‘Coyote’ review: New Sam Shepard biopic could use more context

“Theater is a big bust,” Sam Shepard told Newsweek in 1967, as his star was rising in the off-Broadway world. “Nobody takes big chances.” It was a bold statement for Shepard, who in the following years tried to avoid media attention and often faced crises of confidence. But as Robert M. In his biography of Shepard, Coyote, the playwright was more than a study in contradictions – he was a tangle of ambiguities, his life shaped as much by frustration, failure and self-destruction as by his success on the world’s stages and screens.

In Dowling’s hands, Shepard emerges as an artist who became an EGOT-level talent while making it look easy. (He received Oscar, Emmy and Tony nominations, and won a boatload of Obies and a Pulitzer in 1979 for “Buried Child.”) Born in 1943, Shepherd was raised in the San Gabriel Valley by a two-fisted father who carried a collection of World War II medals, the source of his playwright son’s lifelong obsession with strength and American masculinity. In the early 1960s, Shepard fled to New York and sneaked off-Broadway at lightning speed, drawing inspiration from Samuel Beckett, Edward Albee and a host of experimental playwrights.

Was young Shepherd good? Even Albee, one of his early teachers, said that his early texts “give the impression of being in a state of disarray.” His brilliant 1967 experimental play La Turista included live chicken beheadings on stage until animal rights activists took notice. When his work was shown uptown at Lincoln Center, the seats emptied. But he had the support of intellectuals at the New York Review of Books and the Village Voice, and a theatrical culture that was willing to accommodate him while he found his footing.

In this respect, Dowling Shepard’s book is emblematic of late-twentieth-century American culture, where the counterculture provocations of the 1960s settled into the gentle nudges of the 1980s and 1990s. During his early career, Shepard attacked Vietnam-era conservatism, preferring the hippie atmosphere of the Bay Area to what he called “the sprawling, crazy serpent of Los Angeles in the South.” But he was moving toward the mainstream, sometimes against his will. Bob Dylan drew him into his orbit, as did rising New Hollywood directors like Terrence Malick; A chance encounter with Joni Mitchell on the road with Dylan turned into a short and tense relationship that she chronicled in her classic film “Coyote.”

Dowling, author of a former biography of Shepherd’s idol Eugene O’Neill, expertly deconstructs the history of a man who includes multitudes — “country boy, playwright, lover, rocker, husband, father.” (And, by and large, an alcoholic—his drinking clouding the final chapters of his life, destroying friendships, affairs, and work along the way.) The author has the advantage of Shepard’s writing, which includes reams of plays, short stories, and essays, as well as frank insights from friends and collaborators like Johnny Darke and Ethan Hawke. (But not his wife, Lan Jones, whom he divorced in 1984, or his longtime partner Jessica Lange.)

“Success was like a tide hitting his front door,” Dark says, and Shepard’s fame in the 1980s almost overwhelmed him. A string of powerful family dramas like “Buried Child” and “Fool for Love” made him a household name as much as his acting and productions like “True West” put companies like Chicago’s Steppenwolf on the map. (John Malkovich and Gary Sinise, who starred in the production of Steppenwolf, They revived their roles on public television in 1984; It’s worth a follow on YouTube in all its endearing glory.) Here, Shepard publicly grapples with every demon the family has sent forth, sorting through toxic masculinity with rare intelligence and ferocity, determined, as he puts it, to “destroy the idea of ​​family drama.”

This upward trajectory, and the slow decline of recasts and breakups until his death in 2017, is quite evident in Dowling’s hands. What is less clear is what made these works so powerful in their own right, and in the context of their time. Dowling quotes less from Shepard’s own plays, and more to focus on critical and audience response. But this misses a crucial element in a writer who had to write absurdly — Dowling notes that Shepard began crafting his play “Simpatico” in 1993 while driving his pickup on a Tennessee highway. Perhaps the taste for macho banter that sparked “True West” and “Buried Child” demonstrated his own strength as a writer.

So, too, may be a deeper context about Shepard’s place in the theatrical scene. As Dowling points out, over time Shepherd became an international phenomenon – especially in Ireland, where he was treated as Becket’s heir. But he was not the only playwright to address themes of family and masculinity, and Dowling only occasionally mentions compatriots like David Mamet and August Wilson. Except for a brief reference to a pep talk he gave with Len Nottage, Shepherd seems completely disconnected from the theater community. It made him unique, but perhaps unintentionally made him seem less unique than alone.

In this sense, “Coyote” perhaps embraces too much of the broad-shouldered American mythology that Shepard trafficked in and questioned. We have an abiding affection for lone geniuses, men who go it alone. In his later years he displayed his indifference: “If you don’t understand it, I’ll write another letter,” he told a reporter about his work. But when his body began to fail him due to progressive muscular atrophy, the legend crumbled. Shepard reached out to Dark, longing to have an old friend at his bedside. Darkness passed, exhausted from years of painful, alcohol-fueled behavior. “F-him,” Dowling quotes Darke as saying. “F-it,” Shepard replied. There’s a writer who could have built a Pulitzer Prize-winning play around that.

Athitakis is a Phoenix writer and author of “The New Midwest.”