Opening closure: The plays of Sam Shepard.

摘要

Central to the dynamics of Sam Shepard's drama is the problematic of closure. Subverting traditional categories of drama, Shepard undermines set expectations of what constitutes a play: in Shepard's theatre all is "play." The audience is invited to act as co-creator of the aesthetic experiences: a Shepard play being a presumptively participatory enterprise. Simultaneously, through deploying specific anti-closural strategies, Shepard ruptures the audience's attempts at achieving cause-effect configurations of meaning and narrativity.; This study focuses on exploring Shepard's anti-closural strategies while examining how the reader or spectator's impulse toward interpretive closure, is both stimulated and frustrated by the dynamics of Shepard's drama.; Chapter I, reviews the extant Shepard scholarship and demonstrates the critical neglect of the problematic of closure. It also defines the terms of reference of this study: the concept of closure, and the anti-closural strategies of transformations, theatrical literalization and hyperrealism.; Chapter II: Transformations of Character, examines Angel City, The Tooth of Crime, and Back Bog Beast Bait, and suggests how Shepard explodes conventional notions of "whole character," via the transformations, offering instead, collage-like "bits and pieces," which the audience must negotiate in attempting to achieve closure.; Chapter III: Transformations of Action, explores Icarus's Mother, Red Cross, La Turista, and True West, and demonstrates Shepard's strategic use of transformations to fragment action and problematize narration and interpretation. Traditional notions of plot are ruptured as narrative order, chronological time, and cause-effect configurations of meaning are subverted.; Chapter IV: The Family Cycle, focuses on Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child, Fool for Love, and A Lie of the Mind. While the transformations no longer predominate, Shepard, in possibly his most radical anti-closural gesture, ruptures the very theme of family. Dramatizing the violence that implodes within the family, Shepard confronts us with dysfunctional parents and bizarre homes.; Chapter V, reiterates the importance of engaging the key issue of closure, without which a full appreciation of Shepard's innovative and mercurial drama is not possible.