Fifteen One-Act Plays - (Vintage Contemporaries) by Sam Shepard (Paperback)

About the Book

Filled with wry, dark humor, and exquisitely crafted storytelling, Shepard's plays have earned him enormous acclaim. In these 15 one-acts, he displays his trademark ability to portray human relationships, love, and lust with rare authenticity.

Book Synopsis

Filled with wry, dark humor, unparalleled imagination, unforgettable characters, and exquisitely crafted storytelling, Sam Shepard's plays have earned him enormous acclaim over the past five decades. In these fifteen one-acts, we see him at his best, displaying his trademark ability to portray human relationships, love, and lust with rare authenticity. These fifteen furiously energetic plays confirm Shepard's status as our most audacious living playwright, unafraid to set genres and archetypes spinning with results that are utterly mesmerizing. Included in this volume:

Ages of the Moon
Evanescence; Shakespeare in the Alley
Short Life of Trouble
The Unseen Hand
The Rock Garden
Chicago
Icarus's Mother
4H Club
Fourteen Hundred Thousand
Red Cross
Cowboys #2
Forensic & The Navigators
The Holy Ghostly
Back Bog Beast Bait
Killer's Head

Review Quotes

"The greatest American playwright of his generation...the most inventive in language and revolutionary in craft...the writer whose work most accurately maps the interior and exterior landscapes of his society." --New York Magazine

"Stunning in their originality, defiant and inscrutable." --Esquire

"With the exception of David Mamet, no American playwright of his generation matches Mr. Shepard in the creation of characters that are immediately so accessible and so mysterious." --The New York Times

"One of our best and most challenging playwrights. . . . His plays are a form of exorcism: magical, sometimes surreal rituals that grapple with the demonic forces in the American landscape." --Newsweek

"One of the most original, prolific and gifted dramatists at work today." --The New Yorker

"Sam Shepard fulfills the role of professional playwright as a good ballet dancer or acrobat fulfills his role in performance. . . . He always delivers, he executes feats of dexterity and technical difficulty that an untrained person could not, and makes them seem easy." --The Village Voice

"The major talent of his generation. . . . An original, a major force. . . . [Shepard] is a poet of the theater, shaping a new language out of broken words: an emotional seismograph registering the tremors which shake the substratum of human life." --The Times (London)

About the Author

SAM SHEPARD was the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of more than fifty-five plays, three story collections, and two works of prose fiction. As an actor, he appeared in more than sixty films, and received an Oscar nomination in 1984 for The Right Stuff. He was a finalist for the W. H. Smith Literary Award for his story collection Great Dream of Heaven. In 2012 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Trinity College, Dublin. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, received the Gold Medal for Drama from the Academy, and was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame. He died in 2017.