Two actors are wriggling across the stage on their bellies. They’re earthworms, or maybe simply brothers, Cricket and Coyote, who want to become earthworms. They’re planning to write a screenplay together, and one suggests making their movie about worms. But “I thought we were writing something about what it means to come from the same root,” the other brother complains. “A movie, a Western, brothers killing men and running amuck in the desert.”
In the oozy, ontologically slapstick “Bad Stars,” written and directed by Amanda Horowitz, and produced in the experimental space the Collapsable Hole in 2025, certain correspondences emerge, particularly if the watcher is familiar with Sam Shepard’s “True West.” In that play, from 1980, two brothers, the wild Lee and the uptight Austin, also bicker about how to write a movie; they also think about “running amuck in the desert.” At the comic coup-de-théâtre climax of “True West,” a drunken Lee smashes a typewriter with a golf club, as Austin gloats over an entire fleet of toasters that he has stolen to prove his macho bonafides. “Macho” is a particularly ticklish idea in the gender-playful “Bad Stars,” and several of the light switches in Cricket and Coyote’s house are rewired toasters. Light changes happen with the occasional metallic ssssh-thunk.
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Shepard—the cowboy laureate of American playwriting, laconic film star, and hallucinatory dismantler of the Western myth—died in 2017, yet he remains a constant presence in the theatre. His works, frequently in revival, can still knock an audience senseless, and they have never stopped calling to a certain type of actor—the mostly straight, mostly white theatre guys with an edge who fell in love with Shepard’s dust-and-whiskey monologues in acting class, but who have since been carried westward to Hollywood. Shepard offers those men a way back to something: at the newly reopened Cherry Lane Theatre downtown, now owned by A24, the very first offering was a “True West” reading with Michael Shannon and Paul Sparks. Ethan Hawke and Paul Dano played “True West” ’s warring brothers on Broadway, in 2018; before them, in 2000, it was Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly; before them, at Steppenwolf in Chicago in 1982, it was John Malkovich and Gary Sinise. Typically, the Shepardian passes from metaphorical father to metaphorical son—say, from Ed Harris in the original “Fool for Love” to Sam Rockwell in the 2015 revival of “Fool for Love”—a family tree that descends from man to man to man.
Lately, though, there has been a flourishing of Shepard adaptations—queer ones, avant-garde ones, political ones—written by women. In addition to Horowitz’s “Bad Stars,” Julia May Jonas premièred a gender-flipped version of “True West” called “Problems Between Sisters” last year in Washington, D.C. This spring in New York, Kallan Dana presented “Lobster,” her memory play about a high-school prodigy who stages Shepard’s folie-à-deux “Cowboy Mouth” in a school trailer. (Dana’s title refers to a peripheral figure in Shepard’s play, written with Patti Smith during their intense affair in 1971, in which a drunk-in-love couple order lobster to their Chelsea Hotel room—delivered by the so-called Lobster Man.)
These women write over and through Shepard, dressing in his clothes, borrowing his plots and his swagger. He wasn’t interested in turning over his work to women—Hawke, who became a friend, once tried to talk him into listening to two actresses reading Lee and Austin, and the playwright scoffed at the idea. Yet in these posthumous rewritings, the Shepardian frisson only intensifies when the playwrights shift away from the straight and narrowly masculine. In “Bad Stars,” the boys’ parents are embodied by a single actor, who plays both sides of a pretty hot love scene; in “Lobster,” the ricocheting teen-age angst in the school trailer—an actor loves her brilliant director, who in turn is obsessed with her ex-girlfriend—has exactly the fizzing hormonal energy of Shepard and Smith in “Cowboy Mouth.” (“Just Kids” indeed.) And the sibling fights in Jonas’s adaptation of “True West” certainly feel more viscerally dangerous when the more violent one is visibly pregnant.
Why so much of this, so suddenly? I assumed that the superflux arose from a kind of dialectical pressure. Maybe, I thought, Shepard’s insistent maleness requires an answering feminization from the universe—tit, as it were, for tat. But in reading Robert M. Dowling’s striking new biography of Shepard, “Coyote,” I came to appreciate that these new writers are excavating currents already buried in Shepard’s bedrock. They aren’t moving in opposition to him, exactly, as much as they are mining his own seam of ambiguity. Shepard had an intuition for gender and identity as a kind of performance, and he was interested in the magical dimensions of imitation. In his incantatory rock-’n-roll drama “The Tooth of Crime,” from 1972, a new rock god, Crow, overthrows the old rock god, Hoss, in ritual battle by learning—and then adopting—the older man’s gait. “I just hope you never see yourself from the outside,” Hoss says, in defeat. “Just a flash of what you’re really like.”
