Jan, 1979 Ressurrection begins its thirteen week shoot.
Feb. 1, 1979 Seduced. American Place Theatre directed by Jack Gelber; Michael Feingold the literary manager of the Tyrone Gutherie Theatre tried to get the premiere. Handman say Seduced at the Trinity Square Rep in Providence RI. SS excited about Rip Torn as Howard Hacathorne...tried to get him to play Hoss in early 70's.
March 1979 Impossible Ragtime Theatre, Suicide in Bb dir. Ted Story music by Mitchell Weiss.
April 16, 1979 Buried Child wins Pulitzer Prize, SS letter of acceptance published in The Village Voice, "a play as a fragment of the whole." GOOD QUOTE.
On the way back from the Ressurrection shooting, he visits his father in Santa Fe and while driving home he receives a letter from the president of Columbia University.
Prize changes everything. It brought "this independent and proudly renegade playwright into the mainstream of American theatre."...Official recognition of SS starts in the theater.
Every prize winning play for the previous decade had begun in a not for profit regional theatre except Albee Seascape 1975, Buried was the first to get the award without ever playing Broadway...SS has still never played Broadway...Why?
List of the effects. From regional theatre productions to an invitation to the White House and TV producers looking at Buried. Moves to the Circle Rep until the end of Sept. Esquire mag interview letters and a backlash against SS. Ruby Cohn let Otis Guernsey does not include Buried Child in Best Plays Audience Reception, but the play is anthologized by Brockett. Buried Child. Obie from the VV.
Reads stories by Kafka. READING James Dickey Simone de Beauvoir, Bettleheim Nietzsche, Kierkegaaard and Merleau-Ponty. "Bored with Kafka's parables." GOOD Shewey misjudges here again, SS writes about the influence of Kafka on his writing.
Calamity Jane's Letters to Her Daughter Wolfe, Beckett and Joyce.
June, 1979 Jacaranda at St. Clemens Church danced by Daniel Nagrin. SS likes the collaborative creation better when he participates as a writer.
August, 1979 Spends time in his mother's house in Pasadena while she visits Alaska...shades of True West.
September, 1979 Scarlett Johnson suffers a stroke. Again another example of DS using a prose piece as a memoir or a biographical detail. PROBLEMS WITH BIOGRAPHY.
Nov. 1979 Savage/Love and Tongues at the New York Public Theatre with Joe Chaikin dir by Robt. Woodruff. GOOD QUOTE by Chaikin on romantic love and about the closeness and distance between lovers..."We shared many thoughts about the human experience of love...of the difficulty of expressing tenderness and the dread of being replaced...The first step was to choose the moments and then to speak within those moments." Chaikin and SS did seem unlikely collaborators in certain ways...group improv, SS creates plays alone "allowing actors to improvise only within the parameters preset by his writing. Even in the pieces that had developed from improv such as Inacoma his control was subtle but direct." Openness to the stimulation that they provided each other, as well as a sense of themselves that accepted differences as complimentary rather than contradictory... Mann "Savage/Love was a killer...greatness personified Shep did not come to NYC so Woodruff directed and Phoebe Nevill coached movement..Sam directed in SF Savage/Love don't get sentimental." Mann-Skip was not into the visual part, Mann says "Be relaxed and just do it. Be aware of what's happening. Sam's not into audience solicitation. You believe in it and you do it. No winking and eye. It was very honest, full of integrity but not lecturish." Skip LaPlante discusses his home-made instruments. "Was more Joe's way of working...Tongues was more set a controlled intensity.
Right before Buried Child is published 1979. Michael Roloff "He'll let you know within a very short time that he's not really Sam Shepard...(Sam Shepard Rogers the seventh.. .it's odd as though he's not totally happy with Sam Shepard as though there's some kind of uneasiness about that." Description of family. Father an alchohoic, mother is a linguist, house in Mill Valley one block away from the strip moved from a ranch across the mountains. Scarlett, visits a house boat in Sausalito. Plays pool with very wealthy friends out to eat for everything. Walk at sunset. Paul Sylbert produ design for Resurrection. Kathie Green on a motocycle carrying a .45 gets along with his son "mystically." Olan and he had separate lives. She had her own career about drugs, he liked speed. In NY I liked cocaine for a while. Interested in writing his own screenplays...not a novel. "I have no problem whatsoever writing dialogue but it takes me longer to write the stage directions for a play a couple of pages of a poem "a girl in a red dress." Robert Frank, Rudy Wurlitzer show off to see a medicine man who does something with lightening, very very shy partner reneged on their contract. Lost income from the sale of his paperback rights to Continuum his royalty payments, the income from five titles pays Continuum 4000 to get his rights back out 3/4 years of sales lost 50,000.
VV gives SS the Sustained Achievement Award with people like Chaikin, Ellen Stewart and Al Carmines.
1979 With Woodruff, does a second production of Suicide in Bb-an artist "who must reveal so much in his public life that he conceals his private life to the point of staging a fake suicide." Three part equation-economic security, public success, and freedom of expression. Harry Mann comment on working on character. "He would never trepass on the director." Woodie wasn't a jazz person. "He made me aware of" you do what you do...don't make a big deal out of it. He was very eclectic...sells all of his records to SS. Michael Roloff story on a 300,000 production of Angel City. Karl Webber from the Handke plays Richard Serra do the stage design. SS nixes it as too Hollywood. Paul Sylbert from Ressurection because of going a star route. Comment on Shep production of Lie of the Mind.
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