1975 Action and Killer's Head at American Place Theatre directed by Nancy Meckler. Gere was an acting student of Handiman.
Influenced by Peter Handke's Ride Across Lake Constance and trying to decide where to settle in America. "Most exquisitely condensed play." No plot but "in the best of Shepard tradition strong actions are performed that have a particularly theatrical power because they are performed in front of the audience in real time with no faking." Lucinda Childs Dance.
Steve Reich Drumming an "expression of pure action without motivation." Actions become characterization. "Shepard wants to bypass the thinking part of the brain that guards against new thoughts and go straight for the senses...smell the fish, hear the water pouring...express a yearning to reenter American life after a period of estrangement. Funny and scary feeling. Impaired ability to articulate thoughts. The atmoshere of a drug rehab center. Politically traumatized in not postapocalyptic society." Marranca on Action mirrors the very difficulty of finding a language of social communication and a means to express feeling.
PROBLEM TO EXPRESS FEELING in Nixonian America. "As in CONCRETE POETRY individual lines and actions not as building blocks in narrative but almost as brushstrokes painting a picture on...the contemplative canvas of the stage...resembles Endgame a metaphor for itself as a vehicle for thinking about the world.
Mentions the letters from the women who mistake SS as the wife murderer in BU. Good comment on the development of Magic Theatre with Lion and a number of Berkeley grad students in 1967 doing Europ. avant garde. McClure and the Beard and La Turista in 1970. With Mednick and Woodruff, the Magic like Cook's Th Genesis was known for its heterosexuality in SF town of gay and lesbian theatre. No homosexuals in SS plays and they are reffered to as fags and women are abused. SS took up polo to use women as mallets.
Story on Shep pissing into an offstage toilet. A kind of "nastiness" in this otherwise enconium for SS.
Summer 1975 Action and Killer's Head a Magic Theatre directed by Shep playwright in residence under a Rockefeller grant directs.
Feingold comment on Shep as director..."he knows how to talk to actors...Everybody involved is a friend; they're all on the same wavelength...Feingold edits Mad Dog Blues and Other Plays for Winterhouse edition. Dedicated to Jackson Pollack. Published during the middle Seventies, during the lull period before Sam became a movie star."
Bobbs Merrill and Grove Press let Shep go out of print. Michael Roloff trans(?) Handke starts Urizen Press. Friends with Toby Cole and picks up Shep as client, go bankrupt but bring out 26 plays.
Works on the family plays in Nova Scotia.
Lives in Corte Madera works in construction.
Buys the Flying Y Ranch in Mill Valley. Quote on the pollution of expectations of the theatre audience in NY.
Growing regional theatre movement after the increase of new playwrights writing for Off Broadway in the 60's. Shep approaches ACT in S.F. and is told that his work could take place in the experimental basement. Shep on ACT.
Magic Theatre does Action and Killer's Head a few weeks after the NY opening and it is better received in SF. Shep directs in a relaxed atmosphere. (Production notes in BU) and "smooches with the actresses, how did O-Lan put up with it?"
California Heart Attack A Gee it's great to be back play.
Man Fly turned down for production in NY A $1000 commission from the Mark Taper to do a rewrite of Marlowe's Dr. Faustus which they never used, like McClure with anthropomorphized anim.
Jackson's Dance
Reads Pablo Neruda and Robinson Jeffers at the Flying Y and quote on "I'm filled with a mixture of all this new life and the past..."
Two weeks before moving into the new house in Mill Valley Dylan calls and SS takes a train back to NYC for the "secret" tour of the Northeast. SS was angry that the money did not come through, quote on the ethos of anti-money anti-establishment.
Impressions logged in tiny 3x5" notebooks travelling like the Bishop's Co. and meeting with legendary stars, influences Joni Mitchell to do a Mingus album. Good quote on Dylan and the protection from intellectual probes which are a threat to any artist. Good quote on Myth...have the power to change something inside us...speaks to the emotions and not to the head.
SS defines the tour as a pilgrimage... "We're looking for ourselves...Trying to locate ourselves on the map."
On the sixties and "the shattered feeling and being part of the old folks."
On rock stars as the contemporary manifestation of Wild West heros (again, SS fantasy is made the entire concept of his being...his search for heroes.
In trying to make his case for SS changed attitude toward rock stars, a kind of continuity in this life, leave one thing and head for the next, DS "lies" about SS response to Dylan's behavior at the Manhattan Theatre Club for Horse Dreamer. IN EO SS applauds Dylan; he does not see him as disrespectful.
SS quote in Renaldo and Clara, on doing a "magical' thing.
Angel City grows out of SS experience with this and other films.
Fall 1975 List of people on the Rolling Thunder Revue. "Anyone who looked like a samurai warrior on welfare." Cream of 60's counterculture. Larry Sloman covers the tour for Rolling Stone. On the Road With Bob Dylan: Rolling with the Thunder.
Jacques Levy, "Dylan's friend and songwriting partner...Levy quote on the development of the tour a kind of Children of Paradise film.
"I may be responsible for Sam's career as an actor...In Renaldo and Clara there are shots of Sam "just doing dialogue or whatever and he looked so wonderful..."
Malick saw these shots and "that's how Sam got cast in Days in Heaven. The origin of shep's film acting career."
Shep left and returned to the tour. "Feeling like a backstage groupie...It's not having an ax." "The theatrics staged by Levy particularly appealed to his won sensibility...Everything was staged...The film project was always the bastard child of the tour..."
Shep's frustration he and Dylan could not collaborate.
The Logbook was a salvage operation...Sam left in the middle of the tour around Thanksgiving and then he got the contract for the book and came back for the last show at the Garden, Rubin Carter...jailed and finally acquitted. Comment on the Tubes concert in Boston's Combat Zone.
Description of Shep's personality: "He's got that macho cowboy exterior, on the other hand he's got that suburban bourgeois mentality. It's a weird contradiction."
Sloman comment on Shep's bitterness. You also get a sense of how Dylan greatness Shep idol worship makes Shep nervous. (?)
Another great story Dylan at Horse Dreamer and Martin Gottfried comment in the Times. Levy comment...a kind of audience response when we did La Turista, "People were screaming from the audience. They would stand up and some would walk out."
Description of Shep in Renaldo and Clara.
1975 Fractured after moving to Marin Co. while directing Action at the Magiccomic romantic a suburban rancher who makes his money from show business Massey/Sammy and Lou-Anne Lo. The opining scene of the Appaloosa mare rampaging through the living room and the wife flees to visit her sister in SF. Wife complains that he is at rodeos when he sould be at auditions. Massey is a model for commercials a Marlboro Man who would rather be racing horses.
Back to 1974.
Forward to 1976.
Return to the biographical timeline.
Return to the Sam Shepard Web Site.