Samuel Shepard Rogers was born in 1943 in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, to Jane and Samuel Rogers, Sr., an army officer who later became a poetry-reading, nature-loving teacher. (By the book’s measure, Shepard was Samuel Rogers IV, though elsewhere—and more evocatively—he’s listed as the seventh, and last, of that name.) The younger Samuel was called Steve, to avoid confusion. The family, which also included two sisters, moved all over before settling in Duarte, California, a valley of seedy American effort at the edge of the Mojave, replete with dusty farms, trucks on blocks, and underwatered avocado orchards. Duarte and its “junk magic” became part of Shepard’s myth, though Dowling—constantly in debunking mode—gently reminds us that he was just as much a child of Bradbury, Duarte’s leafier suburb, where the family lived when he was a teen.
Sam Rogers had been a bomber pilot in the Second World War. According to his son, Rogers instinctively touched a scar on his neck whenever a plane passed over, and Shepard, who took on many of his father’s traits, somehow inherited that terror of planes, too. Much later on, Shepard’s fear of flying led him to a life of long drives, driving from the green hill country in Kentucky, where he bred racehorses, down to Texas, where he sometimes joined in on a cattle drive, and up to New York, where he was still premièring plays until 2014. When Shepard was young, Rogers turned to alcohol—which would become another inheritance. Shepard did some of his cross-country driving drunk, and, when his last, degenerative neurological illness came on him and ruined his hands, he took to tipsily steering with his knees.
In the older Rogers’s case, the alcohol and the trauma worked a deep transformation; he grew paranoid about his family, and would go on furious rampages. Something about his rangy teen-age son particularly antagonized him—“Sam called Steve his nemesis,” Shepard’s mother wrote in her diary. “Sam, Sr. came to regard his only son as female,” Dowling writes, quoting Shepard’s own 1978 writing, buried in the archive at the Harry Ransom Center. His father, Shepard wrote, thought he was “not exactly a woman but of the female persuasion . . . not fruity exactly, but suspicious.” Dowling predicates his book on Shepard’s response—the masculine selves he fashioned around those early wounds.
Dowling is hardly the first to write that Shepard struggled with his inextricable antagonism for his father. You find this Oedipal current in countless profiles and in the criticism; you find it in other biographies, such as Don Shewey’s theatrically savvy “Sam Shepard,” published in 1985, and in Robert Greenfield’s juicy “True West,” from 2023. You find it most in Shepard himself—one of his last plays was “A Particle of Dread (Oedipus Variations).” Dowling’s book doesn’t stop at the men’s “silverback gorilla” fights, though, as the source of pain. He suggests by analysis and anecdote that Shepard’s conscious performance as a “man” to deny his father’s deliberate emasculation of him is the source of his tendency to shape-shift, his fundamental slipperiness.
In 1963, a job with a touring theatre company bore Steve Rogers across the continent to New York: a year later, just twenty years old, he started performing under the stage name Sam Shepard, cutting loose of old associations. In New York, as Sam, he became one of the best-regarded young playwrights of a wild, druggy, ecstatic downtown scene. My favorite parts of “Coyote” take place in the East Village of that time, when a counterculture Shepard, zooted out of his mind on various chemicals, hadn’t yet settled on the clenched jaw and thousand-yard stare of his later, dead-eyed Sam persona.
In the Village, Shepard played in bands; he hung out with his roommate Charles Mingus III and his first serious girlfriend Joyce Aaron, who was his entrée into certain echelons of the avant-garde theatre scene. Tony Barsha called Shepard’s corner of the scene “Macho Americano,” defining it as “a lot of pot, a lot of women.” Love triangles rotated like mandalas—Shepard dated and then married O-Lan Jones while they were both being directed in shows by her ex-boyfriend—and his dramatic work, such as “Icarus’s Mother” (1965) and “La Turista” (1967), reimagined the alienation of the Vietnam War period as dark games, prescient dreams, trippy picnics gone bad. Look him up on YouTube playing drums for the Holy Modal Rounders on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.” You see a loose, goofy, lissome beanpole in flares, laughing below a shaggy bob.
He may have had a “cowboy mouth,” but he was not playing the cowboy yet. That came later, after he moved back to California in 1974, in his early thirties, carrying his small family out to a ranch, where he could keep ducks and chickens and horses. For Shepard, the West was both the authentic place (meaning a life lived close to the land) and the realm of falsehood (Hollywood). These qualities were tightly bound. His film career kicked off because Terrence Malick saw him mucking out a stall and, impressed, chose him for “Days of Heaven.”
