In 1967 Sam Shepard entrusted his Melodrama Play, starting in New York and touring Europe, to the La MaMa theatre company and the director Tom O’Horgan – and no wonder. Apart from his writing, Sam’s ambition was to be a rock star in the mould of Bob Dylan and Lou Reed. Tom was not only a visionary theatre director but an award-winning composer and he jumped at the chance to shape Sam’s tale of threat and treachery into a double-focused vehicle for a Brechtian-Greek chorus commentary by onstage musicians.
When I first met Sam he was drumming out the rhythm of one of the songs, confident Tom could dramatise the ideas. We performed it – the number stolen from his brother by the rock star character Duke, called Prisoners, Get Up Out of Your Home-made Beds.
Sam’s previous plays had startled audiences, but it was in Melodrama Play that he explored the recurring themes of the artist’s auto-captivity, the profound fears and insecurities that drive him to betray those closest to him, and the brute, irrational menace of retribution.
As Sam’s close friend and collaborator Joe Chaikin confirmed, until he eventually took the directorial reins himself, he was by turns happy and frustrated when others realised his work. I witnessed his reluctance to appear on the set of Robert Frank’s Me and My Brother (1969), for which Sam co-wrote the screenplay. Robert said he approved the choice to let actors improvise around the script, which explored aspects of mental illness and creativity, including both catatonia and irrationality, themes Sam visited in various guises to the end.
His short television play for the BBC, Blue Bitch (1973), gradually succumbs to the realm of magical realism as an American couple, displaced to Britain and trying to sell their greyhound, establish a Pinteresque relationship with a cockney milkman who himself morphs into a slavering beast – all communication destroyed.
Though some critics were baffled, the truth of Sam’s own struggle was clear to audiences ready for change.
