Bloomsbury The Late Work of Sam Shepard

Hailed by critics during the 1980s as the decade's 'Great American Playwright', Sam Shepard has since continued to produce work in a wide array of media including short prose, films, plays, performances and screenplays. Like Samuel Beckett and Tennessee Williams in their autumnal years, Shepard relentlessly presses the potentialities and possibilities of theatre. This is the first volume to consider Shepard's later work and career in detail and ranges across his work produced since the late 1980s. Shepard's motion picture directorial debut Far North (1988) served as the beginning of a new cycle of work. He returned to the stage with the politically engaged States of Shock (1991) which resembled neither his earlier plays nor his family cycle. With both Far North and States of Shock, Shepard signaled a transition into a phase in which he would experiment in form, subject and media for the next two decades. Skelton's comprehensive study includes consideration of his work in films such as Hamlet (2000), Black Hawk Down (2001), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) and Brothers (2009); issues of authenticity in the film and screenplay Don't Come Knocking (2005) and the play Kicking a Dead Horse (2007); of memory and trauma in Simpatico, The Late Henry Moss and When the World was Green, and of masculine and conservative narratives in States of Shock and The God of Hell. Review The best chapter charts all the echoes of Shepard's biography, media persona and actual writings in the variety of film and television roles he has played since his Oscar-nominated turn as Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff ... [Skelton] is also good on Shepard's cultural status. -- Times Literary SupplementShannon Skelton has produced an excellent, insightful, and unique study of the later plays of Sam Shepard. This is an intelligent book, one that is essential for anyone interested in Sam Shepard and the contemporary stage. The later work solves the issues of personal conflict left unresolved in the earlier play. Offering a range of critical approaches and exhibiting scholarly sophistication, this is an intelligent, overdue contribution to the literature on Shepard. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. -- CHOICE About the Author Shannon Blake Skelton teaches at Kansas State University, USA.