SEASON 2023–2024
All Sam Shepard.
Sam Shepard (1943–2017) was one of the most singular voices in American drama — a playwright, actor, and director whose work reshaped how the country's theatre imagined itself. Born Samuel Shepard Rogers III in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, and raised partly on a ranch in Duarte, California, he arrived in New York in the early 1960s and found his footing in the Off-Off-Broadway scene, writing at a furious pace for tiny downtown houses like Theatre Genesis before his plays outgrew them entirely.
His work returns obsessively to the American West as myth and wreckage: fractured families, warring brothers, absent fathers, and a frontier identity that has curdled into something violent and unresolved. Plays like True West and Buried Child fuse plain-spoken naturalism with sudden, unsettling eruptions of the surreal, exposing the rot beneath the domestic surface of the American dream.
Shepard won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Buried Child in 1979 and, over his career, took home a record ten Obie Awards — more than any other playwright. He was also an acclaimed actor and screenwriter, earning an Academy Award nomination for The Right Stuff and co-writing the Palme d'Or–winning film Paris, Texas.
This season gathers three of his defining family plays: True West, Buried Child, and Fool for Love, each a variation on the same restless, dangerous American inheritance.
Sam Shepard (1943–2017) was one of the most singular voices in American drama — a playwright, actor, and director whose work reshaped how the country's theatre imagined itself. Born Samuel Shepard Rogers III in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, and raised partly on a ranch in Duarte, California, he arrived in New York in the early 1960s and found his footing in the Off-Off-Broadway scene, writing at a furious pace for tiny downtown houses like Theatre Genesis before his plays outgrew them entirely.
His work returns obsessively to the American West as myth and wreckage: fractured families, warring brothers, absent fathers, and a frontier identity that has curdled into something violent and unresolved. Plays like True West and Buried Child fuse plain-spoken naturalism with sudden, unsettling eruptions of the surreal, exposing the rot beneath the domestic surface of the American dream.
Shepard won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Buried Child in 1979 and, over his career, took home a record ten Obie Awards — more than any other playwright. He was also an acclaimed actor and screenwriter, earning an Academy Award nomination for The Right Stuff and co-writing the Palme d'Or–winning film Paris, Texas.
This season gathers three of his defining family plays: True West, Buried Child, and Fool for Love, each a variation on the same restless, dangerous American inheritance.