An Examination of Violence and the Formation of American Identity in Shepard’s Buried Child

Sam Shepard is regarded as the most celebrated living American playwright. Being a product of the off-off Broadway theatre, Shepard started writing early in life and after writing two plays, Cowboys and Stonegarden, in 1964, gained the attention of critics with a series of plays in which he celebrated the freedom of western ideals and frontiers. Shepard is famous for using and glorifying the western and American myths. As Dolmage points out in his dissertation Shepard exposes the impact of various myths have on the lives of everyday men and women in their search for the unconscious self,… (para. 2) In his early stages of writing, Shepard employed quick writing technique and did not revise his writings. He exploited abundance of images and pictures and his language was the language of gangsters, cowboys, movie stars and generally speaking, the language he used was derived from the various institutions within society. (Asgarzade, 219) but in a second phase of his career, Shepard experienced a shift in his style and turned to family dramas in which he no more used that fast, unrevised rhythm of his early writings. As Lee states in his thesis American gothic family is comprised of identifiable character types: the fallen father, the alienated mother, and the haunted son. These recur in Shepard's…family plays, as well as in … family plays of Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams. (1). His style became more realistic and his plots more coherent. Some of the plays in this phase include: Curse of the Starving Class (1977), Buried Child (1978), True West (1980), Fool for Love (1983) and Lie of the Mind (1985). In fact, it is the second phase of Shepard's career that associates him with the American dramatic tradition and its pioneer playwrights; Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and Edward Albee.