Shep makes the rounds as an actor with his resume.
Living in Spanish Harlem, in a gossip he reads about MIngus who got him a job at the Village Gate.
Mingus Sr. leaves Jr. with mom in Duarte and then she leaves Jr. with grandparents.
1963 Mingus arrives with his father as a painter in a flat on the Lower East Side Ave. Story of turning a bar into a recording studio for his father and crashing an oak payphone and getting written up in the paper which Shep reads.
Buses tables at the Village Gate, founded by Art d'Lugoff in a dilapidated cellar in the biggest bum's hotel in NYC "more talent on the floor than on the stage": Shep comment on what he did there. Also Flip Wilson, Woody Allen, Dick Cavett, Richard Pryor. Mingus and Shep fantasize about becoming a comedy team.
Comment on "talented, disaffected youth from countries all over the world" arriving in downtown Manhatten.
LA Weekly: "When I arrived in NY there was this environment of art going on, and you were right in the thing, esp. on the Lower East Side. La Mama, Theater Genesis, Caffe Cino, all those theaters were just starting. Off-off Broadway was just to see new work done: it wasn't done as a showcase to move it somewhere else. That came later. It was all in cahoots with poetry and jazz and all that. And actors. It was kind of a phenomenon 'cause it happened right there, in that time, and took off like a shot"
Changes name from Steve Rogers to Sam Shepard.
Mingus makes the equation of Shep new name with the Dr. murderer..."The guy I knew would exploit that-he was a little sad about it, to tell the truth, but it was viable and it was humorous because people would actually go to the play to see a piece thinking, "I wonder what this guy who killed his wife and got away with it wrote?" A profit motive was involved. He was aware of the box office."
Comment on playing roles as "their need...from a mutual lack of a father's consistent and positive influence...searching for an identity that fit." Shep work developed from this "serious" play from finding a character and letting it speak.
On writing Mingus says: "Because that's how Sam went from acting to writing...Going from being an actor is a better activity than going from a person trying to write what they see on TV, let's say, and calling it theatre, which was what most of the people around us were trying to do. Instead, you'd say something in a voice, like automatic writing, and be committed to what the actual idea was, because you'd hear yourself say this and know that it's really what's true in a dream way or true in a historical, external-to you way, and then face that."
A musical concert with a Smith Corona typewriter, which as in Voyager, is a part of Shep, different typewriters.
East Village (compare to Greenwich Village during the late 1919's) when O'Neil, Dodd, Reid Gaspel etc. made it the New Bohemia. sunglasses and cowboy attire.
Growing up in Calif. they were cowboys in the city. Survival of the urban cowboy this contrast and identity with his environment.
Story on how Shep would start playing and switching different personalities.
At first Shep tries to succeed as an actor, The Eggs of the Devil (The secret of Father Tolentino) directed by Don Plumley 3/11/64 written by a Filipino cook at the Rathskeller. Shep played Sacristin, a young prelate in the Phillipines during the Japanese occupation. Comment on his acting, "just down home and together".
Mingus: "He's written some things that I identify as my personal experiences..." Comment about a "happening about communications and stuff." Shep used the job at the Gate as a theatrical thing," like we were doing a life which was like a movie, like cowboys."
Comment on Shep regard for Stan Laural and the sadness he felt because the great comedian was living in a trailer..."Imagine the world if your heros are Laural and Hardy,...grace and stupidity and naturalness,...We looked at all the movies over and over." Comment on Sam's hatred of "class distinctions, artificial assumptions of anglicizing everything..."
Comment on Sam's behavior as "right in the moment...Sam didn't care about the outcome...Sam was reckless."
Miliueu: R.D. Lang and the Divided self.
Diane Arbus making objects out of society's freaks.
Lenny Bruce at the Village Vanguard.
Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus redefining jazz at the Five Spot also Roland Kirk Cannonball Adderly, Eric Dolphy.
Caffe Cino opens in 1959.
Then the Judson's Poets Theater.
La Mama on June 28, 1963. Church funds at St. Mark's in the Bouwerie.
Quotes from Poland and Mailman on the atmosphere of Off-Off: "He was beginning to understand the alchemical magic of making theater, of creating a transcendent experience he could share with understanding others, his real family."
Mingus talks about seeing Albee's Ping Pong at the Cherry Lane: "These were very abstract things which like the work of Beckett, Pinter and Ionesco made a strong impression...I saw elements of that kind of ambiguity and that sort of cinematography in his work. And it was the goal to make it more real, not believable, because everything is believable. I think that was the goal of Joe Chaikin was pursuing: the no-play concept it's about you experiencing what you believe, and it's about people pursuing the pleasure of being correct rather than the effect of affecting an audience, making them cry, making them laugh."
1964 Theatre Genesis Cook was "looking for writers who were "working things out in themselves through their writing...Worthwhile things could come from a radical nature trying to find itself in society. Not sentiment and catharsis...they were meant to live." Murray Mednick, "What is happening onstage is not a mirror, it's what's happening.", Shep comment on Off Off Broadway.
Music: Shep idolized Dannie Richmond who was the drummer in Mingus Sr. band.
From the artists at the Village Gate Shep admires musicians first because they had an instrument and could play alone.
Painters next with something tangible to work
on and did by myself...
Writers: The Beats, Kerouac, Ferlinghetti. Comments on Shep work
"I never liked books or read very much"
Shep played at switching personalities Bill Hart and popped niacin a drug for schizophrenics.
