Action by Sam Shepard

- Most clearly reveals the theatre to be a prison for all those involved in its operation, from
playwright to spectator. Its whos the self-suficiency and authority of each agent to be an
illusion generated by an oppressive system of theatrical production which is, in turn,
inscribed within an oppressive social network.
- Deconstruction of the theatre’s traditional mode of production;
- A revelation of the fatal complicity between text and performance which robs both of any
pretense to absolute presence or authenticity.
- In the end he falls into the side of the confining and oppressive theatrical forms which he
judged.
 Action goes further than any other shepard play toward the construction of theater’s
traditional mode of production, a revelation of the fatal complicity between text and
performance which robs both of any pretends to absolute presence or authenticity;
 Shepard is constrained by a nostalgic commitment to the walls of his own conceptual
prison;
 The stage is a space of separation and crisis and haste enhanced by the slowly pulsating
lights and the disqueting sense that something has happened;
 The characters refer to a specific dislocating event but the play does not let us know exactly
what the crisis is or where it’s origin lies;
 The characters are unable to recover a past which antedates the crisis; they all suffer from
the degree of amnesia that blocks out experiences they have had only moments before, let
alone months or years ago.
 Even when the characters elude to a specific crisis, their references serve only to
contextualise, not to explain their situation;
 Jeep recalls the civil war which occurred a hundred years a ago to the day;
 The crisis in action is most tellingly manifest as text; the characters are always looking for
a place in a book they left off reading; this search reflects the characters anxiety and
frustration.
 Variations of the line “I can’t find the place” echo nine times in the play; it is just this
failure to find the place which first prompts Jeep to smash the chair and leads to Lupe’s
angered and exasperated exit.
 The few passages which might provide a sense of place are all cataclysmic by nature;
 We never know exactly what the book is; we are led to assume that it is a work of SF but
it could also be a kind of Bible;
 The play is a link between the social or civil crisis and the crisis of the individual;
 For the characters in action, these anxieties take the form of an existential crisis who’s
mark is a deep sense of alienation, or more properly and objectification of the self;
 Jeep maintains that he is looking forward to his life but already the possibility of self
actualization is cast into doubt, and so does Shooter; their senses of alienation are marked
 by fear and provides with an overreading motivation: to find a place or position in which
they feel comfortable at home
 Lupe and Liza are also immersed in the crisis, but their attention is absorbed by practical
activity with domestic chores; they address their own fears pragmatically and never really
understand what the men are suffering;
 To a certain extent, the crisis of the male characters, whether understood as a crisis of action
or of text, underscores the play’s affinity with the institution of theater, as the scene of the
juxtaposition of actors and texts.
 Shepard constantly foregrounds both actorial and existential selfconsciouness, and
suggests the relentlessness with which both actor and character are always already objects
to themselves;
 The script itself does not contain action but rather marks its absence – as merely a sign of
the leaving breath which preceded it and the notation for a promised theatrical fulfillment
still to come; a pure recovery is impossible because the action which actors and director
hope to recover is no longer there – it has never really been there.
 Shepard himself acknowledges this indeterminancy of the script how underneath different
possibilities could be going on actors and directors are forced to make choices, and there
is no guarantee that even one of their choices coincides with that of the play wright
 The juxtaposition of all the different elements (actors, costumes, light set, language, plot)
creates a presence which cannot exist in the script;
 Shepard’s claim: “Added dimension” beyond the text only reveals what must be a
fundamental lack in the script itself, a deficiency for which even the author’s presence
cannot compensate;
 The relationship between text and performance displays the status of each as both
supplement and lack;
 This breakdown of the distinction between inside and outside a crucial moment in
Shepard’s subversion of traditional metaphysical categories
 This set piece could be seen as a kind of play within; it functions not a as a center but as
the displacement of the center.
 This story recounts a union between subject and object, an event with obvious mystical
overtones
 The relationship between this narrative and Shooter’s earlier speech can be glimpsed in a
crucial modification of the original story; it emphasizes the necessity of passing from
outside to inside
 The narratives operate as mutual displacements, each an intimation of the moment of crisis,
whose subject is the displacement of subjectivity and the breach between experience and
expression, between being and knowledge; rather than reflecting a constant and unshifting
reality they function like two parallel mirrors which produce an infinit play of displaced
images;
 The play ends without resolution as the focus shifts to Jeep, now isolated downstage.
 Action delivers no end to a crisis without origin but only an explosion of violence at all
levels: social, existential, theatrical and textual; the play ends in panic in a muffled cry of
terror which does not ask for help so much as it indicates irresolvable helplessness
 The struggle between tradition and revolt in Shepard’s work coupled with associated
emotional qualities, anxiety, fear, anger and guilt – places Shepard, historically within the
modernist insurgence
 On Shepard’s stage, women are the embodiment of that impossible desire, the supplement
to crisis always disorganizing the male created metaphysics