard about the play. I had acted in a production of “Icarus’s Mother” at UCLA in February of 1969 at UCLA and was completely smitten with his work, so hearing about this early play immediately became part of my permanent memory of literary knowledge. I believe the teacher of the course knew someone who knew Shepard when he was a student there seven years earlier, and that person had mentioned the play in the school’s magazine to him. No one else I ever met, including the playwrights I met at Padua Hills (such as Murray Medick and Irene Fornes) in the late 1970s, ever mentioned the play. In point of fact, I kept the knowledge to myself. I hoped someday to do some original research on it.

Early on in the decade, though, I encountered John Brantingham at a poetry readings, and fearing that I might not ever get around to this particular project, told him about the play. He went to the library and told me that it was took some serioue effort to locate the magazine, but indeed it was there. Now I hear that there’s going to be a production, and I am happy to know that the play will now join the “Collected Works” of Shepard.

There is a part of me, of course, (and I confess it’s a selfish part) that wishes I had kept this knowledge to myself and that I had gotten to work on it a couple of years ago. Perhaps if the demands of caring for my mother and fatally ill sister-in-law had been less onerous, I would have found myself being recognized as the person who brought this play to people’s attention well before now.

For those who want to see the play, I will tell you in advance: do not be disappointed when you don’t hear one of those extended monologues that made Shepard’s early one-act plays such memorable theatrical events. In “The Mildew,” he is just beginning to taste what it means to explore the crystalline plasticity that makes theatrical space a poetic environment. Nevertheless, I remember what a thrill it was to read his play as I sat in Mount Sac’s library back in 1983. I confess that I found a photocopy machine back then and made a copy, if only because libraries are not absolutely protected from fire. I had my doubts that Shepard even had a copy of the play himself. I had read an early play of his called “Cowboys #2,” and I believe that title came about because the few copies of the script for the first “Cowboys” had somehow gotten lost or misplaced after its initial production.

I have no idea of who is writing his biography, but I do have a suggestion to pass onto him or her about a possible source of additional material, so if anyone knows a way to contact this person, please put him or her in touch with me.

“The Mildew” – a world premiere of a one-act play by Steve Rogers (Sam Shepard)

Mt. Sac Studio Theater
Tuesday, February 13, 2018; 8 p.m.
Wednesday, February 14, 2014, 8 p.m.
Thursday, February 15, 2018, 8 p.m.

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Books Theater

“The War in Heaven”: Steve Kent and Sam Shepard (1943-2017)

July 31, 2017 – 11:34 am

Monday, July 31, 2017
THE WAR IN HEAVEN
In Memory of Two Poets of the Theater: Steve Kent and Sam Shepard (1943-2017)

In addition to canonical favorites such as Ibsen, Pirandello, and Strindberg, I had been primarily reading contemporary playwrights such as Edward Albee, Samuel Beckett, and Harold Pinter when I moved to Los Angeles at the age of 20. In the winter of 1969, a graduate student named Lynn (“Scotty”) Mason at UCLA posted an announcement that she was casting actors for a student production of a one-act play entitled Icarus’s Mother by Sam Shepard. I had not heard of Shepard or this play, but was fortunate enough to be cast in the role of Frank, the man who recounts an apocalyptic vision as a holiday picnic implodes. It was a prose poem of a high order, and I began to read as much of Shepard’s writing as I could get my hands on, as well as other playwrights he was aligned with. By chance, during the summer of 1969, I acted in a student production of Futz and took a course that concentrated on off-off-broadway playwrights, during which I became familiar with the work of Rochelle Owens, Megan Terry, Irene Fornes, Adrienne Kennedy, Lanford Wilson, and Jean-Claude Italie. Along with other students dissatisfied with the kind of plays the theater department was presenting on its main stage, I formed a theater group called “The Fifth Corner” and we rehearsed off-campus for our adaptation of Anne Sexton’s poem, “Flee on Your Donkey.” After graduation I went on to act with two other theater groups in Los Angeles, one of which included OOB playwright Robert Patrick’s Cheep Theatrics, starring Julie Kavner (future voice of Marge Simpson).