Mentions The Zoo Story and the Dutchman and The Slave Ship and that musicians have an instrument they can play alone or painters, "something tangible that I could work on something that I did by myself"
Ralph Cook , the head writer at the Village Gate was given the use of St. Mark's Church In-the-Bowery which became Theatre Genesis.
Cook: Theatre Genesis in 1964 (the boys Theatre according to Fornes) "to discover authenic theatre voices and develop them toward a kind of subjective realism...for writers working things out in themselves through their writing...worthwhile things could come from a radical nature trying to find itself in society"
Instead of holding a mirror up to nature...Murray Mednick: What is happening onstage is not a mirror, it's what's happening"
Oct. 10, 1964 Cowboys produced at Theatre Genesis with Robert F. Lyons and Kevin O' Connors. Jerry Tallmer New York Post review.
O'Conner and Cook start Theatre Genesis.
Mingus and Shep star in Cowboys with a total environment of light and sound.
When do Lyons and O'Connors do the role?
Bill Hart, writer, director and literary manager at New York's Public Theatre: good comment on Shep connections to Ginsberg and Kerouac and connections to music, the credibility of a dream. Actors were connected with music and physical acting not the Actors Studio..."He had literally altered my consciousness which is the greatest thing a piece of theatre can do make you feel a totally different way which you didn't even know. Shep as the best, right away. Comment to the Living Theatre in the poetic theatre of Goodman and Stein.
EO and Michael Smith on Off Off Broadway: a change of consciousness I knew by getting high and smoking pot...they catch the actual movement of minds of people I knew like Dylan "who seemed to be singing about what he himself felt and experienced, rather than some preestablished range of feelings...". Nonexploitive attitude, not laying the groundwork for a career. Work done for the moment, for its own sake. Village Voice was a key theatre paper at that ...".
60's dramaturgy
use of sound and music
avoidance of classical unities
pop sensibility, lack of sentiment
challenge to the audience to experience what was immediately there
Shep dramaturgy: Music gives purest expression to the ineffable qualities of spirit and emotion.
Vibrates through the words and actions of the characters.
Fascination with the process of his own character burrows into deep recesses restructing his experience until it defines not just himself but the world. Very generally could be said about any good writer. Shep is a particular journey to search for feeling, emotion, awareness...instinctive sense of form, rhythm, and balance.
Shep on his private self and seeing theatre in public.
Outrage over The Rock Garden (comments on the pivotal position of this play in Rosen interview) on the bill with Cowboys defended by the rector of St. Mark's "Look you use beautiful words and do ugly things; we'll take ugly words and make beauty out of them." Included in Tynan's O Cal with a $68 a week royalty.
Michael Smith review in the VV. "Shep is still feeling his way., working with an intuitive approach to language and dramatic structure...distinctly American voice...three week run.
Shep comment on cowboys.
Norman Mailer "The Wild West of American Nightlife."
Midnight Cowboy image.
Shep wrote plays all the time "like other people took drugs".
Like writing songs: Beatles, Motown Brit rock, Bob Dylan
Wrote18 produced plays by 1970. Others completed but not produced and others started but not finished. Joyce Aaron has a whole suitcase full of manuscripts that Shep gave her and that no one has ever seen. On writing and improv: playwrights weren't trying to prove anything. "They put them on as fast as they could write them, rapidly blurring the distinctions between the life they were living and the life they were writing about.
Shep comment on Off Off B.
Frank O'Hara and LeRoi Jones were the NY answer to the SF Beat poets. R. Rauschenburg and Claes Oldenburg were making the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art.
John Cage to the Fugs were making new music older and with more money than the kids who gravitated to the theatre. Lives with Mingus on Ave C. just off Tompkins Square Park.
On Off Off Broadway: "Was a theatrical playground custom-built by and for media-fed baby-boomers coming of age in the cultural and political ferment of the early 1960's. Like the Pop art movemnt and rock n' roll, it was partially caused by the staidness of the artistic environment into which it exploded. " And then a quote from Poland on the expensiveness of Broadway. Bway was going the route of the big Hollywood studios. It was producing fewer plays and each production was more expensive..." Off B. produced Genet, Pinter, Beckett, Ionesco and were not interested in unestablished new American playwrights.
On the Caffe Cino, "A minuscule sidestreet storefront generally credited as the birthplace of off-off B way, opened in 1958 as a bohemian hangout where occasionally friends of the owner, Joe Cino, would put on poetry readings...".
Portraits of the other theatres.
Off Off instituted a renaissance in American Playwriting read early.
Guare, Horovitz, Eyen, Bullins, Noonon, Fierstein, Gurney
Good for the voice of the emerging black theatre and for gay artists. Unselfconscious exploration, uncensorious nesting ground for fledgling playwrights where they could try whatever they wanted, "batters down the barriers of what could be presented..." nudity, four letter words rejected drawing room chatter to explore issues and pop objects.
Comment by Elenor Lester in NYT on OOB.
Shep comment on the coterie audience of the Lower East Side: "It began by accident, spontaneously, among the unnumbered hordes of rambunctious kids who fled small-town America in search of sex, drugs and/or artistic expression and gravitiated toward the bars, basements, coffeehouses and grubby lofts of lower Manhatten. They didn't do it for money or glory, they did it for themselves." Shep "Writing was a kind of salvation for me...I started writing to keep from going off the deep end. That was back in '64. Writing had become a habit. I like to yodel and fuck a lot...When you write a play you work out like a muscian on a piece of music. You find all the rhymes and the melody and the harmonies and take them as they come."
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