Eugene O’Neil brought gravitas to the American theater. But it took Sam Shepard, the greatest playwright to emerge from the economically strapped, artistically fertile off-off Broadway movement launched in the 1960s, to make the American theater finally seem cool. An American original who carefully burnished an image as a writing cowboy, Shepard flirted with categories only to elude them. “Sam was an exciting central figure in our young Greenwich Village ’60s revolutionary theater,” van Itallie wrote to me after the news broke of Shepard’s death. “A play’s like music — ephemeral, elusive, appearing and disappearing all the time,” Shepard told American Theatre magazine in a remark that illustrates the critical challenge.

Source: Los Angeles Times August 01, 2017 01:18 UTC