According to Dowling, Shepard knew himself to have a profoundly divided self—abrasive, hot-tempered, prone to crises of “depersonalization.” Shepard wrestled with a sensation of doubleness, this “feeling of separation between my body and ‘me,’ ” he wrote in a letter to the experimental theatre titan Joe Chaikin, a dear friend of his. Dowling considers his masculine playacting a necessary unifying armature, something powerful enough to bind together these splintering parts. And so the snake-hipped, shaggy-haired rock star in fur coats and sunglasses vanished in California. “Shepard had now, knowingly, placed all his fractured selves within a single hardened shell. For him, the identity of the cowboy was the strongest choice—manly, self-assured, tight-lipped, born to nature,” Dowling writes, and Shepard turns to his new (and lasting) costume: the “jeans, scuffed boots, Levi shirts.”
So much of Shepard’s writing was literature “à clef” that Dowling does sometimes take such accounts at their word, leaving us to ferret around in the notes section to figure out where he’s getting his (frequently incredibly personal) information. In one startling case, Dowling uses an oblique piece in Shepard’s collection “Motel Chronicles” as a source for his private feelings about the nascent love affair with Jessica Lange. It’s an amazing bit of detective work—Dowling works out that the story is dated on the day that Shepard would have been driving back from seeing Lange on a movie set in Los Angeles—though it does require us to join Shepard in eliding what is written as fiction as fact.
Shepard wrote and wrote, often writing his mind on his sleeve. His short stories are confessional; so are many of his plays, and certainly several of the screenplays. He and Patti Smith even performed “Cowboy Mouth,” as themselves, on a theatre bill that included his actual wife. (This much candor finally overwhelmed even Shepard: he bugged out after the first performance.) Want to know what it was like for him to grow up with his violent father? Watch his tribute to Eugene O’Neill, “Curse of the Starving Class,” from 1976, which dramatizes the terrifying tantrum-like explosion—his father smashed his way through a door, after Shepard’s mother locked him out—that shaped his jumpy, scalded-cat spirit. This rigorous self-exploration continued past the point that his disease cost him control of his hands. His last writing, a novella called “Spy of the First Person,” written with the assistance of his sisters and daughter, is some of his most beautiful. It narrates the feeling of being observed, from within one’s own dying body.
In 1983, Shepard wrote a letter to his old friend Johnny Dark about guilt, which he called “probably the single most powerful negative influence in my life & it’s ruled me one way or another for years—going back to my early childhood.” Dowling uses that letter, and others like it, to chart Shepard’s recurring themes—guilt over how he smashes up his several families, terror (he makes an interesting aside that all California writers emerge from what Mike Davis called the “ecology of fear,” surrounded as they are by earthquake and fire), the divided self, alcohol, the insoluble paternal relationship. The biography is careful and wise, though it naturally reflects the obsessive qualities of its subject. Questions of identity formation return again and again. Working in Hollywood as an actor is easy money, but it deepens Shepard’s inner fractures around authenticity. “Think about something ELSE, Jesus,” I wrote in the margins, when Shepard, once again, writes Johnny a letter about his drinking, his anger, his arrogance, and being a “long way away from total acceptance.”
Dowling’s persistent strain of analysis, though, is the persona. In 1994, Shepard told Ben Brantley that “I didn’t go out of my way to create an image,” but Dowling’s account rubbishes that denial entirely. He finds intentional image creation everywhere, noting the moments when Shepard shifts among a possible range of pop masculinities—first he tried to be Mick Jagger (Dowling cites a wonderful moment in 1970 when Shepard told the director of the “bourgeois” Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre that “I have to change the image of this fucking place,” while wearing a full-length fur); then it was the Marlboro Man (Dowling finds an unproduced screenplay, “Fractured,” in which the Shepardian main character makes his money modelling for cigarettes). He notes that, at Shepard’s funeral, Lange read from Shepard’s book of short stories “Cruising Paradise”—and the theme is familiar. “Now, repeat. Let’s get it in our head: ‘I am a man, not to be trusted.’ ”
Hawke tells Dowling that there are really two Shepards: the sweet, sober one, who talks about Sophocles, and the snakebit mean one, who comes out when he’s drinking. The division becomes part of the myth. Lange described him as having an “American wildness,” and he, and others who loved him, helped refigure, even rebrand, this divided, sometimes harshly taciturn self as a quintessentially American landscape—part soft prairie, part harsh mountain pass.
That sense of a man as a landscape, to be endured and journeyed through and explored, is what unites all those Shepard adaptations. The women who write through him don’t share his masculinity crisis, rather they seem delighted, or provoked, by the way he responded to it with playacting, costume, poetry, violence. In “Bad Stars,” Horowitz seated a plein-air painter in the corner of the basement space, apparently to paint the scenes as they happen. The cast wriggled on the floor like worms, and I assumed the artist was painting the same thing. At the end of the show, though, the audience is permitted behind the easel, and what I saw there were what seemed like dozens of small sepia landscapes: brown hills against brown skies. What had she been looking at? Somehow, in a way imperceptible to me, she had looked into a narrow basement and seen the whole wide West. ♦
