Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
He's become a legend over the last three decades, but the elusive cowboy of American theater is not going soft on us -- for damn sure.
Jan 2, 2001 | Sam Shepard is wearing black slacks, a black mock-turtleneck sweater and a glossy black leather jacket. The legendary cowboy of American theater looks dressed up. Like he's heading down to the chapel on Main Street. In fact, what he's doing is looking nice for the theater donors milling about this San Francisco party, located in a chic restaurant on an industrial slice of the bay.
Outdoors on the patio, under an unusually clear night sky, Shepard stands by a heater that glows like a street lamp and chats with a covey of Armani-clad socialites. It's a stunning sight, really. For not only has Shepard steered clear of the public since gaining renown as the second coming of Gary Cooper in "The Right Stuff," he has made the pitfalls of fame a critical theme in many of his four dozen plays. After his "Buried Child" won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1979, he said he "got a greater feeling of accomplishment and pride of achievement" from winning a roping contest in a rodeo.
After three decades in the theater business, though, the 57-year-old playwright knows firsthand that private donations are what keep regional stage doors open. He knows a little celebrity glad-handing seems to loosen the purse strings of the well-to-do, especially the new media-doused generation of the young and the rich here in Yahooland.
Besides, he holds a genuine affection for San Francisco's Magic Theatre, which produced his new play, "The Late Henry Moss," and where he worked as playwright-in-residence in the late '70s, when he wrote his famous "family" plays: "Curse of the Starving Class," "Buried Child" and "True West." But even if this party is making him think he would rather be home on his Minnesota horse ranch with his partner Jessica Lange, their teenage daughter, Hannah, and son, Walker, he has plenty of celebrity support
As promised, the dream cast of "The Late Henry Moss" is here, too: Sean Penn is play-wrestling with his kids near a banquet table; Woody Harrelson is chatting up a female journalist as he lifts a beer off a waiter's tray; and Nick Nolte, decked out in a knee-length seersucker coat and ratty Panama hat, looking like he just washed out of a Thomas McGuane novel, is holding court with a story about, if my eavesdropping is accurate, the thrills of cross-dressing.
As the party swells with San Francisco's requisite band of stars -- Robin Williams, Don Johnson, Bob Weir -- it grows positively giddy with that strange celebrity vortex that sucks people toward the famous but stops us short of actually talking to them. As fans, our greatest fantasy about celebrities is that they would really dig us as friends if they could get to know us in casual conversation in some cedar Montana bar. But rather than risk discovering that Sean Penn or Sam Shepard doesn't care one way or the other whether we too love Cormac McCarthy and John Ford, we don't dare breach their personal spaces -- their auras, really. It would be too humiliating. It's safer to leave them framed in fantasy. And in most cases, rather than deal with the predictable anxieties of their audiences, celebrities prefer to circle in their own orbit.
Again and again, Shepard has written brilliantly about being trapped by the images others have given him, that he has given himself. "Keep away from fantasy. Shake off the image," lectures the gangster rock star Crow in "The Tooth of Crime." The inability to connect with others through the skeins of our illusions is a driving theme of Shepard's passionate, violent work.
But -- outside of his plays, anyway -- he has done little complaining or explaining about his image. Which is one reason why he remains such a magnetic presence in person. It's sentimental, a little hagiographic, probably, to call artists mysterious. But as Shepard drifts through this party, it's precisely his elusiveness that makes it so hard to take your eyes off him.
My curiosity finally gets the best of me and I walk over to Shepard to ask how he's holding up as the evening star. Besides, I have a special passport to cross the fan-celebrity threshold: A week before, I had interviewed Shepard on the telephone, so I have a painless excuse to introduce myself.
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