I never again acted in a play by Shepard, although I certainly saw enough productions of his plays. As famous as he was among theater people, one must understand that public attention and interest in Shepard’s work in the mid-1970s was relatively muted. I remember a production of Curse of the Starving Class at a small theater in Hollywood in the late 1970s, for instance, in which only half the seats were filled, and the same was true of a production of Action at the Burbage Theater around that time. In many ways, it was the devotion of working people in the small theaters who made the case for Shepard’s writing, and not just theaters in New York. The importance of theaters in California is most particularly evident in Shepard’s development, for it was during his residence in Northern California that he began come to terms with his youth in Southern California.

The people I know who worked with him all bespoke of his influence in their lives as well as their work, and I would not be the writer I am today without having encountered writers such as Walter Hadler and Murray Mednick at the Padua Hills Theater Workshop in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Shepard himself taught at the first gathering of that group of playwrights, and had a play he wrote called Red Woman produced there. Padua Hills remains for me the quintessential quest to understand what it is that makes theater theater and not just an entertaining game of “let’s pretend.” Its direct impact on my poetry and poetics is impossible to overemphasize.

The poet William Matthews once observed that there is more talent on exhibit at age 30 in any given generation than achievement at age 60. I suppose that’s one way of separating the highest levels of accomplishment from the merely competent, for not only had Shepard produced a memorable body of work by age 60, one of his very best plays had its premiere performance the month before he turned 61. I saw a production of The God of Hell at the Geffin Playhouse in the summer of 2006, and it only reinforced my belief in his capacity to see into the interstices of human contradictions in a manner befitting a major artist.

It should be mentioned that Sam Shepard was not the only person in his birth family who worked in theater. His sister, Roxanne Rogers, is also a playwright and director as well as an actress. I saw one of her plays, directed by Ivan Spiegel, at the Burbage Theater in West Los Angeles, after it moved from Pico Blvd. to Centinela. After the play was over, I went backstage to talk to Ivan, and we found ourselves in the alley behind the theater. Roxanne joined the group with an older woman whose blue eyes registered a singularly discerning glow. “This is Roxanne’s mother,” Ivan said. We talked briefly, and all the while I had to withstand the temptation to tell her how much her son’s plays meant to me; but it was Roxanne’s evening, and I focused on her play, which had had a scene in a loft built on the stage that made the voices and lines of the characters ricochet back and forth the stage, as if some pent up realization were emerging from a thicket. You can find an article about Roxanne Rogers’s direction of Murray Mednick’s play, “Mrs. Feurstein,” at:
http://paduaplaywrights.org/2011/11/mrs-feuerstein/

Shepard, however, is not the only loss that the theater world has gotten news about: Steve Kent has also died, and not nearly enough has been said about his contribution to theater in Los Angeles and other areas of the country. Kent was one of the founders of the Company Theater and the Provision Theater, which staged plays in the late 1960s and 1970s that still glow in the memories of those fortunate enough to have been present. Anyone who took part in The James Joyce Liquid Memorial Theater or who saw The Emergence knew that what it meant for the audience to be part of the conscious journey of performed vision. Steve Kent was a brilliant director, and he is enshrined in my heart every bit as much as the author of Angel City and the The Tooth of Crime.

Indeed, both Shepard and Kent shared a common collaborator, Joseph Chaikin, founder of the Open Theater. Kent adapted Beckett’s writing into a brilliant stage piece (Texts) as well as worked with Chaikin’s on Shepard’s The War in Heaven, which Shepard specifically wrote for Chaikin. To speak of the sadness I feel in Shepard’s passing is inseparable from the jolting pang of Steve Kent’s death.

I sit in silent homage.

Director, Educator, Activist Steven Kent (1943-2017)

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/my-buddy-sam-shepard

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